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Users’ behaviour and indoor climate are two leading aspects that must be taken into account if we want the retrofitting of the housing stock to contribute to CO 2 reduction, comfort improvement and reduction of living costs. The integrated facade module evaluated in this paper, which constitutes an approach to zero energy renovation, includes a preliminary study for the identification of target occupants and their characteristics and requirements that will guide the design decisions. The proposed strategy primarily focuses on the case of social rental multi-family housing stock in the Netherlands, but should provide insights in the application of the concept in Europe. This paper presents the analysis of the adaptability of this solution to the Mediterranean climate, taking into account the specific characteristics of the occupants of this climatic zone. The results showed an improved performance of building after the application of the evaluated solution in southern Spain, but with lower savings on the energy demand than in the Netherlands, so the economic investment should be reduced in this case. Also, the inclusion in the solution of some variables, such as the forced night-time ventilation for passive cooling and the insulation thickness reduction, were tested and proved to be an optimisation of its performance in the Mediterranean climate. Overall, the study concluded that the proposed refurbishment strategy has the potential to be implemented in different climates, particularly if certain modification in the facade operation is considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Twenty percent of the total energy consumption in the Netherlands comes from household electricity consumption. This comes from household electric appliances whose number has grown in recent years. The paper explores the effect of smart meter introduction, appliance efficiency and consumer behaviour on reducing electricity consumption in the Netherlands. It does so by combining two perspectives: a sociotechnical approach and a bottom up simulation approach. The range of scenarios explored through simulation in the paper provides an understanding of the interplay between efficiency, smart meter diffusion and consumer behaviour. The results show their effect on electricity consumption and suggest that further effort is required to control and reduce it. Insights from the paper suggest that future studies should disaggregate with respect to a number of factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

[Display omitted] • High resolution data from a Dutch net zero energy neighborhood is analysed. • Most buildings are positive energy, emit less carbon than they offset. • Large occupant differences in energy demand are visible across the households. • Occupant preferences and weather conditions greatly influence thermal energy demand. • Due to the high thermal efficiency, there is a high risk for summer overheating. Decarbonizing the building stock is a central component of global climate change mitigation efforts. In practice, this decarbonization can be achieved by a variety of different measures, including improvements in building energy efficiency, electrification of energy demand to reduce reliance on fossil fuels, and installation of distributed (renewable) generation in conjunction with flexible storage. However, these large-scale, often disruptive changes to the built environment also raise a number of concerns, such as loss of occupant comfort exacerbated by climate change, and introduction of additional stressors on the distribution grid. In this paper, we demonstrate several conclusions using detailed sub-hourly data of two years (2019–2020) collected from 40 homes in a recently refurbished net-zero energy neighborhood in the Netherlands. This paper shows that, in renovation projects like the case study, net-zero energy balances should be considered on a neighborhood, rather than building level to minimize worst case planning by accounting for occupant influences and seasonal effects. Furthermore, the energy flexibility and climate resilience in the buildings seems to be rather limited, as a result of energy efficiency improvements. While helpful in climate change mitigation efforts, the large seasonal differences in energy demand and generation imply that this evolution is perhaps sub-optimal from the grid perspective. The results illustrate that all homes in the study were net-zero energy over the two year period, sometimes net positive by up to a factor of three. This led to considerable excess generation especially during the summer months. In addition, it was found that indoor air temperature sensors in a number of buildings showed overheating beyond guideline thermal comfort temperature of 25°C, showing potential thermal comfort and heat stress for vulnerable occupants. These results motivate energy storage or modifications of the installed heat pumps to leverage summer excess generation while reducing the impact of summer heat waves. These findings should enable the Netherlands and other countries aiming to fully decarbonize the building stock formulate better, future-proof policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper presents a case study on the performance based design of a HVAC system and controller of a museum. A famous museum in The Netherlands has reported possible damage to important preserved wallpaper fragments. The paper provides an evaluation of the current indoor climate by measurements, showing that the indoor climate performance does not satisfy the requirements for the preservation of old paper. To solve this problem we developed an integrated heat air and moisture (HAM) model consisting of models for respectively: the indoor climate, the HVAC system and controller and a showcase. The presented models are validated by a comparison of simulation and measurement results. The integrated model is used for the evaluation of a new HVAC controller design and the use of a showcase. It is concluded that it is not possible to satisfy the indoor climate within the recommended limits, exclusively by the use of a new control strategy. Furthermore in order to meet the recommendations, the wallpaper fragments should be placed in a showcase and a similar control strategy as presented in the paper, has to be implemented in order to limit the room air temperature change. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

