Articles

Passive cooling involves a series of strategies to cool buildings without electricity and represents an invaluable set of tools to address the increasingly intense summer heatwaves, even in Europe.

The Green Deal ARV project aims to demonstrate and validate attractive, resilient, and affordable solutions that significantly speed-up deep energy renovations in four different climatic zones in Europe and deployment of energy and climate measures in the construction and energy industries.

Energy optimisation is a crucial aspect of modern society. As the world grapples with the challenges of climate change and the need for sustainable development, it has become increasingly important to find ways to minimise energy consumption while maximising efficiency. The key to achieving this lies in expertise. In this article, Dijana Likar and Paul McCormack explore the significance of expertise in energy optimisation and discuss how it can be harnessed to achieve optimal results.

The renovation wave requires an integrated, participatory, and neighbourhood-specific approach that is customised to the local environment. A digital tool called RESTO (Renovation Strategy Tool) has been developed to help local municipalities automate calculations for comprehensive renovation strategies, by utilising public databases at the neighbourhood level.

Integrated photovoltaics has emerged as key to reducing net greenhouse gas emissions across different sectors, such as building, transport, and agriculture. This article reviews the competitiveness of Building-Integrated Photovoltaics (BIPV) and Infrastructure-Integrated Photovoltaics (IIPV) in residential applications.

In the article, project manager Kadri Kallast takes a closer look at the barriers homeowners need to overcome when renovating buildings placed under heritage protection and how they should be supported along the way.

In article #7 of the ARISE Currency of Skills series, Paul McCormack, coordinator of the ARISE project, examines how skills as a currency help increase the competitiveness of companies and countries and lift economies to new heights.

The regulation Net Zero Industry Act supports manufacturing net-zero technologies, significantly impacting building sector decarbonisation by boosting green technologies like heat pumps, solar panels, and smart facades. The building sector can enhance the act's goals by optimising these technologies' lifecycle impacts and integrating them with energy efficiency and passive heating and cooling systems.

This article explores the integration of energy, and climate plans into spatial planning and its significance for sustainable urban development.

Skills are no longer just a means to an end; they have become an asset in their own right. Just like money, skills can be traded, invested, and accumulated. They have the power to open doors and create opportunities. In a skills-based economy, individuals who possess in-demand skills are more likely to secure high-paying jobs and enjoy greater career mobility.