Katrin Lenz, an expert from the Department Life Cycle Engineering at the Fraunhofer Institute for Building Physics  (IBP), Germany, shares her view with youris.

The building sector has become much greener. To get such credentials it has adopted methods borrowed from other industries, such as life cycle analysis ( LCA ), which looks at the environmental impact of a building at every stage from its creation to its decommissioning.

Scientists, monument preservationists and craftsmen aim at ensuring conservation of the region’s architectural heritage also by optimising energy efficiency.

A new Directive, dubbed the energy performance of buildings Directive (EPBD), brings the new concept of net -zero energy buildings (NZEB) meaning buildings with a zero energy balance that have a better level of energy performance than the standard energy efficiency requirements in current building codes.

Going from modern energy efficient houses to historic buildings must have been a big leap for you.

Professor Karsten Voss works at the school of architecture at the University of Wuppertal in Germany.

What projects are you working on at the moment? We are involved in a German research program called Energy-optimised Construction. It funds monitoring of buildings.

The sun has enough power to supply the whole earth with energy. But as long as renewable energy is more expensive than energy produced by coal or nuclear plants, solar energy won’t be first choice.

Some laboratories have achieved impressive efficiencies under concentrated sunlight. SunPower Corp. is much closer to the market. The California-based company recently produced a record-setting 24.

Engineer and project manager Michael Blunk, Fraunhofer Institute for Wind Energy and Energy System Technology IWES, is one of the experts in the European project UpWind. The aim is to develop a new type of turbine.

Worldwide gas prices continue to rise daily- as well as environmental and safety consciousness. Hydrogen as an energy carrier in fuel cells could now bring forward a solution to many of these problems.

These days, a walk with your loved one along the quiet alleyways of Naples’ old city centre will not induce any feelings of romance, that’s for sure. The smell is unbearable, and the view is simply unimaginable.

Climate change is on everyone’s lips these days and the European Union, having decided to reduce its CO2-emmissions by at least half by 2050, is no exception.

Our future depends on energy, and as households and cars currently contribute to more than 50% of all energy consumption in the EU, new energy-efficient architecture can be an important approach to bring this percentage down.

Imagine living in a building that once leaked heat in the winter and baked in the summer, now retrofitted to be a haven of comfort and efficiency.

It’s all about connection. This is the key to making a city “smart”, say the smart people working on the subject. And by “connection”, they mean not only the technological kind but especially the human one.

17 th November 2022 - The city of Dresden – the second most populated city in Germany – has an important historical significance in the country.

“Wood may be present in people’s life more than we think”, says Mariana Hassegawa, a researcher at the European Forest Institute . She is one of the authors of a case study on new wood-based products by the BioMonitor EU project.

The ongoing energy crisis, which started in summer 2021 due to low natural gas supply and which further deteriorated with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, has highlighted the urgent need for a more independent European energy policy .

The world of online digital media marches forward relentlessly, but many of us still prefer the feel and enjoyment of a good book in our hands, or a newspaper to while away a quiet moment.