With the ageing of population in Europe, the housing stock needs to meet the demands of older occupants, including an increasing demand for energy efficiency. As collective entities, Dutch social housing associations are among the frontrunners in achieving the energy and comfort goals of the European Union and the national government. This paper presents a number of case studies from the domain of social housing for older people from The Netherlands. The cases presented focus on the baseline conditions, the interventions conducted, the financial aspects and the involvement of stakeholders. Implications and recommendations for the design and retrofitting of housing, as well as the process of improving energy efficiency and comfort in practice, are discussed on a supranational level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The building envelope is the interface between the interior of the building and the outdoor environment. A building's energy consumption to a large extent depends on certain envelope design elements. As a consequence, for achieving high levels of energy-saving in buildings, design measures with high impact should be firstly defined and then optimised. This paper aims at finding energy-saving solutions for the envelope design of high-rise office buildings in temperate climates. For this purpose an existing tall office building is selected as a typical high-rise design in the Netherlands and the energy use prior and after refurbishment is compared through computer simulations with DesignBuilder. A sensitivity analysis in line with a large number of energy performance simulations showed which building envelope parameters have a significant impact on the building's energy consumption; hence need more consideration for improvement. The four measures selected for uplifting the energy performance of the building envelope include glazing type, window-to-wall ratio, sun shading and roof strategies. By taking the base case as a reference and optimising one parameter at each step, this study resulted in a high-performance envelope design that offers a considerable energy-saving by around 42% for total energy use, 64% for heating and 34% for electric lighting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Thirty percent of the total worldwide energy is consumed by the residential sector, making it a very significant frontier for energy transitions for sustainability. While the Netherlands aims to achieve a remarkable reduction in the energy consumption in residential buildings with policies mainly aiming at new constructions; little attention is being paid to the existing stock, and this existing stock creates inertia against a transition. Although this is a widely accepted issue, the extent of such inertia has not been analyzed explicitly. In that respect, this study is a preliminary study that aims to demonstrate the importance of the existing housing stock, and the inertia it can cause against an energy transition. Besides, policy options such as increasing efficiency standards for new constructions and increasing the turnover rate of the existing stock are evaluated through simulation experiments using the model developed for the Dutch system. The set of experiments discussed in the paper provides a better understanding about this inertia, as well as what needs to be done for achieving significant progress in a residential energy transition. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: The paper presents an extended method for exergy analysis of buildings and Heating Ventilation Air Conditioning (HVAC) systems, according to an energy demand build-up model from the building side to the energy supply side. The HVAC systems comprise a thermal energy emission and control system, a thermal distribution system, an electricity distribution system and an energy conversion system. Energy and exergy that are required by a building and a HVAC system are posed into the external part and classified by different forms of energy carriers. The external part is out of the boundary of the study. The method is illustrated with an office building equipped with low-temperature heating and high-temperature cooling systems situated in the Netherlands. Thermal exergy and thermal energy demands of the building and thermal energy and thermal exergy losses occurring in the HVAC systems are discussed. The building and the HVAC systems to be considered meet standard Dutch energy performance regulations. Nevertheless their overall exergy efficiencies are low in both cases (17.15% and 6.81% subsequently). The exergy analysis also pinpoints that the thermal energy emission and control system and the energy conversion system are the main causes of the exergy inefficiencies in the heating and cooling cases, respectively. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

To realize the goals of energy transition, becoming energy-neutral at the neighborhood level by sharing energy among clusters of heterogeneous buildings with local distributed energy resources (DERs), will play a vital role. However, uncertainties related to demand and renewable sources pose a major operational challenge to schedule the DERs. In this paper, a scenario-based mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) model is proposed for an energy management system (EMS) of a local energy community. The proposed EMS executes a stochastic day-ahead scheduling operation of multi-energy systems (MES). A set of scenarios are generated with the Gaussian mixture model (GMM) to consider uncertainties of demand and renewable sources. Moreover, Monte Carlo simulations (MCS) are performed to assess the effectiveness of the proposed EMS compared to the deterministic one. The proposed method is validated by using a real-world case study of a generic Dutch university medical campus in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Two types of analysis are performed: one-day analysis and seasonal analysis. In both cases, in an average, the stochastic process outperforms the deterministic process considerably, in terms of cost, CO 2 emission, imported electricity from grid and usage of local energy resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the results from a real residential field test in which one of the objectives was to maximize the instantaneous self-consumption of the local photovoltaic production. The field test was part of the REnnovates project and was conducted in different phases on houses in several residential districts located in Soesterberg, Heerhugowaard, Woerden and Soest, the Netherlands. To maximize self-consumption, buffered heat pump installations for domestic hot water and stationary residential battery systems were chosen due to their respective thermal and electrical storage capacities. The algorithm used to tackle the associated sequential decision-making problem was model-based reinforcement learning. The proposed algorithm learns the stochastic occupant behavior, uses predictions of local photovoltaic production and considers the dynamics of the system. The results show that this algorithm increased the average self-consumption percentage of the local PV generation (used instantaneously in situ) on average by 14%, even if only buffered heat pump installations for domestic hot water were used. This increase was achieved without causing any perceived discomfort to the residential end users. The average energy shifted per day from the solar production period to the night by the 2 kW/3.6 kWh batteries was 1.5 kWh. The main contribution of this work was therefore the real field implementation of the proposed algorithm. The results demonstrate that it is possible to improve even further the integration of local production using flexible loads. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]