Twelve Years of Energy Efficiency in Historic Buildings in Sweden

2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 41-52 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marie Claesson ◽  
Tor Broström

Abstract The Swedish National Research programme for Energy Efficiency in historic buildings was initiated in 2006 by the Swedish Energy Agency. This article gives an overview of the programme: objectives, projects and the general results of the programme. The research programme aims to develop knowledge, methods and technical solutions that contribute to energy efficiency in historically valuable buildings without destroying or damaging the historical value of the buildings, including decoration, furnishings, interiors or equipment. The programme is not limited to listed and monumental buildings but covers a wider range of historic buildings that account for a large part of the energy use in the building sector. For one and two-family houses, around 25 % of the energy use is associated with buildings built before 1945. The same number for multifamily houses is around 15 %. The programme is currently in its third consecutive four-year-stage. Previous four-year-stages were completed in 2010 and 2014. Over time, the scope of the programme and the projects have developed from mainly dealing with indoor climate control in monumental buildings towards addressing more general issues in the much larger stock of non-listed buildings. Technical research, based on quantitative analysis, dominate throughout all three stages, however most projects have had interdisciplinary components. The results from the programme have been presented in 31 journal papers, 67 conference papers, five books and five PhD theses. The projects have also contributed to CEN standards and resulted in a number of Bachelors and Master’s theses. An equally important long-term effect of the programme is that the number of Swedish researchers in the field have increased from practically none in 2007 to 18 senior researchers and twelve PhD students from ten universities in 2014. The research programme on Energy Efficiency in historic buildings is unique in an international context. Hopefully it can serve as an example for other countries on how to address an important interdisciplinary research challenge.

Buildings ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 45 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mihail Vinokurov ◽  
Kaisa Grönman ◽  
Simo Hammo ◽  
Risto Soukka ◽  
Mika Luoranen

This study addresses the challenges in ensuring energy efficiency and high indoor climate quality with efficient use of public money in the municipal building procurement process. Energy efficient municipal building procurement provides a significant leverage when steering the built environment towards the low-carbon economy targets of the EU. Municipal building department professionals need more skills and knowledge to appropriately define the requirements and identify the energy efficient design options accounting for the building’s changing operational environment. This study presents how to systematically integrate energy efficiency in the municipal procurement process of buildings by presenting the list of energy efficiency factors to be included into the procurement process. This list of factors clarifies how indoor climate quality, energy use, and the life cycle economy are related through technological solutions and how the optimal compromise solution can be determined. Furthermore, this list of factors explains the responsibilities in integrating energy efficiency within the municipal building procurement process. Applied in the design of the municipal building the list of factors contributes to more informed and transparent decision-making process.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (20) ◽  
pp. 9549
Author(s):  
Andrea Costantino ◽  
Enrico Fabrizio ◽  
Salvador Calvet

In the last decades, an engineering process has deeply transformed livestock houses by introducing fine-tuned climate control systems to guarantee adequate indoor climate conditions needed to express the maximum genetic potential of animals and to increase their productivity. Climate control, hence, has strong relation with productivity but also with other livestock production domains, outlining a web of mutual relations between them. The objective of this work is to understand the actual role of climate control in intensive livestock houses by unpicking this web of mutual relations through a literature review. The results show that climate control plays a key role in intensive livestock houses since it has strong relations with animal welfare, air emissions, productivity, health, and energy use. These relations make it essential to adopt an integrated approach for the assessment of the effectiveness of any proposed improvement in the different domains of livestock production. This is especially true considering aspects such as the expected increase of livestock production in developing countries and global warming. For this purpose, integrated climate control models of livestock houses are needed, representing a challenging opportunity for performing investigations in this research field.


Author(s):  
Mark Endrei ◽  
Chao Jin ◽  
Minh Ngoc Dinh ◽  
David Abramson ◽  
Heidi Poxon ◽  
...  

Rising power costs and constraints are driving a growing focus on the energy efficiency of high performance computing systems. The unique characteristics of a particular system and workload and their effect on performance and energy efficiency are typically difficult for application users to assess and to control. Settings for optimum performance and energy efficiency can also diverge, so we need to identify trade-off options that guide a suitable balance between energy use and performance. We present statistical and machine learning models that only require a small number of runs to make accurate Pareto-optimal trade-off predictions using parameters that users can control. We study model training and validation using several parallel kernels and more complex workloads, including Algebraic Multigrid (AMG), Large-scale Atomic Molecular Massively Parallel Simulator, and Livermore Unstructured Lagrangian Explicit Shock Hydrodynamics. We demonstrate that we can train the models using as few as 12 runs, with prediction error of less than 10%. Our AMG results identify trade-off options that provide up to 45% improvement in energy efficiency for around 10% performance loss. We reduce the sample measurement time required for AMG by 90%, from 13 h to 74 min.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (8) ◽  
pp. 3444
Author(s):  
Sergey A. Lavrenko ◽  
Dmitriy I. Shishlyannikov

The authors focus on the process of potash ore production by a mechanized method. They show that currently there are no approved procedures for assessing the performance of heading-and-winning machines operating in the conditions of potash mines. This causes difficulties in determining the field of application of heading-and-winning machines, complicates the search for implicit technical solutions for the modernisation of existing models of mining units, prohibits real-time monitoring of the stability of stope-based technological processes and makes it difficult to assess the performance of the services concerning mining enterprises. The work represents an aggregate assessment of the performance of heading-and-winning machines for potash mines by determining complex indicators describing the technological and technical levels of organising the work in stopes. Such indicators are the coefficients of productivity and energy efficiency, respectively. Experimental studies have been carried out in the conditions of the potash mine of the Verkhnekamskoye potassium-magnesium salt deposit to assess the performance of the latest and most productive Ural-20R heading-and-winning machines manufactured in Russia. Using the above methodological approaches, this paper shows that the unsatisfactory technological performance of the studied machine is due to the low productivity of the mine district transport. The average productivity coefficient was 0.29. At the same time, high values of the energy efficiency coefficient show that the productivity of the machine is on par with design conditions.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Muhammad Arif Budiyanto ◽  
Muhammad Hanzalah Huzaifi ◽  
Simon Juanda Sirait ◽  
Putu Hangga Nan Prayoga

AbstractSustainable development of container terminals is based on energy efficiency and reduction in CO2 emissions. This study estimated the energy consumption and CO2 emissions in container terminals according to their layouts. Energy consumption was calculated based on utility data as well as fuel and electricity consumptions for each container-handling equipment in the container terminal. CO2 emissions were estimated using movement modality based on the number of movements of and distance travelled by each container-handling equipment. A case study involving two types of container terminal layouts i.e. parallel and perpendicular layouts, was conducted. The contributions of each container-handling equipment to the energy consumption and CO2 emissions were estimated and evaluated using statistical analysis. The results of the case study indicated that on the CO2 emissions in parallel and perpendicular layouts were relatively similar (within the range of 16–19 kg/TEUs). These results indicate that both parallel and perpendicular layouts are suitable for future ports based on sustainable development. The results can also be used for future planning of operating patterns and layout selection in container terminals.


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