World Renewable Energy Congress

Description

‘Application of Innovative Renewable and Low Energy Technologies for Retrofitting of Public Buildings in Europe’

The retrofitting of existing buildings to improve comfort and energy efficiency is an important component for achieving environmental reduction targets set by EU and other countries. There is urgency to transform Europe into a low-carbon economy to reduce the risk of climate change and achieve sustainable energy security. One of the most cost-effective measures to meet energy reduction targets, as clearly specified in the “European Economic Recovery Plan”, is to address performance of existing building stock.

REtrofitting Solutions and Services for the enhancement of Energy Efficiency in Public Edification (RESSEEPE) is an EU funded project that focuses on the 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 over 50% through whole building retrofit action.

Period	3 Dec 2016 → 8 Dec 2016
Event title	World Renewable Energy Congress
Event type	Conference
Conference number	XVII
Location	Manama, Bahrain
Degree of Recognition	International