Sustainable cities and urban energy systems of the future. Urban Multiscale Energy Modelling (UMEM)

Current climate mitigation scenarios direct towards the development of sustainable urban environments being energy efficient, energy decentralized, producing and storing energy, reducing the emission of greenhouse gases, and using resources in a sustainable and economically way. The developed urban energy simulation framework of this project will help collectivities, urban planners and stakeholders to evaluate the environmental impact of cities in a changing climate and to provide a basis for testing new urban energy retrofit scenarios.

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Advanced Energy Efficient Renovation of Buildings
(ccem-retrofit)

The ccem-retrofit project is based on national and international research and development projects that are collaborating to promote and improve cost effective low energy renovation of existing buildings. The project focuses on typical apartment blocks representing approximately 40% of the European dwelling stock. The project is structured in three parts:

• A technology development;
• B system integration;
• C market analysis and tools.

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Unique and Innovative Solution of Thin Silicon Films Modules Building Integration (Archinsolar)

The project presented here aims to develop a new generation of photovoltaic elements based on silicon thin films technology (amorphous and micromorph). These new elements should be ultra-reliable and manufacturable at a very low cost, allowing an unique architectural integration; respectful of the environment, landscape, buildings and traditions.

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Direct Re-Use of Waste Heat from Liquid-Cooled Supercomputers (AQUASAR)

Towards a low power, high performance, zero-emission computing and datacenters

The Information Technology (IT) industry has a key role in the global effort to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions as it consumes 2 % of the world energy with a strong, demand-driven, upward trend. The IT industry already strives to digitally control and to optimize emission-intensive hardware and software processes. Examples include the replacement of traditional activities with digital information processing thus decoupling knowledge transfer from physically moving material or persons, resulting in an order of magnitude decrease in emissions.

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Sustainable Renovation of Historical Buildings (SuRHiB)

Historical buildings count for about 20 % of the existing building stock. Most of these buildings have been built during the 19th century and at the beginning of the 20th century. Many of them are not protected buildings but they are characterizing the centres and history of European cities and are part of our cultural heritage. However, these buildings, if normally heated, cause relatively high energy consumption. Without improving the energy efficiency of historical buildings, this part of our building stock providing 20 % of heated space would be responsible for about 60 % of the thermal energy demand of the total building stock (assuming, the other buildings will be retrofitted according ccem-retrofit).

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Innovative Building Technologies for the 2000 Watt Society (ccem-house2000)

The ccem-house2000 project is looking for new technical solutions in the building construction sector to reduce the CO₂ emissions substantially. The projects are based on individual national and international research projects (SFOE, CTI, swisselectric research, International Energy Agency IEA) and cover the topics of building materials, advanced building installations and smart control.

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