This study has two aims to investigate the energy demand response (DR) actions on thermal comfort and energy cost in detached residential houses (1960, 2010 and passive) in a cold climate. The first one is to find out the acceptable range of indoor air and operative temperatures complying with the recommended thermal comfort categories in accordance with the EN 15251 standard. The second one is to minimize the energy cost of electric heating system by means of the DR control strategy, without sacrificing thermal comfort of the occupants. This research was carried out with the validated dynamic building simulation tool IDA Indoor Climate and Energy. Three different control strategies were studied: A) a strategy based on real-time hourly electricity price, B) new DR control strategy based on previous hourly electricity prices and C) new predictive DR control strategy based on future hourly electricity prices. The results show that the lowest acceptable indoor air and operative temperatures can be reduced to 19.4 C and 19.6 C, respectively. The maximum annual saving in total energy cost is about 10% by using the control algorithm C.
Enhancement of buildings energy efficiency has typically been approached by viewing the buildings from a social acceptance perspective focusing on multi-level stakeholders. In order to examine social acceptance in terms of public's opinion and knowledge about using low carbon buildings, a multiple-choice questionnaire was designed with four groups of questions: background information, community perspective, social perspective, and market perspective. The study showed that 59.72% of the seventy respondents' opinion were using low carbon building (LCB) can help to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In general, more than 53% of the respondents were willing to upgrade their accommodation to LCB. However, 70% respondents were not ready to hire any consultant because majority of have the problem in paying the upfront cost for LCB.
Key stakeholders in industry are highly responsible for achieving energy performance targets. Particularly, this paper assesses the attitudes, approaches, and experiences of Finnish construction professionals regarding energy-efficient buildings, or nZEBs. A three-tier investigation was conducted including surveys and expert interviews with several stakeholders. The structure of this approach was informed by preliminary data and information available on the Finnish construction sector. The questionnaire showed that the stakeholders ranked energy efficiency and embodied energy/carbon as very important. The survey highlighted that the importance of the embodied carbon CO2 in the materials is less important than the energy efficiency from many of the stakeholders’ points of view. “Energy efficiency” is very important for ESCOs, contractors, and facility managers followed by architects, HVAC engineers, and construction design engineers. Nevertheless, the opinions of architects ranked “embodied energy CO2” as the most important regarding nZEB. When it comes to the importance of “running time emissions” toward nZEB, contractors and ESCO companies ranked it as 1 for importance followed by property owners (78%) and tenants (75%). It is very fascinating to see from the survey that “running time carbon emissions” has been ranked 1 (very important) by all stakeholders. This study will enable construction industry stakeholders to make provisions for overcoming the barriers, gaps, and challenges identified in the practices of the nZEB projects. It will also inform the formulation of policies that drive retrofit uptake.
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