Urban Building Energy Modeling: an hourly energy balance model of residential buildings at a district scale

The energy consumption of buildings is related to several factors, such as the construction and geometric characteristics, occupancy, climate and microclimate conditions, solar exposure, and urban morphology. However, the interaction between buildings and the surrounding urban context should also be taken into consideration in energy consumption models. The aim of this work has been to create a bottom-up model in order to evaluate the energy balance of residential buildings at an urban scale, starting from the hourly energy consumption data. This modeling approach considers the building characteristics together with urban variables to describe the energy balance of the built environment; it can therefore be used to manage heterogeneous types of data at different scales and it can offer accurate spatial-temporal information on the energy performance of buildings. Detailed heat balance methods can be used at a building scale to estimate heating loads, but this urban-scale simplified model can also be used as a decision tool to support urban design explorations and for policy purposes. This urban energy consumption model was verified for a case study of a district in Turin, Italy, with the support of a GIS tool, considering hourly energy consumption data of about 50 residential users for two or three consecutive heating seasons. The results show that a simplified model, based on low quality and quantity data, which are typical of an urban scale, can be a powerful tool for the evaluation and spatial representation of the energy needs of buildings at an urban scale

Urban-Scale Energy Models: the relationship between cooling energy demand and urban form

To enhance the quality of life in cities, it is necessary to improve the energy performance of buildings together with a sustainable urban planning especially in high-density contexts. Previous works investigated the building shape, the urban morphology, and the local climate conditions to optimize the energy performance for space heating of buildings. The aim of this study is to validate a GIS-based engineering model to simulate the hourly energy demand for space cooling in residential buildings at neighborhood scale and to assess the relationship between the urban form and the energy performance in terms of cooling energy demand. A place-based methodology was applied to six neighborhoods in the city of Turin (Italy), identified as homogeneous zones with different building characteristics and urban contexts. The hourly cooling demand of residential buildings was studied starting from the energy balance at building scale, and then was applied at block of buildings scale with the support of GIS. This model was validated with a comparison of the results using CitySim tool and ISO 52016 assessment. In order to investigate the relationship between cooling energy demand and urban form, the GIS-based engineering model was applied to five typical blocks of buildings with different construction periods. The results show how cooling energy demand varies according to building characteristics and urban morphology in a continental-temperate climate. By this analysis, it is possible to identify the optimal block of building shape in Turin ensuring lower energy consumptions during the cooling season with different types of buildings

How to finance energy renovation of residential buildings: Review of current and emerging financing instruments in the EU

The Paris Agreement goals require net-zero CO2 emissions by mid-century. The European Commission in its recent proposal for climate and energy strategy for 2050 indicated the need for more intensified actions to substantially improve the energy performances of buildings. With the rate of new construction in Europe, the challenge is to increase both the pace and depth of building energy renovations. Several barriers inhibit the wide uptake of comprehensive energy renovations, including the inability or inertia to finance upfront costs of energy renovations. Despite various policies implemented to address some of these barriers, current investments in buildings remain at suboptimal levels. The paper reviews current financing practices for energy renovations and investigates some innovative instruments with a special focus on their applicability to residential buildings. In addition to “traditional” financial schemes such as subsidies, tax incentives, and loans, the paper assesses innovative financing schemes: On property tax and on-bill financing, energy efficiency mortgages, and energy efficiency feed-in tariffs. The paper also investigates the concept of one-stop shops for building renovations and crowdfunding. The paper offers an assessment of the characteristics, benefits, and challenges of each analyzed financing instrument and provides policy recommendations for their successful implementation. In general, as financing instruments involve different stakeholders and due to complex nature of the sector, there is no single solution to accelerate energy renovation investment in buildings. The emerging financial models offer the potential to address the long-standing barriers to investment in energy efficiency. This article is categorized under: Energy Efficiency > Economics and Policy Energy Efficiency > Climate and Environment Energy and Climate > Economics and Policy

Climate Justice in the City: Mapping Heat-Related Risk for Climate Change Mitigation of the Urban and Peri-Urban Area of Padua (Italy)

The mitigation of urban heat islands (UHIs) is crucial for promoting the sustainable development of urban areas. Geographic information systems (GISs) together with satellite-derived data are powerful tools for investigating the spatiotemporal distribution of UHIs. Depending on the availability of data and the geographic scale of the analysis, different methodologies can be adopted. Here, we show a complete open source GIS-based methodology based on satellite-driven data for investigating and mapping the impact of the UHI on the heat-related elderly risk (HERI) in the Functional Urban Area of Padua. Thermal anomalies in the territory were mapped by modelling satellite data from Sentinel-3. After a socio-demographic analysis, the HERI was mapped according to five levels of risk. The highest vulnerability levels were localised within the urban area and in three municipalities near Padua, which represent about 20% of the entire territory investigated. In these municipalities, a percentage of elderly people over 20%, a thermal anomaly over 2.4 °C, and a HERI over 0.65 were found. Based on these outputs, it is possible to define nature-based solutions for reducing the UHI phenomenon and promote a sustainable development of cities. Stakeholders can use the results of these investigations to define climate and environmental policies

