IEA EBC Annex 80: Resilient Cooling for Residential and Small Non-Residential Buildings

The rapidly increasing cooling demand for buildings - internationally as well as in Austria - requires further development and application of low energy and low carbon cooling solutions on a large scale. The Annex 80 is meeting this challenge boosting the development and implementation of appropriate cooling solutions by transferring knowledge and coordinating international research endeavours.

Short Description

A wide range of appropriate solutions are already available, such as cool materials, solar shading, ventilative cooling, solar and adiabatic cooling, hydronic thermal mass activation, phase change materials (PCMs), ground source heat exchangers and other natural heat sinks, heat recovery systems, etc. However, many suffer from practical and economic obstacles that keep them from mass application (e.g. lack of guaranteed Key Performance Indicators (KPI), lack of design guidelines, lack of knowledge on system integration, lack of recognition of the value of particular technologies in standards and compliance tools, regional fragmentation of suppliers/supply-chain, etc). These solutions need concerted support from the international scientific communities, knowledge transfer and quantification of the economic potential.

Other technologies are emerging, but need further technological research to reach appropriate technology readiness levels. These include: advanced glazing technologies, micro-cooling and personal comfort control, electrostatic air cleaning, combinations of comfort ventilation and ventilative cooling, high performance vapour-compression and absorption chillers.

Annex 80 is structured into four subtasks A (Impact Assessment), B (Solutions), C (Field Studies) and D (Policy Actions). The following methods and activities are planned:

  • Assessment of selected cooling technologies through desktop research and international exchange of joint research tasks (concerted actions) in the course of the annex.
  • Quasistationary thermodynamic parameter studies
  • Evaluations on selected buildings, with on-site inspections, temporary meassurements, user surveys and analysis of technical and economic data
  • Thermo-dynamic building simulation and computerized fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation for the validation of results and of collected data from real buildings.
  • Monitoring of economic parameters, such as costs for energy services, technical components and maintenance costs
  • Life Cycle Cost analysis.
  • Regular expert meetings with the international consortium for coordination and ensurance of project progression

Expected results are

  • Development of technologies which integrate cooling with minimum additional ecological costs
  • Development of strategies for inter-seasonal combination of heating and cooling demands of buildings, through energy flexibility and integrated energy
  • Systematic examination of globally available fragmented know-how on energy efficient low-carbon cooling strategies.
  • For the Austrian economy in the sector of sustainable space cooling high potential for emerging markets are expected.

The IEA Resilient Cooling Annex for which Austria will take on the leading position of the Operating Agent, will address this multi-disciplinary challenge and boost the development and implementation of robust low-energy and low-carbon cooling solutions on a large scale by transferring knowledge, coordinating international research endeavours and promoting a variety of systems and solutions.

Project Images

Terms of use: The pictures listed underneath the header “Project Pictures” originate from the projects in the frame of the programmes City of Tomorrow, Building of Tomorrow and the IEA Research Cooperation. They may be used credited for non-commercial purposes under the Creative Commons License Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC).

Participants

Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, China, Denmark, France, Italy, Great Britain

Contact Address

Peter Holzer
Institute of Building Research & Innovation
E-Mail: peter.holzer@building-research.at
Web: www.building-research.at