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Energy system modeling has been following the energy transition to investigate challenges and opportunities of future energy systems on all grid levels. Necessary input for sector-coupled energy system models are residential electricity and heat demand curves. The increasing importance of distribution grids and their modeling requires demand profiles in high spatial resolution.This paper presents a method to assign pre-generated electricity and heat demand curves to georeferenced residential buildings in Germany. We aim at overcoming fundamental shortcomings of the Standard Load Profiles and enable new possibilities for the modeling of distribution grids. Our approach provides a large variety in residential load profiles which spatially correspond to official socio-demographic data. All used input data sets as well as implemented methodology and the resulting profiles are publicly available under open source and open data licences to enable further use. Our results are validated on different aggregation levels as well as compared and discussed with the commonly used Standard Load Profiles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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A transition in the electricity market is required to manage the volatility of increasing renewable energy generation. These fluctuations can be faced with flexible consumption through Demand Side Management (DSM), establishment of further centralized storage capacities and provisioning of dynamic back up generation capacities. At least the latter two options can impose large establishment and operation costs upon the electricity market. Therefore, the feasibility and the resulting potential of coupling the electricity grid with the thermal supply of residential buildings is analysed in this paper. Thereby, inexpensive and widespread thermal storage capacities could be used to improve the integration of dynamic renewable electricity generation. In this paper the technical and economical key impact factors for such thermal DSM approach are elaborated. Based on a literature review, the identified key factors are aggregated to form consistent scenarios of the German “Energiewende” (turnaround in energy policy). The practicability and possible magnitude of the intended DSM is then analysed based on the identified scenarios. All resulting scenarios highlight the growing demand for a flexible electricity market. Especially in scenarios with strong growth of renewable electricity generation, up to 45 GW of flexible electric capacities would be required in Germany by the year 2030. Furthermore, the analysis demonstrates that independently of the energy market development, it is very likely that electricity coupled supply systems will continuously have installed capacities of at least 14 GW. It is found that especially the strong dissemination of smart metering and smart control infrastructure is crucial to incorporate these capacities into DSM activities. Furthermore, the necessity and the resulting benefits of residential end-user participation in the electricity market need to be communicated to all stakeholders to ensure the availability and acceptance of dynamic pricing schemes in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Bibliotheksdienst is the property of De Gruyter and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In the context of urban mining, which aims to extend the value chain of building components to conserve resources, save energy, avoid waste, and reduce emissions, the reuse of structural steel has great potential, that has hardly been exploited to date. In Germany, a significant amount of steel is found within multistorey parking units. Due to the standardised and mass relevant steel used in these structures and considering their diminishing significance in the context of transportation transitions, these buildings offer specific opportunities for reuse. The research aims to investigate the reuse of structural steel from parking facilities in a new architectural design purpose with focus on multistorey residential buildings, as these will become increasingly important in the future construction due to the predicted growth of the world population and global cities. The research methodology begins by identifying the reuse potential of structural steel from parking units for future multi‐storey residential buildings. The study then delves into the exploration of hybrid construction methods, which involve incorporating standardized steel profiles with clay and reinterpreting historical cap ceilings. These approaches aim to foster the development of innovative architectural solutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Energy generation and consumption in the power grid must be balanced at every single moment. Within the synchronous area of continental Europe, flexible generators and loads can provide Frequency Containment Reserve and Frequency Restoration Reserve marketed through the balancing markets. The Transmission System Operators use these flexibilities to maintain or restore the grid frequency when there are deviations. This paper shows the future flexibility potential of Germany's household sector, in particular for single-family and twin homes in 2025 and 2030 with the assumption that households primarily optimize their self-consumption. The primary focus is directed to the flexibility potential of Electric Vehicles, Heat Pumps, Photovoltaics and Battery Storage Systems. A total of 10 different household system configurations were considered and combined in a weighted average based on the scenario framework of the German Grid Development Plan. The household generation, consumption and storage units were simulated in a mixed-integer linear programming model to create the time series for the self-consumption optimized households. This solved the unit commitment problem for each of the decentralized households in their individual configurations. Finally, the individual household flexibilities were evaluated and then aggregated to a Germany-wide flexibility profile for single-family and twin homes. The results indicate that the household sector can contribute significantly to system stabilization with an average potential of 30 GW negative and 3 GW positive flexibility in 2025. In 