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Energy efficiency is a cornerstone of climate change mitigation. For buildings, facility management is an essential part of achieving efficient energy use while keeping tenants satisfied. This interview study explores success factors and barriers for facility management in maintaining energy efficiency over time in four approximately 10-year-old non-residential premises built as so-called nearly zero-energy buildings (nZEB) in Sweden. The study highlights the importance of functional digital tools, benchmarks, and building professionals’ involvement in ensuring energy efficiency. It also emphasizes the need for involvement communication and strategies to engage facility management in energy efficiency efforts. The study suggests that in-house and public policies can play a crucial role in sustaining high ambitions for energy efficiency. Access to professional support that is self-evident to use is identified as a critical success factor. Additionally, the research presents an analytic model that can be used in future studies to assess facility management organizations’ potential for maintaining energy performance in buildings over time.

Modular construction is an innovative new construction method that minimizes waste and improves efficiency within the construction industry. However, practitioners are hampered by the lack of environmental and economic sustainability analysis methods in this area. This study analyzes the embodied carbon emissions and direct construction costs incurred during the production phase of a modular residential building and provides comparison to an equivalent conventional residential building. Major drawings and design details for a modular residential building in South Korea were obtained, and the quantity take-off data for the major construction materials were analyzed for a modular construction method and a conventional construction method using a reinforced concrete structure under the same conditions. Focusing on major construction materials during the production phase, the embodied carbon emissions assessment revealed that adopting a modular construction approach reduced the environmental impact by approximately 36%, as compared to the conventional reinforced concrete method. However, in terms of the direct construction cost, the modular construction was approximately 8% more expensive than the conventional reinforced concrete construction method.

As one of the key ways to realize the industrialization and green development of construction, prefabricated construction is conducive to saving resources and energy and improving labor productivity and quality. Aiming to solve the problem of the lack of standardization in the design of prefabricated residential buildings, which leads to the components not being universally used and the industrial characteristics not being fully embodied, while excessive standardization leads to a lack of personalization and flexibility, the modular design theory is applied to the standardized design of prefabricated residential buildings in this study. The application route of modular design theory in the standardized design is constructed, that is, “system decomposition—module design—module combination”. Taking residential buildings within a height of 54 m as an example, each basic functional module is standardized and combined into standard plans. At the same time, the functional space module design based on modular coordination and the module combination design based on the trinity of “modulus, pattern, and mode” are discussed. This research is of great significance for giving full play to the comprehensive benefits of prefabricated concrete structures in quality improvement, cost reduction, and rapid assembly.

Lately, with the growth in energy consumption worldwide to support global efforts to improve the climate, developing nations have to take significant measures. Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) implemented meaningful policy actions towards promoting energy efficiency (EE) in several sectors, especially in the building sector, to be more sustainable. In this paper, various EE measures and solar energy prospects are investigated for the residential sector, in two locations in the middle region of the KSA. An energy performance analysis of pre-existing residential buildings with an overall design is performed using simulation programs. However, installing EE measures in the building envelope is important to achieve an efficient sector regarding its energy consumption. The findings showed that applying EE measures for the building envelope, walls, roof, and windows should be considered first that makes the energy conservation possible. In Riyadh, EE measures are responsible for reducing energy consumption by 27% for walls, 14% for roof, and 6% for window, and by 29%, 13%, and 6% for walls, roof, and windows, respectively, for Qassim. However, the most impactful EE solution was selecting a heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) system with a high energy efficiency rate (EER), which can minimize the energy consumption by 33% and 32% for Riyadh and Qassim, respectively. The study’s feasibility showed that the number of years needed to offset the initial investment for a proposed roof PV system exceeds the project’s life, if the energy produced is exported to the grid at the official export tariff of 0.019 $/kWh. However, the simple payback time was 13.42 years if the energy produced is exported to the grid at a rate of 0.048 $/kWh, reflecting the project’s economic feasibility.

Urban streams are scarce natural elements in compact cities, and suffer from pollution in the course of city expansion and densification, especially in developing nations like China. They may offer the amenity of a riverscape view, but also the dis‐amenity associated with water pollution. Yet whether and how polluted urban streams affect high‐rise residential property values remain under‐investigated. Based on a total of 315 transaction records of apartment sales in two residential precincts located near two typical urban streams in Guangzhou, south China, this study attempts to assess the impacts of urban river pollution, in terms of view and proximity, at a neighbourhood level. A novel “cube contiguity”, consisting of a three‐dimensional spatial weighting matrix, is developed to incorporate the effect of property height in hedonic price models. Comparison of the spatial hedonic analysis of the two selected residential precincts reveals that views of heavily polluted urban streams fail to command a premium, and the impacts of proximity to urban streams vary considerably in high‐rise, compact urban contexts, when micro‐level landscape variations are carefully represented in hedonic modelling. This could be associated with the hydro‐morphological features and riverine landscape, as well as with homebuyers’ subjective perception of river pollution. Assessing the impacts of urban stream pollution could provide a basis for understanding the negative externalities of urban river pollution, establishing priorities for restoring polluted urban streams, and planning the provision of multi‐functional green‐blue spaces with respect to homebuyers’ demand for environmental amenities in mid‐ and high‐rise housing markets in both developed and developing nations.

