Yearly operational performance of a nZEB in the Mediterranean climate

Abstract

Over the last decades, the reduction of the energy use in the building sector has become a topic of major investigation and policy development worldwide. Guidelines have been defined to drive governments and building construction stakeholders towards the retrofit of the existing building stock and to the construction of new highperformance buildings. However, availability of operational data is often limited, especially when it comes to high performance buildings in warm climates, although it is essential to define design approaches targeted to energy efficiency, to design smart energy grids and demand-response oriented energy programs. Buildings, such as living laboratories, may offer opportunities to implement and develop energy databases, to provide benchmarks and to study occupant behaviour under different operational conditions. The paper investigates the energy and thermal comfort performance of a residential building in the Mediterranean climate. The building, certified as Passivhaus and equipped with an advanced monitoring system, allows to test different control strategies, to study occupant behaviour and to provide real time operational data. In particular, the data analysis showed a positive energy balance on yearly basis, i.e. an energy use of 59.7 kWh/m 2 net/year vs. an on-site energy generation of 76.0 kWh/m 2 net/year. The energy breakdown highlighted, that energy uses related to user behaviour and comfort requests account for about 72 % of the total energy use, confirming that occupant behaviour is one of the major drivers of the operational energy use (and the related services) in high performance buildings.

Thermal Comfort in NZEB Collective Housing in Northern Spain

“…There is a varied body of research on overheating in residential buildings in Europe [5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16]. In [16], there is a wide sample of these studies focusing on buildings with Passivhaus certificate dating 2011 to 2015.…”

“…This has led to problems in overheating of buildings, among others", and concludes that there is an emerging conflict between the implementation of energy efficiency standards and the recommendations of Article 4 of the EU Directive 2010/31: "These requirements shall take into account the general conditions of the indoor climate, avoiding possible negative consequences such as inadequate ventilation, as well as the particular conditions, use and age of the building" [1]. Many of the studies add overheating mitigation measures [11][12][13][14][15][16].…”

Neighborhood Energy Modeling and Monitoring: A Case Study

“…Micro-grids, connecting from a few buildings to a whole neighborhood, represent a technical option to enable the sharing of information and energy among buildings, providing a fundamental structure to promote waste heat recovery [8,9], energy communities and demand-response programs, but also to implement a remote control and management of buildings to decrease their energy use while enhancing occupants' comfort. Intelligent buildings or smart buildings [10][11][12], have been studied for a long time, and currently building management systems (BMS) are commonly applied also in residential buildings [13][14][15][16], at least in the form of remote monitoring and management. These advanced control systems boost building management, enabling communication between users and building appliances, through remote monitoring and control [6,17,18].…”

10 preguntas de los edificios energía cero: revisión del estado del arte

“…En efecto, se estima en ellos una demanda energética de un 25% a un 50% menor que la generada por los edificios convencionales (Häkämies et al, 2015). Para esto, se requiere, cabe subrayar, una conducta eficiente del usuario en la utilización de los sistemas pasivos y las tecnologías activas (Carpino, Mora, Arcuri y De Simone, 2017;Causone, Tatti, Pietrobon, Zanghirella y Pagliano, 2019) En la Figura 8, se ilustran los diferentes sectores incluidos en los cálculos de balance, y se observa que el mayor potencial en ahorro energético se encuentra en la reducción de la demanda de calefacción y enfriamiento (Garde et al, 2014).Un edificio en climas templados, con la aislación apropiada, podría reducir la demanda de calefacción de un 20% a un 50% (Taleghani, Tenpierik, Kurvers y Van den Dobbelsteen, 2013). Para el logro de un diseño óptimo, el consumo debería ser de 30 kWh/m 2 /anual (Hermelink et al, 2013).…”