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Climatic conditions strongly affect the energy performance of buildings, and due to the synergy between global climate change and the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect, the climatic conditions inside and outside the city are highly different. However, weather data collected at airports are commonly used for building energy simulations and these data do not take into account real temperature distribution in cities. Many studies in the literature address the topic but mostly considering only a couple of urban and non-urban stations. In this paper, the urban climate in Rome, Italy, is analysed after monitoring of the air temperature and relative humidity in four selected neighbourhoods and one reference station from October 2014 until September 2017. Rome is characterised by a composite urban pattern and high variability of building types, of which the four selected areas are representative. The heating degree days decrease up to 18% and cooling degree days increase up to 157% in the urban area with respect to the rural reference and the area most affected by the UHI is the city centre. The UHI is more intense in summer than in winter (average increase between 0.7 °C and 1 °C); while the diurnal and nocturnal UHI depends on the season and the neighbourhood. Then, the energy performance of a representative apartment block and a typical office building was computed using the measured data. Regarding the predicted energy performance, comparing the four urban sites and the reference site, the UHI causes a reduction of heating consumption up to 21% in residential building and 18% in the office building. An increase of cooling consumption up to 74% is instead computed for the residential building and up to 53% for the office building. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historic buildings constitute a large amount of the European building stock and their preservation is of paramount importance for cultural, economic and also environmental reasons, as their conservation is regarded as more sustainable with respect to demolition and reconstruction. However, historic buildings require frequent repair and conservation works, whose environmental impact is still to be evaluated. In the present paper the sustainability of conservation intervention is evaluated by the LCA analysis method, focusing in particular on cleaning materials and technologies, with reference to conservation sites located in Bologna, Italy. After identifying the most used cleaning materials and technologies, the time necessary for achieving an equal cleaning effectiveness was selected as functional unit and the LCA analysis was carried out, along with a quantitative evaluation of some other key aspects of the different methods (workers’ health, acoustic impact and waste produced in the building site). The results highlight that the different technologies involve remarkably different environmental impacts, but that in some cases their impact could be easily reduced by substituting some secondary materials in the cleaning process, without affecting the effectiveness of cleaning. The results also show that the methods involving the lowest environmental impact are not necessarily the best ones in terms of safety and waste production in the building site. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Non-residential buildings like healthcare ones contribute to energy consumption and cause a negative environmental impact. This is mainly due to the age of the buildings, their poor level of energy efficiency and the implementation of only a basic maintenance plan. Owing to the very limited budget available for public administrators, Energy Performance Contracting (EPC), that entails the involvement of an Energy Service Company (ESCo), can provide the entire or part of the capital needed for investments aimed at progressively increasing energy efficiency over their service life. In this paper, three acute hospitals and two community clinics built in Italy are analysed, in order to assess the economic feasibility of several energy renovation actions that can be included within EPC contracts. To this purpose, the outcomes of energy audits carried out in 2014 about these buildings are reported, which involved analyses of consumption measured over the previous three years and assessment of use profiles for the development of models to break down the overall consumption and to estimate potential savings. Diverse improvement strategies were assessed, consisting in either isolated or combined renovation actions and tested on the five buildings, whose comparison was carried out in terms of energy saving, pollution reduction and economic feasibility. As a result, the best combined renovation actions per each hospital were recommended, that included – but were not limited to – the improvement of the control and regulation of existing sub-systems without replacement, partial replacement of other sub-systems and integration of renewables. Finally, each scenario was evaluated through the payback period and other economic performance indexes in order to assess the feasibility of the EPC framework when applied to this case study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]