building energy performance Articles
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Every Little Helps on the Path to Carbon Neutrality
Reversing cameras, left, right and centre mirrors … a glance over your shoulder can still be what makes that all essential difference. So too with building energy performance. It is probably best to just assume that your building has an energy performance blind spot. The next steps are to find it and then fix it. This was our approach to Tesco’s National Distribution Centre when ...
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Climate Adapted Buildings
Acknowledging our power-hungry practices and demanding a proper understanding of the fundamental laws of physics within the context of a building. The single-greatest environmental impact of buildings today is their ongoing energy usage, which accounts for almost half of global energy usage. Heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) requirements of conventional buildings represent more ...
By Actual Media
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Incorporating energy performance, sustainability of buildings into environmental due diligence
This article examines recent trends related to climate change and sustainability and their impacts on environmental due diligence. The authors say quantifying a building's energy and sustainability condition, performance, and potential will become commonplace and now is being incorporated into routine commercial real estate transactions. They believe commercial property sellers should consider ...
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Green Walls: The New Wall-Y Technical Manual Is Online
The Wall-Y Technical Manual is now available on our website, with updated data and a new graphic design. A useful tool to have all the technical specifications of our product and the prescriptions to correctly design systems for vertical green walls. Wall-Y, the high-strength Geoplast grid, is the ideal solution for creating green walls and for delimiting spaces in gardens or inside buildings. ...
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Alta diagonal office building Barcelona, Spain - Case Study
Key Parameters Type of Facility – Existing Building (EB) Function –Office Building Area – 9 stories, 93,500 square feet Project Completed – 2012 Challenge: Sustainable design in a complete renovation of one of Barcelona’s most distinctive buildings in the heart of the city’s financial district. The building’s owner sought to transform an iconic ...
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Does organising matter? Tracing connections to environmental impacts in different housing estates
Much of the research on buildings and the environment is of a technical-economic nature. But so far, this has not led to any great changes in practice. This article brings organising into the research agenda: Does organising matter for the environmental performance of buildings? If so, how? This question is investigated by a comparative analysis based on an empirical approach. Two housing ...
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Thermal impact of sinking residential buildings in hot regions – Kuwait as a case study
This paper is concerned with improving residential building thermal performance at early design stage. The modification considered in this work was based on reducing external heat gain via sinking the building or part of it. Three scenarios were proposed of which the most acceptable one was thermally analysed. The analysis was based on integrated dynamic simulation of the whole building thermal ...
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Indigenous materials and techniques database (IMTeD): a sustainability data aid for designers
A consideration of the "value" of indigenous materials in developing nations precedes an overview of current approaches to encouraging their sustainable use. A significant factor in the failure of traditional building materials to become widely established in the developing world is identified as being a lack of appropriate (i.e. supported by formal measurement and test procedures) ...
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Do certified sustainable buildings perform better than similar conventional buildings?
The aim of this study is to assess the performance of sustainable buildings. Its objective is to compare certified green buildings with similar in location, size, age and function conventional buildings by testing hypotheses that green buildings perform better than conventional ones. Objective data including building costs, energy and water consumption, material recycling, indoor pollution ...
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Measurements and Standards to Support Increased Energy Efficiency and Reduced Environmental Impact
“The world is facing twin energy-related threats: that of not having adequate and secure supplies of energy at affordable prices and that of environmental harm caused by consuming too much of it.” Daniel Hecker, economist, Bureau of Labor Statistics, July 2005 Buildings in the U.S. consume 72 percent of all electrical energy produced in this country. Emissions associated with ...
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Proper Design of `Green Building` is the precursor of performance and efficiency
EPC World Magazine, had a Q&A with Mr. Juzer S Kothari, Managing Director of Conserve Consultants Pvt. Ltd. Founded in 2005, Conserve is a global consulting firm based in India with expertise in high performance- energy efficient-sustainable buildings ; and is committed to enable organizations conserve energy, water, materials and resources. The firm has worked on 200+ Major Projects ...
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Indoor Air Quality, Energy consumption and building performance: leveraging technology to improve all three - Forwood Cloud Wiser III Environmental Dynamics Group, Inc. Princeton, New Jersey USA
Abstract: Building owners and occupants expect more from their buildings today – both better indoor air quality (IAQ) and less energy consumption. Many facilities strive to design and commission a ‘smart building’ – one that is healthy, environmentally conscious and operating in the most efficient way possible. However, maintaining optimum IAQ often seems to be in conflict ...
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Greening the Built Environment
ASTM Standards and Products Form the Foundation of Sustainable Construction Efforts Today, a major focal point for the worldwide building industry is the growing demand for sustainable construction. Sustainable, or “green,” construction is focused on the more effective use of resources and ultimately the creation of healthier, energy efficient, more environmentally friendly homes and ...
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Building Energy Modeling 101: HVAC Design and Operation Use Case
A great deal of energy use in buildings goes toward heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (HVAC). In 2015, HVAC consumed 15.5 quads. The first step in reducing HVAC energy use is reducing heating and cooling load—i.e., the amount of heat that needs to be added to or removed from a building—typically by reducing heat from equipment and lighting; minimizing unnecessary ventilation; ...
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Energy & Environment: Driving industrial development in the southeastern Mediterranean
Recent developments in the environmental markets of the greater southeastern Europe and the Mediterranean make explicit the necessity for the provision of integrated services, covering both issues of energy efficiency and environmental protection. Such services, when provided by a single entity, promote the uniformity of the deliverables and strengthen customer benefits; the service is not ...
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Conventional and alternative water supply systems: a life cycle study
Research on urban development to date has tended to focus on buildings and their performance in terms of associated energy and environmental impacts. Although, many detailed studies of residential buildings have been carried out, these studies usually concentrate on the house itself without consideration of the infrastructure systems. Alternatives to traditional infrastructure systems are ...
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A collaborative platform for sustainable building design based on model integration over the internet
Considerable potential exists for reducing life cycle environmental impacts of buildings in Japan. While energy consumption during the operation stage of a building's lifetime is usually dominant, indirect energy use and pollutant emissions associated with production and disposal of building materials during construction and demolition are significant. For sustainable building design, ...
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To strengthen smart building sustainability and resilience, building owners should look to artificial intelligence and machine learning
For many commercial building owners, the ability to capture and analyze facility performance data is rapidly emerging as a high priority and as a competitive differentiator. By focusing on data that pertains to both energy consumption and building asset maintenance, building owners, thanks to new artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning capabilities, can now drastically reduce these two ...
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How sustainable commercial real estate can make your business more profitable
In the first post of this series on commercial real estate, I talked about the urgency to transform properties to support an ‘all-electric, all-digital’ future. In this post, I will zoom in on one specific pillar of the Schneider Electric vision for Buildings of the Future: the tangible value of ...
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MIT community takes the Earth Day Challenge
Take Action! Earn Points! Win Prizes! Written by Rachael Budowle, MIT Sustainability Program.You can read the original new in MIT NewsEarth Day has been reinvented at MIT. The Institute has a long history of Earth Day fairs, film series, colloquia, and other activities designed to celebrate the day and spread information about energy and the environment. This year marked a shift from providing ...
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