A review of renewable energy applications in buildings in the hot-summer and warm-winter region of China

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rser.2015.12.124Get rights and content

Abstract

Renewable energy not only can effectively alleviate the depletion of traditional energy sources, but also meet the need for building development. At present, the applications of renewable energy in buildings are still facing many problems. This paper presents a review of the application of renewable energy systems in buildings, and describes how to make good use of renewable energy for the sustainable development in the hot-summer and warm-winter region of China. The effective measures would improve the calculation methods, design the building and energy system with locality, develop integrated design of renewable energy systems, establish evaluation indexes of renewable energy applicability in buildings, and strengthen project management. Discussion results presented in the paper can provide a guideline for better to apply renewable energy systems to buildings in the hot-summer and warm-winter region of China.

Introduction

Various fossil fuel resources such as oil, coal and natural gas are the largest energy sources for human living and production. However, due to the rapid development of modern industrial economy and the sharp increase in population, these conventional energy sources have been gradually depleted. According to the reported data, building energy consumption in many countries has reached more than 35% of total energy consumption. Human beings pursue higher quality of life, so the building energy consumption grows up, such as air-conditioning and hot water production energy. Therefore, it is critical to carry out research related to renewable energy applications in buildings. The application of renewable energy is still not mature in the building field. The literature analysis revealed that there are a lot of problems in the application of renewable energy in the building for the sustainable development.

This paper will describe the current situation and review renewable energy applications in the hot-summer and warm-winter region of China. The problems of renewable energy applications in the region will be also summarized in the paper.

Section snippets

Renewable energy applications in buildings around the world

Researches of renewable energy are mainly carried out on two aspects: utilization technology of renewable energy and design methods of renewable energy systems in buildings.

Applications in the hot-summer and warm-winter region of China

Application research and specific projects of renewable energy construction techniques in the hot-summer and warm-winter region of China already have some results currently. By the end of 2011, two ministries had approved 72 cities as demonstration cities of renewable energy application. Fig. 2 shows the nationwide distribution of demonstration cities. As can be seen, most of the demonstration cities are concentrated in Jiangsu and Zhejiang coastal areas, North China and South China where there

Improving calculation methods for bioclimatic design

As an incapability to fully consider local climates for the application of renewable energy technologies in the hot-summer and warm-winter region of China, the annual average climatic data or empirical values are used in the system design, resulting in improper selection. It needs to improve system calculation algorithms based on intensive analysis of local climates, and use more detailed (monthly or hourly) data in the system design instead of annual average and empirical values.

Building design integrated with renewable energy

There is a

Acknowledgments

This work was financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant no. 51368003) and the Systematic Project of Guangxi Key Laboratory of Disaster Prevention and Structural Safety (No. 2104ZDX05).

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