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The present paper discusses issues related to the three major problems of the built environment in Europe and in particular, the energy consumption of buildings, the energy poverty and the local climate change. The article introduces the idea of a zero concept world where the global impact of the three specific sectors will be diminished. The paper analyses the actual status of each sector and identifies the main problems. It discusses and sets a road map to satisfy this objective, involving future quantitative and qualitative targets for the three considered sectors while it investigates the major technological, economic and social forces and policies that have to be employed in order to minimize the energy consumption of buildings, eradicate the energy poverty and mitigate the local climate change. The links, synergies and impacts between them are analysed in a comprehensive way and the interrelated nature and characteristics of the three sectors is highlighted. The mechanisms to transform the actual problems into opportunities and appropriate drivers for future development are identified and analysed. A road map involving a full estimation of the necessary investments to fulfil the defined targets is presented. The major medium and long term benefits for the society, including the impact on the economy, employment, the environment and health are fully quantified and analysed. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Energy storage technologies can provide energy security, fight climate change, and improve the value of current or future energy systems. Thermal Energy Storage (TES) is a key enable technology, it allows to stock thermal energy that can be further used for heating and cooling applications and power generation. The methods and tools used to analyse all the literature about the evolution of TES systems research are described in this paper. Bibliometrics is the science that studies, in a statistical way, the written publications of a certain field of research, and it is considered one of the few interdisciplinary research fields that can be extended to almost all scientific areas. The bibliometric analysis of the database Web-of-science (core collection) shows highlighted information in order to figure out the scientific outputs. The importance of the bibliometrics is to analyse a knowledge development from a strategic point of view in order to detect its evolution regarding the research in such a field and to detect which are the opportunities within this area. This study presents the publication evolution in TES field over the last two decades, per year, per country, per authors, per journal, and per TES technology, taking into account sensible heat TES (SHTES), latent heat TES (LHTES), and thermochemical energy storage (TCS), and considering the connection between authorship communities and country interactions. The communities are obtained from the co/authorships, regardless of the country or affiliation; this permits to view the size of the communities, as well as to identify collaboration opportunities between communities with low or no interaction. Furthermore, studies are included regarding detailed analysis on each TES technology, as well as other factors (such as funding) that can influence the current and future research.

The temperature of cities continues to increase because of the heat island phenomenon and the undeniable climatic change. The observed high ambient temperatures intensify the energy problem of cities, deteriorates comfort conditions, put in danger the vulnerable population and amplify the pollution problems. To counterbalance the phenomenon, important mitigation technologies have been developed and proposed. Among them, technologies aiming to increase the albedo of cities and the use of vegetative - green roofs appear to be very promising, presenting a relatively high heat island mitigation potential. This paper aims to present the state of the art on both the above technologies, when applied in the city scale. Tenths of published studies have been analysed. Most of the available data are based on simulation studies using mesoscale modeling techniques while important data are available from the existing experimental studies. When a global increase of the city's albedo is considered, the expected mean decrease of the average ambient temperature is close to 0.3. K per 0.1 rise of the albedo, while the corresponding average decrease of the peak ambient temperature is close to 0.9. K. When only cool roofs are considered, the analysis of the existing data shows that the expected depression rate of the average urban ambient temperature varies between 0.1 and 0.33. K per 0.1 increase of the roofs albedo with a mean value close to 0.2. K. As it concerns green roofs, existing simulation studies show that when applied on a city scale, they may reduce the average ambient temperature between 0.3 and 3. K. Detailed analysis of many studies reporting a comparison of the mitigation potential of both technologies has permitted the definition of the limits, the boundaries and the conditions under which the considered technologies reach their better performance, in a synthetic way. © 2012 Elsevier Ltd.