Electrifying end uses is a key strategy to reducing GHG emissions in buildings. However, it may increase peak electricity demand that triggers the need to upgrade the existing power distribution system, leading to delays in electrification and needs of significant investment. There is also concern that building electrification may cause an increase of energy costs, leading to further energy burden for low-income communities. This study uses the urban scale building modeling tool CityBES to assess the electrification impacts of more than 43,000 residential buildings in a neighborhood of Portland, Oregon, USA. Energy efficiency upgrades were investigated on their potential to mitigate the increase of peak electricity demand and energy burden. Simulation results from the calibrated EnergyPlus models show that electrification with heat pumps for space heating and cooling as well as for domestic water heating can reduce CO 2 e emissions by 38%, but increase peak electricity demand by about 9% from the baseline building stock. Combining electrification measures and energy efficiency upgrades can reduce CO 2 e emissions by 48% while reducing peak electricity demand by 6% and saving the median household energy costs by 28%. City and utility decision makers should consider integrating energy efficiency upgrades with electrification measures as an effective residential building electrification strategy, which significantly reduces carbon emissions, caps or even decreases peak demand while reducing energy burden of residents.

Residential buildings generate significant greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and consume energy throughout their life cycle. In recent years, research on GHG emissions and energy consumption of buildings has developed rapidly in response to the growing climate change and energy crisis. Life cycle assessment (LCA) is an important method for evaluating the environmental impacts of the building sector. However, LCA studies of buildings show widely varying outcomes across the world. Besides, environmental impact assessment from a whole life cycle perspective has been undeveloped and slow. Our work presents a systematic review and meta-analysis of LCA studies on GHG emissions and energy consumption in the preuse, use, and demolition stages of residential buildings. We aim to examine the differences among the results of diverse case studies and demonstrate the spectrum of variations under contextual disparities. Results show that residential building emits about 2928 kg GHG emission and consumes about 7430 kWh of energy per m 2 of gross building area on average throughout the life cycle. Residential buildings have an average GHG emission of 84.81% in the use phase, followed by the preuse phase and demolition phase; the mean energy consumption in the use stage occupied the largest share of 84.52%, followed by preuse stage and demolition stage. GHG emissions and energy use vary significantly in different regions due to different building types, natural conditions, and lifestyles. Our study stresses the compelling requirement to slash GHG emissions and optimize energy consumption from residential buildings by use of low carbon building materials, energy structure adjustment, consumer behavior transformation, etc.

With the proposed goals of “energy conservation, carbon reduction, and green development,” green and low-carbon lifestyles have gained significant attention. As a major sector of energy consumption, residential buildings face common issues such as high energy consumption, poor comfort, and aging facilities. Taking a residential building in the West Coast New Area of Qingdao, Shandong Province as a case study, this research employs field surveys and DesignBuilder software simulations to analyze the performance of building envelopes and interior walls in non-heated spaces. The thermal insulation performance differences are compared across three stages: the original building, preliminary retrofit, and passive ultra-low energy stage. On this basis, a parametric analysis of the thermal performance of passive ultra-low energy building envelope components was conducted. The results demonstrate that passive ultra-low energy retrofitting of the building envelope can achieve an energy-saving rate of up to 87.06% compared to the original building, and 84.9% compared to the preliminary retrofit. This research, focusing on the parametric analysis of passive ultra-low energy envelope performance in existing residential buildings, provides a theoretical foundation for energy conservation and carbon reduction in existing residential buildings.

The paper analyses 100 multi-family residential buildings with basements made in traditional technology, with a usable area from 604.50 m2 to 2315.00 m2, built between 1952 and 1958 in the Masovian Voivodship. For the analysed buildings, individual elements were inspected once a year and their technical condition was determined. The research was conducted in 2018–2022 and focused on three selected buildings. The results of the study carried out by the authors were used to determine the degree of their aging using the visual method and to compare the results with those obtained from computational methods, e.g., time methods: linear, non-linear, parabolic. The main emphasis in the article is on faulty repairs of buildings, often without proper supervision and the impact of this phenomenon on the accelerated aging of buildings. Although the faulty repairs are common, they are omitted in the methods of predicting the aging of buildings. The paper also presents the analysis of the repair management carried out on the basis of post-inspection recommendations. The results of the conducted analysis confirm that the visual method is the most accurate to determine the degree of wear and tear of the building due to the possibility to determine its actual condition, considering account of the renovations carried out and their quality. The value of the degree of technical wear of selected buildings Sz was similar for visual and time methods.

In Iran, residential buildings contribute 28.4% to total energy consumption and 18.1% to total carbon dioxide emissions. However, there are several barriers that hinder energy efficiency in these buildings, including environmental, technical, financial, social, and legal factors. Among these barriers, behavioral obstacles are considered the most significant challenge to achieving energy-efficient buildings. The purpose of this paper is to examine the obstacles that prevent people from using renewable and energy-efficient technologies, and how they impact other barriers and potential solutions. The study used a combination of research methods, such as document analysis and semi-structured interviews, to create a questionnaire for 69 architectural experts in Iran. The data was then analyzed using principal component analysis (PCA) to understand the connection between the behavioral barriers. The study revealed that traditional education and a lack of online feedback are responsible for building occupants’ lack of awareness. Unenforced regulations can also lead to a lack of motivation and interest, which ultimately results in resistance to behavioral change. In addition, inappropriate curtailing of behaviors and disregard for active and passive systems, as well as recycling strategies, can lead to high consumption behaviors. Weak government policies, a lack of practical solutions and design, and the absence of aesthetic and symbolic benefits are the underlying reasons why energy-efficient technologies are not appealing to consumers. The study’s findings are a useful resource for policymakers in Iran and other countries to understand the current obstacles to improving residential building energy efficiency and to develop new solutions to overcome these obstacles.