Building energy performance calculation and distributed generation-Efficient design solutions at building and community level

Energy efficiency in the built environment can make significant contribution to the sustainability of the energy services sector. On the other hand public administration must support and encourage the regeneration of the built environment by providing incentives to the practices that better contribute to the transition towards the new energy paradigm of distributed generation. Energy certification is today one of the most powerful tools in this direction, but it needs to evolve in order to connect efficiently to local energy planning, distributed power generation planning and energy management practices. Currently available building energy performance calculation methods must be completed by considering whole building energy consumption. Additionally local energy regulations must adopt these calculation methods to allow efficient design solutions for the built environment, both at the building and the community scale. They need to employ an energy quality ranking to establish the type of incentive to be adopted with respect to the global energy performance of building. Furthermore, they need to address issues like GHG emissions, embodied energy and externalities. The results presented in this paper are related to the development of a building energy regulation for the city of Parma, starting from present Italian building energy regulation and certification procedures. The Italian certification protocol presents several shortcomings related to the use of stationary calculation methods for energy performance evaluation, addressing inappropriately the topics like cooling demand, renewable energy sources (RES), micro-cogeneration, etc. In the present work, calculation methods evaluated and presented are both stationary and dynamic, to suggest the adoption, in a near future, of a dynamic calculation method for Italy, similarly to other countries in the Mediterranean area.