Low-Carbon Buildings and Urban Energy Systems

Dear Colleagues,

An increasing carbon footprint of buildings is an urgent environmental, social, and economic issue requiring a holistic solution involving advanced architectural designs, green constructions, efficient building services systems, renewable applications, control technologies and management strategies. To fulfil carbon neutrality targets around the world, it is necessary to integrate a sustainable built environment with efficient conversion, conservation, and storage technologies in urban energy systems via smart utility grids. Given the complicated interaction among buildings, the environment, and urban energy systems, a synergy of urban planning, architectural design, building engineering, as well as energy systems should be achieved to incorporate feasible innovative technologies to reduce carbon emissions from buildings and urban communities. In particular, emerging green material, digital design, artificial intelligence, and automatic control technologies can be applied to optimize the stability, reliability, and resilience of the urban energy distribution network (e.g., buildings, communities, transportation and utilities) and reduce its lifecycle environmental impact.

This Special Issue therefore intends to provide a platform for high-quality original research works addressing the technical, environmental, and economic performances of the building sector and urban energy systems to achieve a low-carbon built environment, including but not limited to:

• Urban energy planning;
• Energy efficient systems in buildings;
• Low-carbon architectural design and materials;
• Green building rating systems;
• Building information modeling;
• Lifecycle impact assessment;
• Grid integrated green transportation;
• Renewable energy systems;
• Building automation and smart grid;
• Energy storage and management.

Dr. Xi Chen
Prof. Dr. Yixing Chen
Prof. Dr. Chunmei Guo
Dr. Aaron Liu
Guest Editors

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 semimonthly 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.