Alicia Lerbinger


Last Name

Lerbinger

First Name

Alicia

ORCID

0000-0003-2915-0072

Organisational unit

03695 - Hoffmann, Volker / Hoffmann, Volker

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2023 - 20255
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Publications 1 - 5 of 5
  • Policies for cost-effective decarbonization of residential buildings and transport: Addressing sector coupling and diverse actor perspectives
    Item type: Doctoral Thesis
    Lerbinger, Alicia (2025)
    Climate change is one of the most urgent challenges of our time, requiring rapid decarbonization across all sectors to limit global temperature increases. The buildings and transport sectors together account for a substantial share of global final energy use and energy-related CO2 emissions. This makes their decarbonization critical for achieving climate targets. However, current emission reductions fall short of the targets, which indicates that existing policy measures have been insufficient to drive the necessary structural changes quickly enough. The decarbonization of residential energy systems, which includes both building energy use and associated mobility demands, is essential but faces several challenges. High upfront costs for building retrofits and electric vehicle adoption deter households and property owners despite potential long-term cost savings. Further, the electrification of both heating and transportation introduces new interdependencies between previously separate sectors, referred to as sector coupling. The transition is further complicated by the involvement of numerous actors, whose misaligned interests can hinder the implementation of decarbonization measures. Designing policies that do not consider these sectoral interdependencies and actor-specific perspectives results in slower emission reductions. Techno-economic optimization models are valuable tools for exploring cost-effective decarbonization pathways, but current approaches have limitations when applied to residential energy systems. Most existing models focus on single sectors or make considerable simplifications when modeling multiple sectors. This limits their ability to identify cross-sectoral synergies. Further, they typically adopt a central planner perspective that does not account for the diverse actors involved in residential energy transitions, which can lead to solutions that are theoretically optimal but cannot be implemented. This thesis addresses the central research question: What policies enable the cost-effective decarbonization of residential buildings and transportation, considering sector coupling and different actor perspectives? It develops comprehensive techno-economic optimization frameworks using multi-stage mixed-integer linear programming models and applies them to Swiss case studies, representative of the broader European context. It advances traditional techno-economic modeling along two primary dimensions: sector coupling through building-electric vehicle integration, and the consideration of different actor perspectives. Four individual studies collectively address different aspects of the research question. Study I introduces MANGOever, a comprehensive framework for optimizing building energy systems, retrofits, and electric vehicle charging infrastructure over long time horizons. It incorporates EV driver behaviors based on real-world travel patterns rather than assuming perfect control over charging processes. Study II applies the MANGOever framework to assess different electricity pricing structures for residential customers. It analyzes how tariff designs impact both building and transportation electrification. Study III shifts the focus to institutional real estate portfolios. It introduces a portfolio-level optimization framework that accounts for heterogeneous building characteristics and different policy scenarios and enables the identification of cost-effective retrofitting strategies at the portfolio level. Study IV addresses the landlord-tenant dilemma by integrating different actor perspectives and evaluating policy instruments designed to address the split incentives between building owners and tenants. The thesis contributes to the growing body of literature on techno-economic optimization modeling for the residential energy transition. Methodologically, it extends existing modeling approaches by incorporating behaviorally realistic driver patterns from empirically grounded agent-based models to enable a more accurate assessment of available flexibility in electric vehicle charging demand. It proposes frameworks that account for actor heterogeneity and distributed decision-making. The portfolio approach in Study III offers a novel perspective that links individual building retrofit plans to real estate investment portfolios, while Study IV advances the modeling of distributional policy impacts by capturing the perspectives of both landlords and tenants. Key empirical findings demonstrate the potential of sector coupling to improve system efficiency. Time-of-use electricity tariffs and increasing block grid charges effectively support heat pump adoption and EV home charging. For institutional investors, portfolio-level policy approaches are more advantageous than building-level requirements, as they reduce total decarbonization costs while achieving similar emission reductions. Addressing the landlord-tenant dilemma requires comprehensive policy mixes as individual measures prove insufficient to encourage both energy supply- and demand-side interventions. These findings offer valuable insights for policymakers who aim to accelerate residential energy system decarbonization. They highlight how coordinated policy design across sectors is essential to avoid conflicting signals that could discourage electrification. The frameworks developed in this thesis bridge the gap between theoretical decarbonization potential and real-world implementation and provide insights into more effective, socially acceptable, and economically viable policy instruments.
  • Optimal decarbonization strategies for existing districts considering energy systems and retrofits
    Item type: Journal Article
    Lerbinger, Alicia; Petkov, Ivalin; Mavromatidis, Georgios; et al. (2023)
    Applied Energy