Prediction of HIV-1 virus-host protein interactions using virus and host sequence motifs

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Host protein-protein interaction networks are altered by invading virus proteins, which create new interactions, and modify or destroy others. The resulting network topology favors excessive amounts of virus production in a stressed host cell network. Short linear peptide motifs common to both virus and host provide the basis for host network modification.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>We focused our host-pathogen study on the binding and competing interactions of HIV-1 and human proteins. We showed that peptide motifs conserved across 70% of HIV-1 subtype B and C samples occurred in similar positions on HIV-1 proteins, and we documented protein domains that interact with these conserved motifs. We predicted which human proteins may be targeted by HIV-1 by taking pairs of human proteins that may interact via a motif conserved in HIV-1 and the corresponding interacting protein domain.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Our predictions were enriched with host proteins known to interact with HIV-1 proteins ENV, NEF, and TAT (p-value < 4.26E-21). Cellular pathways statistically enriched for our predictions include the T cell receptor signaling, natural killer cell mediated cytotoxicity, cell cycle, and apoptosis pathways. Gene Ontology molecular function level 5 categories enriched with both predicted and confirmed HIV-1 targeted proteins included categories associated with phosphorylation events and adenyl ribonucleotide binding.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>A list of host proteins highly enriched with those targeted by HIV-1 proteins can be obtained by searching for host protein motifs along virus protein sequences. The resulting set of host proteins predicted to be targeted by virus proteins will become more accurate with better annotations of motifs and domains. Nevertheless, our study validates the role of linear binding motifs shared by virus and host proteins as an important part of the crosstalk between virus and host.</p

Life history traits in Darwinula stevesoni (Crustacea: Ostracoda) from Southern European populations under controlled conditions and their relationship with genetic features

We describe life history traits of the ostracod Darwinula stevensoni through laboratory experiments. This small (about 0.7 mm), ancient, obligate parthenogenetic species appeared to be particulary difficult to handle as its long life cycle (up to 3-4 years) has made lab experiments over several generations very difficult. D. stevensoni is an eurythermal and euryhaline species with low variability in size and shape (both of the carapace and the soft parts). Its genetic variability has also been found to be very low. Survival, clutch size, deposition timing and hatching were evaluated in acclimated and non-acclimated females from seven populations: six from Northern Italy and one from Spain. The samples were collected from three different habitats: four lakes, two streams and one spring. A genetic survey using starch gel electrophoresis had previously revealed that only Glucose phosphate isomerase (Gpi) locus was polymorphic. A clone, homozygous at Gpi locus, is the most common in lacustrine and spring habitats in the whole bio-geographic range. Surprisingly, two heterozygous clones dominate in Northern Italian lotic environments. Enzymatic activity of heterozygous and homozygous genotypes at Gpi locus was assayed in order to evaluate the relationship between Gpi activity and fitness. Survival and developmental time were not affected by acclimation, while reproductive potential decreased in acclimated females. In females from running waters, reproduction started later and lasted for a shorter time, clutch size was smaller, and hatching percentage lower than females from lakes. These differences are not directly correlated with differences in enzymatic activities at Gpi locus. This does not rule out an overall genetic control of these characteristics since, in a parthenogenetic species, the whole genome is transmitted without recombination. We stress the intriguing case of D. stevensoni in relation to the concept of the "general purpose genotype"

Building energy models with morphological urban-scale parameters: A case study in Turin

With a growing awareness around the importance of the optimization of building efficiency, being able to make accurate predictions of building energy demand is an invaluable asset for practitioners and designers. For this reason, it is important to continually improve existing models as well as introduce new methods that can help reduce the so-called energy performance gap, which separates predicted from actual consumption values. This is particularly true for urban scale simulations, where even small scenes can be very complex and carry the necessity of finding a reasonable balance between precision and computational efforts. The scope of this work is to present two different models that make use of morphological urban-scale parameters to improve their performances, taking into account the interactions between buildings and their surroundings. In order to do this, two neighbourhoods in the city of Turin (IT) were taken as case studies. The buildings studied present similar characteristics but are inserted in a different urban context. Several urban parameters were extracted using a GIS tool and used as input, alongside the building-scale features, for two different models: i) a bottom-up engineering approach that evaluates the energy balance of residential buildings and introduces some variables at block-of-buildings scale, ii) a machine learning approach based on the bootstrap aggregating (bagging) algorithm, which takes the same parameters used by the previous model as inputs and makes an estimation of the hourly energy consumption of each building. The main results obtained confirm that the urban context strongly influences the energy performance of buildings located in high built-up areas, and that introducing simple morphological urban-scale parameters in the models to take these effects into account can improve their performance while having a very low impact on the computational efforts