2030, the corresponding flexibilities potentially increase to 90 GW and 30 GW, respectively. This underlines that considerable flexibility reserves could be provided by single-family and twin homes in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Germany's climate goals require over 75% of its housing stock to be retrofitted for energy efficiency. An important question for Germany and other countries is, what minimum energy efficiency standard should be mandated for housing retrofits so as to reduce CO2 emissions economically efficiently? It has long been known that the marginal costs of energy efficiency increase as standards are pushed higher, and therefore the marginal costs of CO2 abatement increase, but at the same time energy consumption reduces, thereby reducing CO2 emissions. This paper investigates where the social optimum lies between these two effects. In addition to a large database of house sale advertisements containing price and energy efficiency data, it uses two semi-official data sources of modelled and actual energy efficiency upgrades in Germany. It finds that retrofitting to a modestly high standard of about 70 kWh/m2/y entails marginal costs of CO2 abatement comparable to current CO2 prices. However, each step to a higher standard increases these by up to an order of magnitude, with absurdly high marginal costs of CO2 abatement for the highest standards. German policymakers are currently pushing for higher minimum standards, but money could better be spent retrofitting more houses to less stringent standards. • Policymakers seek to drive energy efficiency in buildings to ever higher levels. • But costs of CO2 abatement rise extremely sharply as standards tighten. • Use cost data on retrofits of German buildings to various efficiency standards. • Retrofits to current standards are at the limit of CO2 abatement efficiency. • Driving standards higher increases CO2 abatement cost by an order of magnitude. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Humans' activities in urban areas put a strain on local water resources. This paper introduces a method to accurately simulate the stress urban water demand in Germany puts on local resources on a single-building level, and scalable to regional levels without loss of detail. The method integrates building geometry, building physics, census, socio-economy and meteorological information to provide a general approach to assessing water demands that also overcome obstacles on data aggregation and processing imposed by data privacy guidelines. Three German counties were used as validation cases to prove the feasibility of the presented approach: on average, per capita water demand and aggregated water demand deviates by less than 7% from real demand data. Scenarios applied to a case region Ludwigsburg in Germany, which takes the increment of water price, aging of the population and the climate change into account, show that the residential water demand has the change of −2%, +7% and −0.4% respectively. The industrial water demand increases by 46% due to the development of economy indicated by GDP per capita. The rise of precipitation and temperature raise the water demand in non-residential buildings (excluding industry) of 1%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

[Display omitted] • Simulation of residential building energy supply with heat pump or hydrogen systems. • 2050: Hydrogen economically-viable if H 2 -/Elec.-price is less than 34–61 % per kWh. • For conservative price predictions: Electric heat pumps are most economical solution. • Energy carrier switch for single-family houses: H 2 -/Elec.-price below 44 % per kWh. • Energy carrier switch for multi-family houses: H 2 -/Elec.-price below 58 % per kWh. • Fuel cells are emerging as an economically-viable option for multi-family houses. Fossil-fueled heating in the building sector is responsible for 16 % of Germany's total CO 2 emissions. Options for the climate-neutral heating of buildings include renewable electricity or renewable hydrogen. In this paper, we conduct a bottom-up study to investigate the role of hydrogen in the climate-neutral energy supply of ten selected residential buildings in comparison to electricity-based systems. Based on a demand simulation and linear optimization of the supply system, sensitivity analyses identify the threshold values of the hydrogen price for the use of hydrogen technologies (hydrogen boilers or fuel cells) in building energy systems and make the quantities of hydrogen consumed visible. The results specify the first installations of hydrogen-operated fuel cells in multi-family houses if the hydrogen price reaches 0.17 €/kWh H2 in 2050 at an electricity price of 0.31 €/kWh el. Generally, for different building types and electricity supply prices, it indicates that the use of hydrogen becomes economically-viable if the price of hydrogen supply is in the range of 34–61 % of the price of the electricity supply per kWh and below. For the case of green hydrogen obtained using renewable electricity, it is highly questionable whether hydrogen supply will be that much cheaper than direct electricity supply, making its economical use in buildings uncertain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper introduces an iterative methodology to progressively reduce building simulation model complexity with the aim of identifying potential trade-offs between computational requirements (i.e., model complexity) and energy estimation accuracy. Different levels of model complexity are analysed, from commercial building energy simulation tools to low order calibrated thermal networks models. Experimental data from a residential building in Germany were collected and used to validate two detailed white-box models and a simplified white-box model. The validation process was performed in terms of internal temperature profiles and building thermal energy demand predictions. Synthetic profiles were generated from the validated models and used for calibrating high order models. A reduction (trimming) procedure was applied to reduce the model complexity using an energy performance criterion prior to model trimming. The proposed methodology has the advantage of keeping the physical structure of the original RC model, thus enabling the use of the trimmed lumped parameter building model for other applications. The analysis showed that it is possible to reduce the model complexity by half, while keeping the accuracy above 90% for the targeted building. