Low-energy house

Summary

A low-energy house is characterized by an energy-efficient design and technical features which enable it to provide high living standards and comfort with low energy consumption and carbon emissions. Traditional heating and active cooling systems are absent, or their use is secondary. Low-energy buildings may be viewed as examples of sustainable architecture. Low-energy houses often have active and passive solar building design and components, which reduce the house's energy consumption and minimally impact the resident's lifestyle. Throughout the world, companies and non-profit organizations provide guidelines and issue certifications to guarantee the energy performance of buildings and their processes and materials. Certifications include passive house, BBC - Bâtiment Basse Consommation - Effinergie (France), zero-carbon house (UK), and Minergie (Switzerland). Background During the 1970s, experimental initiatives for low-energy buildings were made in Denmark, the United

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Reducing Greenhouse Gas emissions is not the only solution

Justine Brun

With the increasing strength and frequency of climate change events, the urgency to mitigate climate change impact is ever so important. Canada reported his Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) and submitted its ambition to reduce his Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions by 40-45% by 2030 compared to 2005 and reach net-zero emissions by 2050. Interest for energy system modelling has been increasing for planning future energy systems, as a result of growing concern for sustainable development and transition towards renewable energies. Nevertheless, planning a decarbonization of energy system can potentially lead to environmental burden shifting, and can increase impacts on other environmental impacts such as ecosystem quality or human health. Thus, this project aims towards integrating Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) and more specifically Life Cycle Impact Assessment (LCIA) within Energy Systems Modelling, in order to minimize not only climate change impacts, but human health and ecosystem quality. In addition, a dual spatial resolution was integrated in the model in order to increase data precision and computational efficiency. The results show that a low-carbon energy system, based on the optimization of GHG emissions allows to greatly reduce all the environmental impacts under analysis, compared to an all economic- based energy system, but a multi-objective optimization allows to simultaneously reduce impacts on ecosystem quality and human health, while reducing GHG emissions and keeping good economical and technical performances. The results also show that it is theoretically possible for Canada to keep on track with their emission reduction ambition by 2030, by deploying more renewable energies. This project does not allow assessing Canada’s potential to reach net-zero emissions, as environmental impacts from carbon capture technologies are still to be characterized and integrated in the model.

2022

Renewable Land: Planning the Evolution of Logistic Areas

Gloria Serra Coch

Land is the support of life and the generator of energy cycles in the planet, also being a finite resource. The first consequence of urban population growth and build environment expansion is land consumption. Present strategies reduce this expenditure, generally by attenuating dispersive growth, favouring compact city models and reusing built inventory. From current urban land, a noteworthy percentage is assigned for logistic use and this proportion is increasing as a consequence of delocalized economies. However, planning strategies seem to overlook these areas when addressing the mentioned issues. The common localization of these zones, well-connected and placed in the influence area of a city, gives them a high probability to be absorbed by the mixed-use urban tissue during the process of city growth. Planning urban logistic land considering its possible future conversion into mixed-use urban fabric becomes a pressing concern. The study analyses industrial areas that have been transformed into mixed-use urban tissue to, subsequently, stablishing a correlation between them and current logistic zones. In the case of logistic areas, special attention should be paid to transportation infrastructures, legislation and land-use organization, ecosystem preservation and mixed-use progressive introduction. The objective is to foster the planning of logistic land considering its potential future re-use and transformation into mixed-use urban tissue with low energy costs.

UNIV POLITECNICA CATALUNYA2021

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The Swiss Minergie®-standard is, by the number of labelled buildings (> 20'000) one of the most successful building energy labels in the world. It is obviously a strong incentive for designing comfortable, low energy buildings. This standard is now valid for temperate - cold climates only. There is therefore a need for a similar standard for buildings dominated by cooling loads, as it is common in the tropical and sub-tropical climates of the world. Since the new EPFL campus planned in Ras al Kaimah (United Arab Emirates) should be exemplary, a project was launched by the Dean of EPFL Middle East, together with Minergie®-Association and the Solar Energy and Building Physics Laboratory of EPFL, aiming to set-up such a standard. In order to initiate this project, two buildings (a single family dwelling and an office building) were chosen. The single-family dwelling was simulated at an hourly time step using a detailed dynamic thermal model based on the computer simulation programme Energy plus issued from LBNL. The monthly energy consumption of the dwelling shows a good correlation with the monitored data. In addition to that, both energy consumptions, calculated with the dynamic and the simplified models are close to each other, giving confidence to the predictions of the latter. Therefore, both buildings were assessed using a simplified monthly energy balance method. Starting from the current buildings configurations, several variants implementing various improvements towards energy efficiency were considered. These simulations show that considerable energy saving (up to a factor 5) can be achieved by implementing together several improvements to these buildings. In addition, the building reaches a higher level of users comfort.

EPFL2011