Research co-operation
BRANZ, Victoria University of Wellington School of Architecture's Centre for Building Performance Research (CBPR) and The Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment, University College, London (www.bartlett.ucl.ac.uk/architecture), had a formal agreement for research co-operation involving BEES.
IEA
In addition, BEES supported the International Energy Agency (IEA) to participate in the Solar Heating and Cooling Agreement's Task 40 ‘Towards Net Zero Energy Solar Buildings'. BEES was a major contributor to this international research activity with Dr Michael Donn, CBPR, as co-leader of Subtask C: Advanced Building Design, Technologies and Engineering.
International Energy Agency Net Zero Energy Buildings Research - 6th Experts' Meeting
New Zealand leadership of the Architectural Integration research subtask of the IEA Net Zero Energy Buildings (NZEB) research project required co-chairing the 6-monthly Experts' meetings. The purpose of these meetings was to review work completed by participants over the past 6 months and to plan the next 6 months collaboration within the overall framework of the research work plan. 30 participants from 19 countries met in Basel on 5-7 October.
The participants identified 40 buildings that met a set of minimum standards defining NZEBs suited to study in the project. These standards include having energy demand 50% lower than local codes, having measured performance data for at least 1 year available, having ready access to design analysis and construction drawings available. The New Zealand team developed a standard data collection form focused on the NZEB building performance analysis matrix developed in 2010. The core of the matrix was the three analysis foci: passive (architectural design) measures, energy efficiency measures and renewable generation measures.
The plan for the following 6 months was to review the case study buildings, extracting 'solution sets' of combinations of building design features and their performance. Longer term, the BEES modelling team saw this exercise returning to New Zealand a range of solution sets demonstrated to work elsewhere that can be evaluated as suited to redesign testing of the New Zealand building stock.
The work of the BEES modelling team on climate analysis was presented and endorsed at Basel. This analysis noted that conventional analyses of climates as cold or hot or mixed have limited application to non-residential buildings where what happens inside the building is often at least as significant as the outdoor climate at a location. For design teams to be able to generalise from lessons learned in BEES study buildings or from buildings elsewhere in the world requires a system for communicating to them the significance of climate.