The EBC Annex 80 held its second Expert Meeting on April 20^th and 21^st as its first fully web-based meeting. Over 50 participants from 15 countries took part in three online sessions schedule to take on the large time lag between the USA, Europe, Asia and Australia.

Cooperation of Annex 80 and INIVE

In the weeks before the meeting the Annex 80 represented by its Operating Agent Peter Holzer and INIVE and venticool represented by Peter Wouters signed a letter of consent to officially inaugurate their cooperation. As in the previous EBC Annex 62 on Ventilative Cooling, venticool will implement an Annex 80 section on their website compiling all the latest findings on resilient and ventilative cooling in one place. The new section of the website shall be launched by the end of June.

Defining Resilience in Cooling

A major effort during the annex’s first year has been defining resilience in terms of cooling for buildings. An extended review of scientific papers has been carried out by the international consortium of researchers under the lead of Wendy Miller from Queensland University of Technology. Risk management and natural hazard literature from diverse disciplines has been reviewed. The goal was to develop a conceptual framework for understanding the breadth, depth and scope of “resilient cooling” as a disaster risk management strategy to deal with temperature hazards. Disaster Risk Management for instance focuses on understanding and managing risk considering spatial scale and magnitude of impact. It describes the following stages: a) emergency, b) disaster, c) catastrophe, d) extinction event; The Sendai Framework (2015) for Disaster Risk Reduction on the other hand focuses on community vulnerability and resilience to the risk posed by the hazard. It describes four stages: 1. Understand the risk, 2. Strengthen risk governance, 3. Invest in risk reduction, 4. Enhance preparedness AND Build Back Better; The full paper “How can we define and measure “resilient cooling”? – A review and evaluation of resilience frameworks and criteria” has been submitted to the journal Applied Energy and is currently under review.

Assessment of Cooling Technologies

The progress of the assessment of cooling technologies and their aspects of resilience has been discussed at the meeting and the results will be published in the official Annex 80 State-of-the-Art Review as well as in a separate paper specifically dedicated to this subject. Chen Zhang from Aalborg University together with Ongun Berk Kazanci lead the group of scientists from seven different institutions which assesses technologies from the following fields of technology: a) Reduce heat loads to people and indoor environments, b) Remove heat from indoor environments, c) Enhance personal comfort apart from space cooling, d) Remove latent heat from indoor environments; So far the scope of the received reviews is vast. The content is now being condensed in order to achieve a publishable size of the review paper.

On November 5^th and 6^th all Annex 80 members will meet again for their 3^rd Expert Meeting. As from present-day perspective it will again be held as remote meeting.

If you want to know more about the Annex please visit the website http://annex80.iea-ebc.org/ or contact Peter Holzer, operating agent of EBC Annex 80 at: peter.holzer@building-research.at