    Integrated energy system planning at the district level can contribute towards the sustainable transformation of the building sector by unlocking solutions beyond individual buildings. This is particularly true for existing districts, whose older buildings have a low energy performance and for which measures to reduce the energy demand and ensure a low-emission energy supply must be implemented. In the urban context, district heating networks (DHN) are a promising way of doing the latter, especially with carbon capture and storage (CCS) on the horizon. However, investment decisions for both types of measures – energy supply and demand reduction – must consider individual buildings as part of district-scale considerations as building-level demand-side interventions affect energy demand patterns and densities. These can in turn affect energy supply decisions at the district-level. This study presents a comprehensive methodology for determining optimal decarbonization strategies for existing districts while considering building-level energy supply and retrofitting investment decisions and the expansion of existing DHN. We do so by extending the MANGOret (Multi-stAge eNerGy Optimization - retrofitting) optimization framework for the long-term investment planning of building-level multi-energy systems and envelope retrofits. In addition, the study presents an approach for modeling CCS as an emission-reduction technology for the waste incinerator supplying the marginal expansion of the district heating network. The developed optimization model considers a long-term time horizon with multiple investment stages, allowing it to represent economic and technological developments over the model time horizon. It incorporates a multi-objective perspective, capturing the trade-offs between the total system costs and emissions. The model is applied to two existing case study neighborhoods in the city of Chur, Switzerland. The long-term energy system design and operation for the two neighborhood typologies – mixed-use and residential – are analyzed as part of the DHN expansion investment decision. The results show that retrofitting is the main cost driver of any decarbonization strategy. Therefore the choice and the size of the energy systems offer better leverage for reducing emissions with a moderate increase in costs. In dense inner-city neighborhoods with high heating demands, district heating is the cost-optimal heating choice. Together with a low-emission district heating source such as a waste incinerator with CCS or biomass, it also becomes the CO2-optimal choice. Furthermore, the case studies demonstrate that a combination of heat pumps, hot water thermal storage, and solar PV is not only the CO2-optimal but also the cost-optimal decentralized heating option if no DHN is available. This highlights the attractiveness of energy-efficient heating systems already today.
  • Decarbonizing real estate portfolios considering optimal retrofit investment and policy conditions to 2050
    Item type: Journal Article
    Petkov, Ivalin; Lerbinger, Alicia; Mavromatidis, Georgios; et al. (2023)
    iScience
    Retrofitting existing buildings is crucial for achieving Net Zero emissions. Institutional real estate owners play a key role because of their significant ownership, especially of large buildings. We utilize an interdisciplinary approach to evaluate cost-optimal decarbonization conditions for three Swiss real estate portfolios owned by a global institutional investor. We leverage a bottom-up optimization framework for building asset retrofitting, scaled to the portfolio-level, to study the effect of policy scenarios and implementations. Results indicate that achieving Net Zero necessitates significant investments, largely through thermal energy efficiency measures and low-CO2 energy systems, as early as possible to avoid locked-in emissions. Owners will be challenged to smooth long-term capital investments, pointing to a potential liquidity crisis. Consequently, hard-to-decarbonize assets are unable to reach regulatory benchmarks largely because of lingering embodied emissions. To lower transition risk, we recommend that policymakers move toward average CO2 benchmarks at the real estate portfolio-level, emulating automotive fleets.
  • Driving electrification: the impact of electricity pricing on heat pump adoption, electric vehicle charging, and building energy technologies
    Item type: Journal Article
    Lerbinger, Alicia; Mavromatidis, Georgios; Powell, Siobhan Jocelyn Larissa (2025)
    Environmental Research Letters
    Decarbonizing the building and transport sectors requires electricity pricing designs that can effectively support the adoption of heat pumps (HPs) and electric vehicles (EVs). To inform electricity pricing design, techno-economic optimization modeling can help identify which pricing structures most effectively support the economic viability of electrification across different building characteristics and modeled EV plug-in behavior over the long term. In this paper, we explore the interplay between EV plug-in behavior, building energy system investment decisions, and electricity pricing design, testing electricity tariffs with varying energy and grid components. Using a comprehensive techno-economic optimization framework, we analyze how various combinations of energy and grid charges impact HP adoption across six diverse Swiss residential buildings from 2025 to 2050. We incorporate three distinct EV plug-in behavior scenarios modeled from real-world travel data. Our findings reveal that time-of-use energy charges consistently lead to the highest HP adoption rates across all building types, outperforming both flat and hourly energy pricing structures. Among grid charges, increasing block charges generally support heating electrification more effectively than peak or volumetric charges. Building characteristics substantially affect HP adoption, while EV plug-in behavior has more impact on the choice of charging infrastructure. Overall, our results show the importance of coordinated electricity tariff designs that account for the diversity of building characteristics and user behaviors to enable cost-effective electrification.
  • MANGOever: An optimization framework for the long-term planning and operations of integrated electric vehicle and building energy systems
    Item type: Journal Article
    Lerbinger, Alicia; Powell, Siobhan Jocelyn Larissa; Mavromatidis, Georgios (2024)
    Advances in Applied Energy
    The growing electrification of heating and mobility has increased the interdependence of these two sectors and introduced a new coupling with the electricity sector. However, existing studies on local energy planning often focus solely on solutions to meet buildings’ energy demands, neglecting or highly simplifying new mobility demands. Here, we address this gap by introducing MANGOever (Multi-stAge eNerGy Optimization for electric vehicles and energy retrofits), a comprehensive optimization framework for long-term co-planning of building energy systems and electric vehicle (EV) charging infrastructure. The framework optimizes multi-stage investments and operational strategies to minimize system costs and CO2 emissions over a multi-year horizon, considering the stochastic nature of EV charging based on observed driver habits and travel patterns. Applying the model to a case study of a multi-family home in Switzerland reveals significant synergies between EV charging and the management of solar photovoltaic generation. The results underscore the importance of considering habit-based EV charging behavior in the model and demonstrate how diverse EV plug-in behaviors can be leveraged to maximize the use of midday solar production and reduce emissions. These findings emphasize the need for integrated planning of these sectors to achieve a cost-effective, low-carbon energy transition.
Publications 1 - 5 of 5