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Linking top-down energy efficiency indicator analysis with bottom-up policy analysis. • Explaining the contribution of energy efficiency policies in Germany and Switzerland. • Analysing the counteracting effects to energy policy of rebound and non-compliance. This paper studies the factors underlying the evolution of the energy consumption for space heating in residential buildings by linking top-down analysis, based on meso -indicators, and bottom-up analysis, based on policy evaluations. The top-down analysis (i.e. the perspective from energy statistics) allows one to separate the change in total energy use into activity level, societal factors and energy efficiency gains. The explanatory power of the resulting meso-(statistical) indicators is often limited, if the underlying factors are not examined (e.g. changes in heating levels and patterns, weather effects, cost of energy and policies regarding insulation and heating system standards). We overcome most of these drawbacks by conducting a bottom-up analysis (i.e the perspective from single policy measures), which enables us to discern the contribution of energy efficiency policies to the changes observed with the meso -analysis. We focus on space heating consumption in the residential sectors for Germany and Switzerland. A major aim of this analysis is to show the contribution of energy efficiency policies (such as thermal building regulation, subsidy programmes, fiscal measures etc.) towards the changes in this indicator. The results show that the progress in energy efficiency (both autonomous and policy induced) in both countries had the greatest effect (-776 PJ for Germany, −42 PJ for Switzerland) regarding the change in energy consumption for space heating in the period from 2000 to 2016. However, the impacts of "technical and comfort" rebounds (+436 PJ for Germany, N/A for Switzerland) and other developments such as societal changes (+316 PJ for Germany, +35.5 PJ for Switzerland) were found to compensate for a significant part of the energy efficiency gains. In both countries, it was possible to link physical energy efficiency indicators to policy evaluation, but limitations were also identified which are primarily related to data gaps. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• A new retrofitting strategy by using prefabricated elements window machine. • Minimization of the renovation costs and speeding up the retrofit action. • A potential in energy saving and improving the Indoor Environment Quality. • Further significance in retrofit and healthy home office working environments. The renovation of existing residential buildings across Europe has become a key factor for energy saving and the improvement of Indoor Environment Quality (IEQ). This paper presents an investigation of IEQ for a typical 1960s single-family house in Germany before and after a new retrofitting strategy (prefabricated element with integrated ventilation and new thermal envelope). In-situ measurements were applied to investigate the energy efficiency and IEQ improvement for the new retrofitting strategy in temperate winter regions of Europe. The simulation model replicates the measured data to be closer to reality and simulates a home office (COVID-19) scenario. The in-situ measurements showed that our retrofitting strategy increases the indoor air temperature during the heating period by up to 2.5 °C, decreases relative humidity by up to 3.8% and increases CO 2 by up to 24 ppm than before. As the simulation results shows, the retrofitted home office scenario allows a reduction in heating energy of up to 77%, an increase in CO 2 concentration of up to 41.8 ppm, 0.5% less relative humidity and 1.6 °C higher indoor air temperature than that without retrofitting. The new approach to retrofit residential buildings thus showed a potential in energy saving and improving the IEQ. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Grouping techniques are used to select representative buildings for stock modelling. • Three grouping approaches are applied to a case study from Germany. • Partition comparison relies on validation indices and impact on demand modelling. • Grouping techniques & selection indices impact the representative buildings chosen. Grouping techniques are frequently used in urban studies as a means for partitioning building stock heterogeneity. The choice of grouping techniques and selection indices can have a significant influence on the segmentation of building stock and associated identification of representative buildings. To date, this issue has not been systematically examined nor justified. The current paper compares different grouping and partition selection techniques using residential building data from Germany. Three grouping techniques are investigated: supervised, unsupervised and semi-supervised. The unsupervised approach is addressed through three clustering algorithms in this work: agnes, diana and partition around medoids. The semi-supervised approach consists of typology-based seed buildings coupled with a distance-based grouping, while the supervised approach relies on classification rules. The resulting partitions are assessed through multiple criteria: internal indices (CH, Dunn2, Silhouette), external index (F-measure) and impact on heating demand modelling (Heating Demand Error). Results show that the algorithms and the selection indices impact the choice of representative buildings to be modelled. Moreover, considering the F-measure, similarities between the three techniques results were observed on some of the groups. Parameters to account for when selecting a grouping technique are discussed and include the number of groups, group uniformity, and compactness/separation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: Most anthropogenic material stocks and flows are associated with the building sector. Several recent studies have developed material composition indicators (MCIs) suitable for calculating material stocks and flows of the building sector using bottom‐up approaches, which hold great potential to provide information to support resource efficiency