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Many countries have similar technical and architectural issues linked to solar energy integration in isolated mountain dwellings nowadays. In order to promote energy policies able to improve the solar energy potential use, it is necessary to set up multi-criteria approaches for producing improved diagnostic analysis. This study, conducted in eight mountain huts located in the Beaufortain region, in French Alps, shows the advantages and limitations of these approaches. Even if analysis criteria can be easily identified, the search for data allowing an accurate assessment is often difficult for isolated mountain dwellings. The results of this original study show the importance of multi-criteria analysis for technical and architectural issues linked to solar energy integration in isolated mountain dwellings by taking into account their natural environment, the elements of their bioclimatic architecture, their solar production conditions and their energy needs.

In many countries, the stock of existing buildings accounts for half of the energy consumption. With the actual environmental and energetic context, it is urgent to reduce energy consumption and greenhouse gases emissions in the buildings sector. In order to optimize retrofitting strategies, the thermal behavior of the existing buildings must be efficiently modeled by the dynamic building energy simulation tools. The stock of existing buildings is very important with, for instance, more than 30 millions of dwellings in France. This stock is characterized by a wide variety of construction techniques that are not taken into account in the existing calculation methods and tools as has been shown in a recent French study. This paper presents in the first part the uncertainties related to the thermal modeling of a traditional ancient house using different calculation tools. Then the house is modeled with the dynamic simulation tool TRNSYS in order to analyze the influence of the uncertainties of the climatic data on the quality of the results.