It is well known that evaporation and radiation are two ways of keeping something cool. David Chandler at MIT explains how researchers there have created an experimental 3-layered cell that combines evaporation and radiation with an insulator to deliver cooling that needs no power. It can provide around 9°C of cooling from the ambient temperature, enough to permit safe food storage for about 40% longer under very humid conditions, and could … [Read more...]
Buildings Renovation: if Europe had started a decade ago it wouldn’t have a Russian oil & gas problem
It’s a message we are starting to see a lot. If ambitious climate policies struggling to be implemented today had been launched a decade ago, Europe wouldn’t have a Russian oil and gas problem. Andreas RĂĽdinger at IDDRI looks at buildings renovations in France. Two missed targets, proposed in 2008, are a 38% reduction in energy consumption in existing buildings by 2020, and 400,000 “major” renovations annually. If they had been met, natural gas … [Read more...]
Buildings Retrofits: inaccurate efficiency ratings are going to waste budget
Buildings renovations are going to be expensive, and complicated to roll out. Accurately predicting how much energy a building actually wastes will make that process easier and cheaper. EPC ratings are used to categorise the energy efficiency of homes. But Freya Wise at The Open University quotes research in Europe, along with her own investigations in the UK, to show that a lot of older buildings waste less energy than the standard estimates are … [Read more...]
How to ramp up Green Mortgages for climate-friendly house improvements
Green mortgages are used to finance climate-friendly house improvements. In the U.S. they already exist, but need to be made far more accessible and marketed widely. Greg Hopkins at RMI cites their report “Build Back Better Homes: How to Unlock America’s Single-Family Green Mortgage Market” to explain that the financial markets are looking increasingly favourably at lending that is certified as ESG (environmental, social, and governance). … [Read more...]
Buildings Renovation in Germany: success story or potential failure?
The German Federal Association of Housing and Real Estate Companies (GdW) has claimed that money and effort spent on the nation’s buildings renovations have not worked. But Andreas RĂĽdinger at IDDRI has looked into the evidence and concluded that the opposite is the case. CO2 emissions from the residential sector in 2018 were 37% lower than in 1990. Though final energy consumption was broadly stable, that’s because efficiency gains were offset by … [Read more...]
From Buildings to Solar Thermal: using electric charge to vary insulating properties tenfold
The insulating properties of a material don’t normally vary. Applying an electric charge to a material can vary its electronic and magnetic qualities, but not its thermal conductivity, normally. David Chandler at MIT says now a team of researchers there have found a way to do it. Their “electrical heat valve” can increase the thermal conductivity of thin-film strontium cobalt oxide (SCO) on demand by running a charge through it after adding … [Read more...]
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