social indicators to localize renewable energy sources considering their visual impacts

Abstract In historical and consolidated contexts, the influence of visual factors and landscape perception may limit the possible integration of renewable energy systems (RES) and retrofitting actions. However, in several cases, these restrictions do not take into account the real visibility of a landmark or landscape excellence, causing constraints and limitations in zones where the visual effect is non-existent or limited. The paper will introduce, using 3-D GIS mutual-visibility analyses and social network geo-referred information, an indicator of visibility to define the expected impact of an RES. This methodology may help designers and administrations when re-defining the effect of such technologies on the preservation of the local visual impact of landmarks and points of interest without exceeding in restriction

Horizontal earth-to-air heat exchanger in Imola, Italy. A 30-month-long monitoring campaign.

The present paper reports the results of a 30-month-long monitoring campaign of a EAHX (earth-to-air heat exchanger) system installed in a school building in Imola (ITA). The horizontal EAHX is divided into three fields for a total of 32 buried pipes. The system pre-treats the inlet air of three dedicated AHUs. The analysis follows a consolidate methodology used in a previous shorter monitoring of the first Imola’s field that was already published. In this study, a comparison between different years of monitoring is introduced, together with the soil temperature trends of the first field

The influence of different hourly typical meteorological years on dynamic simulation of buildings

This paper presents a parametric study on the effect of different TMY (Typical Meteorological Year) datasets on the results of energy dynamic simulation. The analysis was carried out running the software Design Builder with EnergyPlus code on a sample residential building located in three Italian cities and using two different TMY data sets: EnergyPlus and CTI (Italian ThermoTechnical Committee). As a support of the simulation results to be confirmed to a larger scale (the whole Italian territory), an analysis on the two TMY data sets was carried out by calculating CDH (Cooling Degree Hours) and HDD (Heating Degree Days) for 21 Italian locations together with annual global horizontal radiation and average annual mean daily wind velocity. The discrepancies found between the software data set and the more updated and locally validated CTI data set undermine the accuracy of simulation results hence flawing the energy performance assessment criteria based on those results

Including Urban Heat Island in Bioclimatic Early-Design Phases: A Simplified Methodology and Sample Applications

Urban heat island and urban‐driven climate variations are recognized issues and may considerably affect the local climatic potential of free‐running technologies. Nevertheless, green design and bioclimatic early‐design analyses are generally based on typical rural climate data, without including urban effects. This paper aims to define a simple approach to considering urban shapes and expected effects on local bioclimatic potential indicators to support early‐design choices. Furthermore, the proposed approach is based on simplifying urban shapes to simplify analyses in early‐design phases. The proposed approach was applied to a sample location (Turin, temperate climate) and five other climate conditions representative of Eurasian climates. The results show that the inclusion of the urban climate dimension considerably reduced rural HDD (heating degree‐days) from 10% to 30% and increased CDD (cooling degree‐days) from 70% to 95%. The results reveal the importance of including the urban climate dimension in early‐design phases, such as building programming in which specific design actions are not yet defined, to support the correct definition of early‐design bioclimatic analyse

Simulated Versus Monitored Building Behaviours: Sample Demo Applications of a Perfomance Gap Detection Tool in a Northern Italian Climate

Green building technologies and design-correlated choices may significantly contribute to supporting the transition toward net energy flows in the built environment. Nevertheless, large discrepancies are underlined between standard simulated and monitored building behaviours requiring approaches able to simply correlate real building behaviours and simulated ones to further support coherent certification and/or optimization. The paper focusses on the application of a semi-automatic methodology to compare and evaluate thermal behaviours of buildings considering monitored and simulated data. The approach is based on a new Python tool developed by the authors, able to manage EnergyPlus inputs and perform multi-source KPIs calculations. The mentioned tool is used here to support semi-automatic model verifications of real weather data by optimizing model parameters to fit monitored behaviours. The approach is applied in this chapter to two demo buildings, a municipality school and a residential unit, located in the Turin metropolitan area of Piedmont, in Northwest Italy

Thermal Comfort and Climatic Potential of Ventilative Cooling in Italian Climates

The chapter describes several climate-correlated variables and suitable key performance indicators (KPIs) to define the local ventilative cooling potential. Furthermore, a methodology is presented to verify potential correlations between climate KPIs and indoor comfort parameters. The latter values are calculated by adopting dynamic energy simulations (EnergyPlus) and comfort models – both Fanger (ISO 7730) and the recently updated EU adaptive comfort approach (EN 16798-1) – considering a sample building unit. Simulations are run by using a parametric-enabling tool developed by the research unit to check correlations and is part of work performed for the PRELUDE project, co-funded by the EU, Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 958345. The approach is applied to the whole Italian territory considering typical yearly (hourly defined) meteorological conditions for all municipalities (about 8000 data points). Strong connections between climate and building KPIs are underlined together with the high potential of ventilative cooling in reducing discomfort and energy needs in the Italian territory