4th Expert Meeting: IEA Annex 80 Resilient Cooling in Buildings

The 4th Expert Web Meeting of the International Energy Agency Annex 80 - Resilient Cooling of Buildings took place on April 15-16, 2021, 1:00 pm-3:00 pm UTC. The meeting was planned to take place in Italy; however, due to the COVID-19 conditions, the meeting took place online.

The Annex is lead by the operating agent Dr. Peter Holzer from the Institute of Building Research & Innovation in Austria. Participants represent more than 20 countries and are listed here link. The Annex focuses on defining resilience and identify universal key performance indicators to assess the following cooling fields of technologies:

A. Reduce heat load to indoor environments and people indoor; (advanced solar shading/advanced glazing technologies, advanced cool materials, green roofs, roof pond, green facades, ventilated roofs, ventilated facades, and thermal mass utilization including, PCM and off-peak ice storage).

B. Remove sensible heat from indoor environments; (ventilative cooling, adiabatic/evaporative cooling, compression refrigeration, absorption refrigeration, including desiccant cooling, natural heat sinks, such as groundwater, borehole heat exchangers, ground labyrinths, earth tubes, sky radiative cooling, and high-temperature cooling system: Radiant cooling, chill beam).

C. Enhance personal comfort apart from space cooling; (comfort ventilation (elevated air movement, micro-cooling, and personal comfort control).

D. Remove latent heat from indoor environments; (high-performance dehumidification including desiccant humidification).

Subtask Group A is working on a definition of resilience in terms of cooling and the development of resilient cooling qualities, criteria, and KPIs. The group is seeking to set a definition of resilience to be able to compare technologies comprehensively. The activities interrelate resilient cooling to UN SDGs. Furthermore, two task forces are working on setting common conditions to run comparative building performance simulations for different cooling technologies worldwide. Task Force 1 is defining representative weather data for all world climates to generate future climate change weather files based on the CORDEX general circulation models (GCM). The task force is looking at overheating and temperature increase as the main disruption for occupants' thermal comfort. Task Force 2 is defining a common framework for thermal comfort conditions and overheating risk calculation methods to enable the comparative simulation of cooling technologies.

Subtask Group B is working on classifying and grouping different coding technology. The group is almost ready to publish a state-of-the-art report for existing cooling technologies and their physical principles, functions, and performance. This is meant to address the resilience characteristics. Based on the work activities of Group A, Group B is looking to evaluate the resiliency of cooling technologies under different extreme events, mainly heatwaves and power outages. The state-of-the-art activities include the creation of technology profile sheets that summarise and describe the operational characteristics and benefits of the selected cooling technologies and systems. A new task force (KPI Task Force) is expected to continue the development of key performance indicators that can be used be evaluate technologies and compare them not only qualitatively but also quantitatively using building performance simulations.

Subtask Group C is working on collecting data of real case studies for buildings with cooling technology. The group is looking to standardize the data Gathering methods regarding monitoring and simulation models and surveys to assess occupancy satisfaction. Also, the group is looking to use the KPIs and apply them during the building evaluations. So far, the group developed a questionnaire for building managers and users and is looking to create a template for case studies registration and reporting. The tentative database of projects indicates more than 20 registered studies that incorporate cooling technology such as ventilated facades compression chillers, split and multiple split units, VRF units, absorption chillers, desiccant cooling, and personal comfort controls.

The Sub-task group has new leaders with the goal to develop recommendations for future regulatory policies to support the implementation and mainstreaming of Brazilian cooling systems on a national European and international level. The group is focused mainly on two activities. Firstly across a comparison of national, international policies such as product labeling programs AC minimum energy performance standards (MEPs), sustainability aspects in building regulations, and standards related to resilient cooling. Secondly, engage with international programs such as KIGALI – Cooling Efficiency Programme, Mission Innovation Challenge #7, and correlated IEA Technology Collaborating Programmes to support mainstreaming of resilient cooling solutions.

After two days of intensive discussion and exchanges, the Annex members made very several important decisions. The group managed to develop an inventory of universal key performance indicators and metrics. Also, a qualitative assessment of cooling technologies in terms of their resilience capacity, applicability, and technology readiness is underway. The group will focus in the next months to evaluate different cooling technologies through comparative simulations based on the developed framework in Group A. 17 teams signed up to test the technology performance through dynamic simulation to cover the cooling technologies in groups A, B, C. Finally, the group should be looking for ways to increase the market penetration of low-impact cooling technologies and identify breakthroughs to unlock the barriers of their market uptake especially in cooling-dominated regions of the world.

• The 5th Expert Meeting will take place (tentatively) on October 21-22, 2021 in Torino, Italy.
• For further information please visit the annex webpage: https://annex80.iea-ebc.org/

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We had a very important meeting last week that will help to sharpen our focus during the next months. We've almost reached the midway point of the IEA Annex 80 on Resilient Cooling in Buildings. The annex passed its infancy phase successfully by defining resilience and developing a framework that will allow benchmarking passive and active cooling technologies. The next step is to focus on key performance indicators and benchmark the different cooling technologies using dynamic simulation. I invite you to read this post for further details.

Thank you, Peter Holzer and Phillipp Stern for the outstanding organization. Thanks to team Liege for all your efforts and contributions Deepak Amaripadath, Essam Elnagar, Vincent Lemort, Ramin Rahif, Eileen Ndongo, Sébastien Doutreloup, Xavier Fettweis.