2nd Solar Africa International Renewable Energy Conference

Description

Application of Renewable and Low Energy Technologies for improving Buildings Energy Efficiency

Developing countries are facing many challenges that are inhibiting sustainable growth and development. One of these challenges is lack of access to ‘affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all’ which is one of the United Nations sustainable development goals. In order to achieve these goals, developing countries must develop a holistic strategy which must include diversification of the energy mix to include renewable energy and also strategies for reducing demand through improving energy efficiency of buildings.

This paper presents the approaches used for improving the energy and environmental performance of existing building through the application of innovative building fabric and building integrated renewable technologies. In order for developing countries to narrow the gap between energy demand and supply, some of the approaches in this paper could be adapted improve building energy efficiency.

REtrofitting Solutions and Services for the enhancement of Energy Efficiency in Public Edification (RESSEEPE) is an €13,000,000 European Union funded project that focuses on the low-energy refurbishment of existing public buildings in three European cities: Coventry (UK), Barcelona (SP) and Skelleftea (SW). The aim of the project is to bring together design and decision making tools and innovative technology manufacturers to collaborate and improve building performance through the application of renewable energy and building fabric technologies to achieve energy reduction in the region of 50% in existing public buildings. Some of the technologies include, Building Integrated Photovoltaic System, Ventilated Facades, Phase Change Materials, Vacuum Insulated Panels, Aerogel Super-insulating Mortar and electro chromic windows. This paper presents the systematic process of achieving holistic building and system performance evaluation of selected technologies pre and post retrofit. The paper also presents decision making procedure for selection of advanced building technologies for high energy performance retrofitting.

A range of building performance evaluation protocols have been used to evaluate the performance of existing case study buildings in terms of comfort and user satisfaction, benchmarking of energy consumption using measured energy data and display energy certificates to evaluate appropriateness of the various intervention measures. Building performance modelling using IES virtual environment has been used to evaluate the performance mix of technologies. The result reveals that it is possible to achieve energy reduction of up to 50% through whole building retrofit action.

Period	6 Feb 2017 - 9 Feb 2017
Held at	2nd Solar Africa International Renewable Energy Conference
Event type	Conference
Location	Sokoto, Nigeria