Principles and standards for sustainable summer comfort

Carlos Lopes, Swedish Energy Agency
J. Fergus Nicol, Department of Architecture, Oxford Brookes University, UK
Lorenzo Pagliano, End-Use Efficiency Research Group, Politecnico di Milano, Italy
Márton Varga, Austrian Energy Agency

Keywords

sustainable summer comfort, passive cooling, market transformation, thermal comfort, adaptive comfort model

Abstract

Recent studies predict a dramatic increase of cooling energy demand in Europe, despite the available knowledge and technologies of passive cooling. The international project KeepCool addressed this gap, searching for intelligent ways to promote the market penetration of passive cooling technologies and a new definition of sustainable summer comfort based on ten steps. The project tailored the available information into a toolkit for building owners, planners and building users. In the eight participating countries, we explored various marketing strategies to reach these target groups, and uncovered four main barriers for the broad market implementation of sustainable summer comfort: outdated rules of thumb in building and plant design, remuneration schemes for planners and designers without incentives for integral planning, building codes concentrating on winter requirements, and the scattered supplier industry for passive solutions. One step towards overcoming these barriers is the adoption of the Adaptive Comfort Model in the European Standard EN 15251. The paper will present the evidence on which its provisions are based (focusing on thermal comfort) and the advantages they present for those concerned to design buildings which use the minimum of energy.