The Sustainable Pathway towards Zero-Energy/Emission Buildings: Exploring High-Efficiency Solutions and Integrated Approaches

Dear Colleagues,

The target of reducing energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions implicates all of human life, including daily home routine and indoor thermal comfort. As disclosed in the IEA World Energy Outlook, in 2021, the final energy consumption of the building sector represented almost the 30% of the entire world demand. The largest amount of buildings energy need is related to space heating and cooling, which can be strongly influenced by several factors, e.g., environment, building structure and envelope, and HVAC management. Hence, in order to face the challenging energy targets of the 21st century, this Issue will promote the achievement of zero-emission buildings by 2028 for new buildings and 2050 for the existing ones. In order to meet this objective, scientists and designers are encouraged to adopt an effective and integrated approach to decrease end-use energy consumption and pollutant emissions in both designing new buildings and retrofitting existing ones.

Besides, the highly efficient building envelope and the high-performance and optimal management of the heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems are mandatory in order to achieve satisfactory results in tems of energy consumption reductions. The great potential of both increasing renewable energy source (RES) production and optimizing building envelope and plant systems should be considered.

This Special issue proposes to deal with the challenging topic of reaching zero-energy and zero-emission buildings and adopting high-efficiency building envelopes and HVAC plants integrated with RES.

Submissions to this Special Issue should focus on the different strategies to be adopted in the roadmap to the decarbonization of the building sector. Studies on integrated technologies and approaches for building and thermal plant aspects, RES productions, and energy storage and management are welcome. This includes the simulation and evaluation of building energy performance and development of cost-effective solutions. This Special Issue aims to collect the experiences of the researchers to enhance the diffusion of knowledge and improve energy efficiency in the built environment.   

We welcome manuscripts on the following topics, but not limited to these topics:

• Zero-energy buildings;
• Zero-emission buildings;
• Net-zero-energy buildings;
• Energy efficiency in the built environment;
• Energy-efficient building systems;
• Sustainable design;
• Sustainable buildings;
• Optimal design for new buildings;
• Retrofitting solutions;
• Building performance simulation;
• Cost-effective solutions;
• Multi-variable multi-objective optimization;
• HVAC plant management;
• Thermal energy management;
• Renewable energy sources;
• Building automation control systems.

Dr. Silvia Di Turi
Dr. Raniero Sannino
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. Sustainability 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 2400 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.

• zero-energy buildings
• zero-emission buildings
• energy-efficient buildings
• built environment decarbonization
• renewable energy sources
• integrated retrofitting strategies
• HVAC plant management
• thermal energy management