A comprehensive evaluation of zero energy buildings in cold regions: Actual performance and key technologies of cases from China, the US, and the European Union
Section snippets
Credit author statement
Ran Wang, collected and analyzed the data, wrote and improved the paper. Wei Feng, conceived the research and designed the research methods. Lan Wang, made a comparative analysis of the zero energy builiding standard. Shilei Lu, conceived the research and designed the research methods.
The policy and energy target
Table 1 summarizes the main ZEB related policies in the three regions. In the US, the leadership of the federal government in climate action has been withdrawn, and local governments have become the standard-bearers of climate change, leading to new and aggressive carbon reduction targets, with a particular emphasis on architecture. Therefore, states have set ZEB policies within their jurisdictions. The top-down development strategy has been adopted to promote ZEBs in China. Under the
The climates
This research focuses on cold regions, and the targeted climate features (Fig. 3) are often described as climate zones 4–8 in the US, cold and severe cold climate zone in China, and climate zones 3–5 in the EU. Fig. 4 shows the distribution of cold regions in the three regions. For the three regions, the cold climate accounts for about two-thirds of the total area. Moreover, most of the ZEBs are distributed in this area, so it is important to study the actual performance of ZEBs in cold
Energy performance
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Energy use intensity and renewable energy production intensity
Fig. 6 shows the energy use intensity (EUI) and renewable energy production intensity (RPI) of three regions, both in primary energy per square meter of building floor space on an annual basis. The balance line is used to assess the proximity of a building to zero energy consumption.
In the U.S, the ZEB cases are subdivided into two categories: verified ZEB and emerging ZEB. Verified ZEB has achieved zero energy for at least one full
Key features of ZEB in the cold regions
Four key features of ZEBs in cold regions: (1) definition form of ZEB affects its performance, (2) a high-performance envelope is critical, (3) advanced technology is not a necessary condition for a ZEB, and (4) optimal selection of renewable energy types is influenced by many factors. These are detailed below.
The statistical energy performance results show that the specific embodiment/definition form of ZEB in different regions affects case performance. The ZEB definition determines the
Conclusion
Based on more than 400 actual cases, this paper evaluated the actual energy performance of ZEBs, design features, and technology selection in three cold regions. The study mainly took into account the regional differences in natural resources, building characteristics and economic level, and compared the evaluation results among the US, the European Union, and China. Finally, a matching analysis between the actual ZEB performance and policies/standards was conducted. The main findings are as
Declaration of competing interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgment
This research has been supported by the “National Key R&D Program of China” (Grant No. 2016YFC0700100).
The U.S. authors recognize Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s support from the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231 and support from the Energy Foundation, United States.
The U.S. Government retains a non-exclusive, paid-up, irrevocable, world-wide license to publish or reproduce the published form of this manuscript, or allow others to do so, for U.S. Government
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