Materials research and development needs to enable efficient and electrified buildings

Because of the complexity of modern buildings—with many interconnected materials, components, and systems—fully electrifying buildings will require targeted R&D and efficient coordination across those material, component, and system levels. Because buildings that consume the smallest amount of energy are easier to electrify, energy efficiency is a crucial step toward fully electrified buildings. Materials advances will play an important role in both reducing the energy intensity of buildings and electrifying their remaining energy use. Materials are currently being explored, discovered, synthesized, evaluated, optimized, and implemented across many building components, including solid-state lighting; dynamic windows and opaque envelopes; cold climate heat pumps; thermal energy storage; heating, ventilating, and air conditioning (HVAC); refrigeration; non-vapor compression HVAC; and more. In this article, we review the current state-of-the-art of materials for various buildings end uses and discuss R&D challenges and opportunities for both efficiency and electrification. Graphical abstract

Analysis of methods for assessing the energy efficiency of data centers using the power usage effectiveness method

The article deals with the analysis of methods for assessing the energy efficiency of data centers according to the Power Usage Effectiveness method. The demand for data centers which consumes a large amount of electricity is growing with the growth of digitalization and the accumulation of big data in the network. The energy consumption of the cooling system for the machine room accounts for a significant part of the operating costs of the building. Free cooling in a refrigeration system reduces energy consumption much more than operating systems with a vapor-compression cycle. In 2006 according to The Green Grid, the assessment method of Power Usage Effectiveness has become an international standard for measuring energy efficiency and is widely used in the design and operation of data centers. In this regard, the operation principles of free-cooling chillers are considered. The calculation example of the system payback in free-cooling is also given.