Building Energy Efficiency and Sustainability

Abstract

Architects and engineers play a key role in the transformation of the building sector toward energy efficiency and climate change mitigation. Buildings are responsible for 40% of the total energy consumption and 11.9% of the CO 2 emission. In this sense, various international agreements are focused to decarbonize buildings, and the concept of nearly Zero-Energy Buildings (nZEB) as well as the implementation of Energy Performance Certificates (EPCs) have been designed. For that reason, building energy efficiency projects could be a driving force to achieve a low-carbon building stock and Energy Poverty (EP) mitigation. This chapter considers energy improvements and comfortable indoor spaces, in which the most appropriate operational guidelines and the users' training measures are crucial. With this approach, adaptive thermal comfort models could be an opportunity to guarantee sustainable use of Heating, Ventilating, and Air Conditioning (HVAC) systems without affecting users' thermal comfort. This paves the way for significant reductions in energy consumption with a more responsible use of HVAC systems considering the adaptive thermal comfort models. Keywords Energy efficiency • Climate change • Nearly zero-energy building • Energy performance certificate • Energy poverty • Building sector • Thermal comfort • Adaptive comfort Low-Carbon Economy Goals and Energy Efficiency in BuildingsWhy are architects and engineers essential to decarbonize society? Various answers are possible, but the most direct is the potential of technicians to achieve a sustainable balance between citizens' activity and the natural environment, and this is due to the current environmental situation. The natural environment is today in a continuous process of environmental degradation that contributes to environmental pollution, sea-level rise, and more and more extreme temperatures [71]. In addition, the greatest anthropogenic activity is depleting the Earth's natural resources. Some reports of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) indicate that the capacity of these resources was