Energy Planning: Green house against greenhouse(gas)

While economic downturn is still conditioning progress towards a better wellbeing almost worldwide, the energy challenge is increasingly at the core of the public concern and national planning: first because it is, without any doubt, one of the main causes of the problems looming modern society; second it also could be the wished trigger to invert the trends.

In EU and overall in Italy this consideration is easily verifiable: while GDP troubles and consumption (energy included) tends to decline or stick, investment in renewable energy is astonishingly booming.

Data shows Italy among the biggest investors in the last couple, overall in the PV sector, which finds the capacity installed exponentially enlarged: from 2010 added a +203% and the trend has continued along 2011, bringing the country among the world leaders: solar PV installations summ a total capacity installed of 12.4GW a we speak, according to GSE.

Although that’s great news it will not suffice to fix the tendency. While the production side is giving is favourable contribution, additional effort is needed from the demand side. What integrates the two parties in a whole successful strategy is efficiency. Efficiency to produce, efficiency to distribute, efficiency to consume.

As further investments are hard to be put in place from impoverished public administrations and households, while consumers life style choices require long time to assimilate the culture of limitation, the solution is once again offered by nature:  a visionary an innovative solution which does not require either any extra cost or a new invention; it simply require to observe how nature run on sunlight:  the concept of passive house minimise strongly energy consumption while assuring the same comfort on heating and cooling a building. In terms of energy-efficiency is the most effective way of ensuring high results with low cost, while providing health and durability to our buildings. International standard consider a performance of ≤ 15kWh/(m²yr) regarding specific space heating and cooling demand, and ≤ 120kWh/(m²yr) about total specific primary energy demand.

That means great energy saving if we consider that in Italy, only residential buildings energy demand accounts for 22.5% of total.

The Passive-On project has been promoted and coordinated by the end-use Efficiency Research Group of Politecnico di Milano to drive Italy on the direction of northern countries, where this concept of design is well diffused, but large scale dissemination of the idea looks difficult to reach. Actually passive energy mechanisms better fit with cold climate, which requires high consumption of energy for heating. While the design spreads in the northern region of Italy, in the rest of the peninsula the concept struggles to kick off, as it seems harder to adapt houses in order to fulfill saving standard when it comes to refrigeration systems. Moreover, Italy holds also a wide range of antique residential buildings, which makes them very valuable in term of beauty, art, and history, but reforms become tougher and more expensive.

To give response to such concerns, the Italian energy agency ENEA recently promoted a project (“progetto greenery”) which has the potential to assure further energy consumption saving by creating literally wall and roof gardens. According to the project, if citizens embrace providing a green cover to an house, it could lead a minus 9,0-48 kWh/m2 per year on what concerns building’s cooling, which means a potential of around 20% reduction in passive houses designed in hotter climate. More efficiency, less demand, less necessity to increase generation, finally more saving and health for everyone.

As international political negotiations and economic systems around the world are failing to go green, the burden of the change is again on us, on every single household: people have still the potential to move the world on.

Comments Off on Energy Planning: Green house against greenhouse(gas) / 02 Jan 2012 por Francesco Mazzeo
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