The Contribution of Energy Efficiency and Onsite Energy to the Resilience of Buildings

A special issue of Buildings (ISSN 2075-5309). This special issue belongs to the section "Building Energy, Physics, Environment, and Systems".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (30 April 2024) | Viewed by 2713

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Guest Editor
Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Campus de Tafira S/N, 35017 Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain
Interests: water–energy nexus; energy efficiency; microgrids
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Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Resilience (sometimes referred to as “resiliency”) is "the ability to resist being affected by an event or the ability to return to an acceptable level of performance in an acceptable period of time after being affected by an event closing." In the wake of a disaster or other extreme event, the benefits of energy-efficient buildings can extend far beyond cost savings. Buildings designed to be energy efficient, or which are capable of producing energy onsite, offer a greater level of protection to the people and operations they house.

This Special Issue covers research on how energy efficiency and onsite energy contribute to resilience. Potential topics include (but are not limited to):

  • Environmental assessment of buildings.
  • Thermal comfort strategies.
  • Indoor thermal environment.
  • Building energy analysis and efficiency.
  • Green buildings.
  • Construction materials and their impact on indoor conditions.

Dr. Enrique Rosales-Asensio
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Buildings is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • environmental assessment of building
  • thermal comfort strategies
  • indoor thermal environment
  • building energy analysis and efficiency
  • green buildings
  • construction materials and their impact on indoor conditions

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Published Papers (2 papers)

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Research

28 pages, 12177 KiB  
Article
Optimal Microgrids in Buildings with Critical Loads and Hybrid Energy Storage
by Enrique Rosales-Asensio, Iker de Loma-Osorio, Ana I. Palmero-Marrero, Antonio Pulido-Alonso and David Borge-Diez
Buildings 2024, 14(4), 865; https://doi.org/10.3390/buildings14040865 - 22 Mar 2024
Viewed by 1166
Abstract
This research aims to optimize and compare the annual costs of energy services in buildings with critical loads and analyze case studies for hospitals and higher education institutions in the United States. Besides electricity and natural gas costs, the study considers all the [...] Read more.
This research aims to optimize and compare the annual costs of energy services in buildings with critical loads and analyze case studies for hospitals and higher education institutions in the United States. Besides electricity and natural gas costs, the study considers all the infrastructure costs of capital amortization and maintenance. In addition, it studies energy resilience improvement due to distributed generation, including solar photovoltaic, solar thermal, internal combustion engine, and fuel cell sources. The optimization considers the electrical consumption, the heating and cooling demands, and the operational strategy of the energy storage systems. To simulate real scenarios, energy tariffs were modeled and considered, and final optimization results were produced. Some of the microgrid load was considered critical to model resilience benefits. The results show that if favorable energy tariffs are applied, the benefits of increasing energy resilience represent a novel market with high potential in facilities with significant critical loads. This methodology can be used in similar scenarios, adapting each particular load profile and critical load to provide a combined optimal solution regarding resilience and economic benefits. Full article
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24 pages, 2173 KiB  
Article
Biomethane Microturbines as a Storage-Free Dispatchable Solution for Resilient Critical Buildings
by Enrique Rosales-Asensio, Iker de Loma-Osorio, Emin Açıkkalp and David Borge-Diez
Buildings 2023, 13(10), 2516; https://doi.org/10.3390/buildings13102516 - 4 Oct 2023
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 1062
Abstract
Climate-change-related events are increasing the costs of power outages, including losses of product, revenue, and productivity. Given the increase in meteorological disasters in recent years related to climate change effects, the number of costly blackouts, from an economic perspective, has increased in a [...] Read more.
Climate-change-related events are increasing the costs of power outages, including losses of product, revenue, and productivity. Given the increase in meteorological disasters in recent years related to climate change effects, the number of costly blackouts, from an economic perspective, has increased in a directly proportional manner. As a result, there is increasing interest in the use of alternators to supply dependable, instantaneous, and uninterruptible electricity. Traditional research has focused on the installation of diesel backup systems to ensure power requirements without deeply considering the resilience capabilities of systems, which is the ability of a system to recover or survive adversity, such as a power outage. This research presents a novel approach focusing on the resiliency impact of backup systems’ storage-free dispatchable solutions on buildings and compares the advantages and disadvantages of biomethane microturbines, natural gas engines, and diesel engines backup systems, discussing the revenue resulting from the resilience provided by emergency generators. The results show that, for several diesel fuel and natural gas safety assumptions, natural gas alternators have a lower probability of failure at the time of a blackout than diesel generators, and therefore, resilience increases. Full article
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