policies. A major limitation is the lack of country‐specific MCIs. This study aims to introduce a concept for a better transferability of MCI across different contexts by proposing requirements for defining MCIs and to discuss options and limits of the transferability. We take existing MCIs for residential buildings in Germany and Japan as case studies and make them comparable by applying harmonization methods. Based on that, similarities and differences are systematically identified and discussed, considering their socioeconomic, cultural, technical, and environmental factors. Our results indicate significant limitations to the transferability of MCIs for detached houses, while bigger apartment complexes show greater homogeneity despite the very different environments in which they are constructed. This indicates that while it is possible to assume foreign MCIs as plausible for large constructions, local coefficients need to be estimated for smaller single‐family homes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept and the experience of "home" is a key element in the "lived space" of the modern era. This article analyzes the changing perceptions of home among bourgeois German Jews living under the Nazi regime—a period when all notions of stability and consistency were shattered by external events and developments. Using rich private (diaries, correspondence and photos) and public (Jewish press) sources while drawing on theoretical frameworks employed in the social sciences (such as human geography, environmental psychology and cultural anthropology) it explores how various formations of "home," domesticity, and Gemütlichkeit were transformed among German Jewish men and women and impacted the construction of self. Owing to their unique circumstances created by their tragic experience under the Nazi regime, German Jews can serve as an illuminating case study of a declining bourgeois social group struggling to adapt its domestic habitus to deteriorating legal, economic and social conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In postwar Germany, Allied personnel and displaced populations competed with local Germans for housing. Examining group interactions and conflicting interests in this competition sheds light on issues of responsibility and reconciliation in the occupied country. In the East, Germans quickly grasped the key political interests of the Soviet occupiers: inhospitable landlords were denounced as "Nazis," and many East Germans rewrote their pasts to claim "victim-of-fascism" status. In the West, Germans cast themselves as allies in the battle against Communism. Wartime and postwar victims in both East and West struggled to gain a moral status that would facilitate access to resources and authority; yet in neither East nor West did they create united fronts. Meanwhile, the alliance between local Germans and ethnic German expellees against the DPs and Communists did facilitate integration of the ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe into western German society, changing the social and political landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines World Heritage Sites in Germany, focusing on their environmental sustainability and integration with natural landscapes. It discusses the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) for visual analysis of greenery in cultural sites like Goslar and Quedlinburg, emphasizing their preservation and adaptation to ecological needs.

This study investigates whether the non-profit and for-profit status of housing associations implies a symbolic meaning and represents an informational cue that potential renters may value. Referring to the stereotype content model, we examine the relationship between renters’ perceptions of the stereotypical dimensions of ‘competence’ and ‘warmth’ of management-related images and, subsequently, rental housing attractiveness. Using a between-subject-experimental design (for-profit vs. non-profit housing associations) in a German rental market context, a sample of 200 respondents was placed in a hypothetical rental offering situation and asked to evaluate the rental provider with respect to stereotypical perceptions. The study results show that the extent to which the management of a housing association is perceived to behave unselfishly and consistently with moral codes (warmth) and is able to bring about one's intent (competence) are positively related to rental housing attractiveness. The results imply that symbolic trait inferences have incremental value beyond the instrumental attributes of a rental offering, such as rental price or housing comfort, in the explanation of rental housing attractiveness. For a citizen-oriented rental housing policy, the study suggests that policy-makers should make reflections on the limitations of privatisation measures and should promote the capacity of public and non-profit rental offers and housing associations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The strong expansion of residential rooftop photovoltaic (PV) and battery storage systems of recent years is expected to rise further. However, it is not yet clear to which degree buildings will be equipped with decentral energy producers. This study seeks to quantify the effects of different PV and battery installation rates on the residential residual loads and grid balancing flows. A land surface model with an integrated residential energy component is applied, which maintains spatial peculiarities and allows a building-specific set-up of PV systems, batteries, and consumption loads. The study area covers 3163 residential buildings located in a municipality in the south of Germany. The obtained results show minor impacts on the residual loads for a PV installation rate of less than 10%. PV installation rates of one third of all residential buildings of the study region lead to the highest spatial balancing via the grid. The rise in self-consumption when utilizing batteries leads to declined grid balancing between the buildings. For high PV installation rates, regional balancing diminishes, whereas energy excesses rise to 60%. They can be decreased up to 10% by the utilization of battery systems. Therefore, we recommend subsidy programs adjusted to the respective PV installation rates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]