Building integrated renewable energy
About one-third of the primary energy in the world is consumed by buildings. A large amount of CO2 emission due to building energy consumption has threatened the sustainable development of the world. Improvement on the building energy performance, especially by integration with renewable energy resources has attracted interest worldwide to reduce greenhouse gas emission to make our society more sustainable. This Special Issue on building integrated renewable energy was open to all contributors in the field of building energy efficiency. The original experimental studies, numerical simulations, and reviews in all aspects of renewable energy utilization, management, and optimization have been considered.
Geothermal energy and solar energy
Geothermal energy and solar energy are the energy sources to help achieve zero energy buildings. Geothermal energy can be used for building heating. Xu et al. developed a mixed convective–conductive fluid-flow model of a co-axial closed-loop geothermal system to investigate its heat extraction performance for heating. It was found that a geothermal well could provide enough heat for a building with an area of 10,000–20,000 m2. The heating area under intermittence operation was 4000 m2 more than that under continuous operation. Xu et al. further simulated the performance of a single-well groundwater source heat pump system in Beijing, China and found that the output temperature for a single well serving an area of 9000 m2 during the heating season was 11–15.
Solar energy utilization is very important to help reduce the building energy consumption and even achieve net zero energy buildings. Zhou et al. proposed a solar integrated vacuum freeze-dryer and building air conditioning system, where a solar absorption refrigeration system provides cooling to both the building space and the freeze-dryer. Through computer simulation under the TRNSYS environment, it was predicted that 35.2% of the total energy was provided by solar energy. Gong et al. developed a single box model to evaluate the energy performance of perovskite-based building-integrated photovoltaics. Simulation results showed that a single box could achieve zero energy demand except for January and December while maintaining the indoor air temperature at 18 C in winter and less than 26 C in summer.
However, despite all the advantages, BIM is not often used in the FM phase. The most significant causes that hinder this integration are:
Renewable energy can be used to power barrier-free intelligent surveillance systems. Peng et al. develop algorithms to improve the accuracy and reduce the work load for night time pedestrian detection, which can improve the correct rate of detection to 92.4%, thus reducing the energy requirements of the power station.
From: Building integrated renewable energy
Yaolin Lin, Wei Yang, Xiaoli Hao and Changxiong Yu
