• Energy Research
• 2021-2025close

Empirical studies have shown that internal temperatures in refugee shelters are impacting morbidity, and possibly mortality. Within a displacement setting, solutions are often constrained by time, cost, material availability and local requirements. This often results in “deemed suitable” designs rather than optimal solutions. In this study, we ask which route is most appropriate to optimise thermal comfort: prototyping design improvements, which requires time but may not require significant domain expertise, or thermal modelling, which can be quickly carried out if there is expertise. In a unique experiment, a laboratory of 12 shelters, built in a desert refugee camp, was adapted by the refugees themselves with variants to improve thermal comfort. Thermal modelling and field results were compared. Prototyping, though requiring additional time, was found to offer several advantages over modelling: (a) it gives a more visceral answer, in that the agency staff and refugees can experience the improvement - this could be important as most people might not be able to relate to a numeric statement about temperature; (b) the difficulty of constructing variants can be compared; (c) the financial and time costs are identified accurately. This suggests that such prototyping experiments have great utility, conferring substantial advantages over computer-based modelling. Significantly, we show that simple adaptations can improve conditions by up to 6°C, and that the skills exist in camps to complete such improvements.

Several regulations and standards have been developed to reduce the carbon footprint of buildings, but these have failed to provide a clear pathway to a net zero future. Hence, we recently introduced the Active Building Code (ABCode). This provides guidance on reducing the environmental impact of the next generation of buildings, termed Active Buildings (ABs), through their synergy with the grid. This paper aims to illuminate the regulatory landscape, justify our initial proposal for the ABCode, and reveal opportunities and challenges to the popularisation of ABs. Twelve online focus group discussions were conducted, with thirty stakeholders in total, all selected on the basis of their expertise. A grounded theory approach identified five core themes in such discussions. These strongly overlap with what is incorporated in the ABCode, suggesting the code successfully captures issues important to experts. Stakeholders defined ABs as responsive buildings and proposed both energy and carbon are considered in their assessment. They hence aligned with the definition and evaluation framework proposed by the ABCode. Finally, stakeholders considered people’s tendency to prioritise capital cost as the greatest challenge to the popularisation of ABs, and the increasing demand for healthy environments as its greatest opportunity.

The recent reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) urge for the reconceptualization of our design of the urban built environments. However, current efforts to integrate urban environmental assessment into practice in Egypt are proving insufficient. This paper utilises the Ladybug tools simulation plugins to investigate the impact of changing the morphological characteristics of three-block typologies (scattered, linear and courtyard) and their associated parameters to understand their multidimensional relationship with environmental conditions, outdoor thermal comfort and energy use intensity. This study based in Cairo, Egypt, considers 3430 hypothetical geometrical configurations comprising of a variety of design parameters and indicators. The results show a strong correlation between the design parameters and the combined performance of thermal comfort and energy consumption (R2 = 0.84), with urban density having the strongest impact on both thermal comfort and energy use (R2 = 0.7 and 0.95, respectively). The design parameters exhibited a consistent impact on the different typologies, albeit with varying magnitude. Compact and medium-density urban forms are shown to elicit the best overall performance, especially for ordinal orientations (e.g., ~45°) across all typologies. Compact high-density scattered forms are favoured when considering thermal comfort, while courtyards outperform other typologies when considering energy efficiency and overall performance.

Abstract Archive film stores aim to preserve the cultural heritage of countries by protecting their photographic record from degrading. This is however challenging for many countries in the global south due to the construction and running costs of suitable, low-temperature facilities. Additional complications arise from aggressive climates, intermittent electricity grids and the need to minimise carbon emissions. Given the lack of relevant studies, this paper examines the engineering of film stores in the global south, in order to identify solutions that can help maintain the required internal conditions, deal with power outages and minimise energy use (and therefore operational cost and carbon). The insulating concrete form and phase change material option was found to be more resilient than thermal mass in all three locations, as it maintained lower temperatures after 2.5 days without power, with the largest difference being observed in Sri Lanka (2 °C). It also led to a lower annual energy use, with the largest difference being again detected in Sri Lanka (32 kWh·m−2). The high renewable energy production of the store resulted in a negative annual net energy in Mongolia and Yemen (around −155 kWh·m−2 and −190 kWh·m−2, respectively). However, this was not possible in Sri Lanka because of its hot and humid climate, which triggered a high annual energy use (around 400 kWh·m−2).

