Ventilative cooling application in Mediterranean buildings: impacts on grid interaction and load match

Abstract

The concept of load matching refers to the simultaneous occurrence of loads and generation in buildings: it can be increased and optimised with modifications on both the energy demand and generation, but its pre-requisite is to guarantee passive energy efficiency. In the Mediterranean areas, a major challenge in new buildings is the increasing overheating even during mildly hot seasons. Ventilative cooling can be a potential solution to such issues and have an impact on load match in buildings and their grid interaction. The study analyses the potential of ventilative cooling to improve the load match in three different case studies in Italy. Ventilative cooling proved viable in moderately improving the load match and in more effectively reducing import of electricity from the grid under the appropriate climaticindoor conditions. In addition, the thermal-physical features, energy generation and consumption characteristics of the buildings are a source of large variability in the results. Increases in the load cover factor through natural ventilative cooling among the case studies range from 0.5% (high-performance building, low cooling share) to 5% (prefabricated module, high cooling share on the total); energy import is reduced effectively from 1% up to 22% in the case of a Sicilian residential building.