Energy Cooling

Among all public buildings, on account of their educational purpose, school buildings have a major social responsibility. Therefore energy performance in this type of building is of great importance. The overall purpose of this research is to achieve a functional benchmarking, based on the real operation conditions of school buildings, by the exploitation of the results made public, through an intensive literature survey on energy consumptions in schools. The survey was made to gather data that is relative to energy consumption in school buildings, documented in the most diverse fields and units: global energy consumption values, electrical energy consumption; fuel consumption for heating, energy data consumption of schools expressed in annual cost per unit of heated/cooled surface area ($/m 2) or per unit of heated/cooled volume ($/m 3) or, finally, as the annual cost per student ($/student). The literature was analyzed to determine if a worldwide comparison among the published data could be established. The results suggest that when attempting to determine an energy benchmark some considerations should not be forgotten: standard indoor environmental conditions (IEC) for classrooms (set-point for indoor operative temperature of 20 1C in winter and 26 1C in summer as suggested in EN 15251:2007), electrical and heating consumption values should be kept separately, different education levels usually require different energy consumption values. A good way to normalize heating energy consumption is going through a climatic adjustment based on Heating Degree Days (HDD). For an impartial data comparison, based either on an operating rating or on a simulation carried out for reference conditions, benchmark reference values should be expressed in terms of billed energy data.

To enhance the quality of life in cities, it is necessary to improve the energy performance of buildings together with a sustainable urban planning especially in high-density contexts. Previous works investigated the building shape, the urban morphology, and the local climate conditions to optimize the energy performance for space heating of buildings. The aim of this study is to validate a GIS-based engineering model to simulate the hourly energy demand for space cooling in residential buildings at neighborhood scale and to assess the relationship between the urban form and the energy performance in terms of cooling energy demand. A placebased methodology was applied to six neighborhoods in the city of Turin (Italy), identified as homogeneous zones with different building characteristics and urban contexts. The hourly cooling demand of residential buildings was studied starting from the energy balance at building scale, and then was applied at block of buildings scale with the support of GIS. This model was validated with a comparison of the results using CitySim tool and ISO 52016 assessment. In order to investigate the relationship between cooling energy demand and urban form, the GIS-based engineering model was applied to five typical blocks of buildings with different
construction periods. The results show how cooling energy demand varies according to building characteristics and urban morphology in a continental-temperate climate. By this analysis, it is possible to identify the optimal block of building shape in Turin ensuring lower energy consumptions during the cooling season with different types of buildings.