Decarbonising the built environment is at the heart of many nations' route to net zero. This leads to policies that target specific technologies. Within such policies, there is a natural instinct to combine the need to reduce carbon emissions with solving other issues, such as fuel poverty. Here, we examine for the first time if, from a carbon perspective, this is optimal. By assembling energy performance certificates and household economic deprivation data, we use fuzzy matching techniques to produce a single statistically robust dataset of 44,300 households. Then, through secondary data analysis, we closely examine the carbon impact and cost of energy retrofits. Overall, upgrading to band C is the most viable strategy. However, the results demonstrate that households belonging to the least deprived 20% present more than double the carbon saving potential compared to those in the most deprived 20% (2.7 and 1.2tCO2/yr, respectively), and offer the best return in CO2 savings on money spent. This highlights the need for retrofitting policy to be cognisant of both building stock and deprivation and the disproportionate role in climate change played by the more affluent. The results offer important new insights for governments and suggest a rethinking of retrofit initiatives. Practical Application: This study is the first to employ such data to identify retrofit strategies for governments and offers three key practical applications. (i) It shows how by combining such data one can start to develop policy that is tuned to the demographics and stock, and that by disaggregating the data a lot can be learnt prior to the development of local or national policy. (ii) It clearly puts to bed the idea that attacking fuel poverty is the most effective way towards carbon reductions. (iii) It suggests a new way of thinking about targeted interventions that optimise carbon reduction in a cost-effective way.

This dataset reflects our two-stage investigation into the stakeholder perceptions of Active Buildings. In the first stage, we collected thoughts on the future of the built environment through a series of online focus group discussions with 30 industry experts. In the second stage, we quantified the ideas that arose from the first stage through an online survey of 30 academics and researchers. The recently launched Active Building Code (ABCode) offers guidance on minimising the environmental impact of the next generation of buildings termed Active Buildings (ABs). This dataset reflects our two-stage investigation into the stakeholder perceptions of ABs and, in particular, their statistical analysis using a logistic regression model in R. Further relevant documentation may be found in the following resources. Nikolaidou, E., Walker, I., Coley, D., Allen, S., and Fosas, D., 2022. Going active. CLIMA 2022 conference, 2022: CLIMA 2022 The 14th REHVA HVAC World Congress. Available from: https://doi.org/10.34641/CLIMA.2022.325. Additional information can be found in the associated paper "Going active: How do people envision the next generation of buildings?'', included in the CLIMA 2022 Conference Proceedings.

The validation after HERS BESTEST contains a base model for a single zone, single storey building isolated in Colorado (USA). This base model (ID L100A) is then modified in a series of scenarios targetting different building properties, like glazing ratios, insulation levels, or shading conditions (IDs L110A to L324A and P110A to P150A). The examples are domestic buildings in the UK built with a desire to deliver a space heating demand better than the average of the national stock. These houses are described with the information that would be typically available early in the design process, following a first sketch of solutions that is meant to be influenced with ZEBRA. The dataset corresponds to (1) the ZEBRA tool, (2) its validation and (3) built-in examples. The ZEBRA tool is a novel, super-reduced, pedagogical model for scoping net zero buildings. The validation is after ASHRAE Standard 140-2017 for space heating demand intensity after HERS Bestest (Judkoff & Neymark 1995). The built-in examples are domestic buildings located in the UK and are described in the PDF files and implemented in ZEBRA. The ZIP file contains a blank version of the ZEBRA tool; a readme file; a folder containing example tasks (as PDF files) and solutions using the ZEBRA tool; and a folder containing a validation suite for the tool. The data is stored in plain-text files (either CSV or MD files, encoded in UTF-8) and spreadsheets (xlsx, Microsoft Excel 365, Version 2107 Build 14228.20226).

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