Abstract
The building sector accounts for one third of the global energy consumption and it is expected to grow in the next decades. This evidence leads researchers, engineers and architects to develop innovative technologies based on renewable energies and to enhance the thermal performance of building envelopes. In this context, the potential applicability and further energy performance analysis of these technologies when implemented into different building typologies and climate conditions are not easily comparable. Although massive information is available in data sources, the lack of standardized methods for data gathering and the non-public availability makes the comparative analyses more difficult. These facts limit the benchmarking of different building energy demand parameters such as space heating, cooling, air conditioning, domestic hot water, lighting and electric appliances. Therefore, the first objective of this study consists in providing a review about the common typologies of residential buildings in Europe from the main data sources. This study contains specific details on their architecture, building envelope, floor space and insulation properties. The second objective consists in performing a cross-country comparison in terms of energy demand for the applications with higher energy requirements in the residential building sector (heating and domestic hot water), as well as their related CO2 emissions. The approach of this comparative analysis is based on the residential building typology developed in TABULA/EPISCOPE projects. This comparative study provides a reference scenario in terms of energy demand and CO2 emissions for residential buildings and allows to evaluate the potential implementation of new supply energy technologies in hot, temperate and cold climate regions. From this study it was also concluded that there is a necessity of a free access database which could gather and classify reliable energy data in buildings.
Highlights
The reduction of energy consumption and the related CO2 emissions in the building sector are the main global environmental concerns in long-term perspective for sustainable development [1].The building sector is the largest energy consumer in the world with approximately one third of Energies 2019, 12, 2436; doi:10.3390/en12122436 www.mdpi.com/journal/energiesEnergies 2019, 12, 2436 the global final energy consumption and it is expected to grow closely with the increase of living standards [1,2]
The building sector accounts for one third of the global energy consumption and it is expected to grow in the decades
All data used in this paper was obtained from three consecutive projects co-funded by the Intelligent Energy Europe Programme (IEE) [17], the new European Union (EU) Building Stock Observatory [18]
Summary
Energies 2019, 12, 2436 the global final energy consumption and it is expected to grow closely with the increase of living standards [1,2] This tendency is highly affected by the following key drivers that include the growth of the world population (41%), the increase in households that require energy (115%) and the increase in floor area per capita (50%) by 2050 [2]. Regarding these global energy trends in buildings, 24% of the global final energy demand comes from the residential sub-sector while the 8% remaining comes from commercial [2]. Efficient building envelopes [6], building shape and orientation [7] are promoted with the same aim, such as potential passive energy saving systems by international energy directives
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