REHVA is the Federation of European Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning Associations (HVAC) founded in 1963. It represents over 120,000 HVAC designers, building services engineers, and technicians across 24 European Countries.
REHVA provides a strong platform for European professional networking and knowledge exchange, pursuing the vision of improving health, comfort, safety and energy efficiency in buildings and communities. REHVA contributes to technical and professional development.
The following REHVA contribution is focusing on the building sector and based on the professional experience of its members.
- Background
The evolution of energy needs in buildings and decarbonization
The strategy to decarbonize heating and cooling systems should take account the evolution of the energy needs related to space heating and cooling, and domestic hot water (DHW).
The space and ventilation heating demand is reducing, mostly because of the insulation of buildings and heat recovery of air-handling unit. This action must be continued. Because even in a changing climate, an adequate rate of insulation and the implementation of heat recovery, positively effects the reduction of both the heating and cooling demand.
The space cooling use is increasing also due to climate change and stronger and longer lasting heat waves. To only match this growing demand with the installation of cooling systems, would enlarge this challenge. Passive actions, as solar protection and night-time ventilation, and an adequate building design (thermal mass) are vital to an adequate solution and should be associated with and an adapted equipment.
Due tocooling, but also related to the reduction of space heat demand, it is likely that there will be a shift towards low temperature heating systems and all-air systems, besides the change of energy carriers from fossil fuels to sustainable, increasingly local produced, electric energy.
In well insulated dwellings, the domestic hot water demand becomes higher than the space heating demand. The development of water saving equipment and DHW heat recovery, is starting, but this energy saving potential is highly untapped. In many building regulations,DHW reduction is not sufficiently valorised.
The use of renewables is increasing (e.g the development of on-site photovoltaics). The building is no longer only an energy consumer, but becomes also an energy producer. This favours the self-use, including electro mobility (storage of use of energy).
The development of renewables and electrification of the uses creates new problems, as the intermittency of production (also summer, winter) and electricitypeak loads. Therefore, storable solutions are needed for the back-up including electricity mobility.
In the future, improving energy efficiency alone will not be enough, but it will also be necessary to be able to manage the power demand of buildings. Instantaneous power and peak power demand are additional challenges. Improving the energy flexibility of buildings has been found to be an effective way to manage instantaneous power demand.
The re-use of existing boilers and the use of the existing gas grid infrastructure for renewable energy carrier (e.g. biomethane) could be an interesting option, especially for buildings that aren’t easily to insulate, for instance because of their architectural or historical value.
These evolutions are well identified and are new challenges for the building sector as a whole, but especially the HVAC sector.
- Possible actions and barriers for the decarbonization of heating and cooling
Possible actions for decarbonization are:
- Energy savings (e.g. insulation of buildings, domestic hot water flow reduction devices), free cooling with outdoor air and ground),
Energy efficiency (e.g. cogeneration, heat pumps, heat recovery, district low-temperature exchange networks), - Use of renewables (e.g. photovoltaics, biomass, thermal solar).
The heating and cooling strategy should cover all these actions, and not favor one of them.
These actions could be implemented at building, energy community, municipalities or national level.
Lack of professional skills
The challenges are well-know. But there is a lack of skills to address them.The needed complex technical systems require new expertise. In particular, ensuring the functionality of the systems throughout their entire life cycle is important. An EU common training and qualification scheme would help professionals to work EU-wide instead of national approaches fragmenting the European market.
Success stories of efficient decarbonization of heating and cooling systems should widely be communicated and discussed. National energy and climate plans (NECPs) should be shared, in a way that they can inspire and encourage.
There is no “one fits all solution”
Each action needs to be seen in the overall context: at building level, at neighbourhood level, at municipal level, etc. For example, district heating and cooling systems depends on the density of the demand. The electrification of use has to take into the availability of renewable sources, consider the storage to avoid the peak loads on the grid and district heating/cooling systems.
The performance of equipment has to be seen by taking into account the whole energy chain. This might be a difficult topic for policy makers and professionals and also for the communication to the public. But that is a challenge which must be faced. A first step is in its recognition and presenting it as an opportunity to choose a tailored solution for all circumstances.
Affordable buildings and public infrastructure
Buildings should be affordable and at the same time, the needed investment to become Zero Emission buildings should be cost-effective to entice building owners to make the necessary investments. It means that higher CAPEX must be compensated by lower OPEX.
Subsidies may be considered if a certain technology is not yet cost-effective, and if it is expected that cost effectiveness is expected in due course.
But it was observed that public subsidies had a negative influence on the prices. The price for an equipment was much higher in the countries with subsidies than in the country without subsidies.
Sometimes the amount of subsidies is linked to the capacity of the equipment, which may lead to oversizing and inefficient installations.
Subsidies should not be only linked to the means, but to the performance (results). Subsidies should help to finance the initial higher investment, but subsidies should be performance driven, for example they could be delivered as a loan and be paid back by the savings of energy costs. This approach would allow a wider financing of cost-efficient building renovation.
- Proposal for non-legislative actions to accelerate implementation
- There is no “one-fits all” solution. The heat and cooling strategy should set only the targets (e.g. emission levels) and define milestones, but not favour a single solution. Common benchmarking should be developed for the comparability of results.
- The heat and cooling strategy should favour the communication and exchange on good practices.
- Skills roadmaps, to address shortages in the HVAC, automation & IT- technology, refrigeration and building systems workforceand a EU wide professional training and qualification scheme should be developed.
European standard should be used as support and further harmonization should be pursued. - Subsidies should be performance driven and not only linked to the means. They should be cost-efficient meaning that the investments should be paid back by the energy cost savings.
- New solutions also require new service business models. Energy could be sold as a service, where an aggregator is responsible for the demand response and for their use towards the grid company.
- Different types of storage solutions (e.g. batteries, hydronic storage, biogas, short term and intraseasonal storage) and the interaction between different sectors (building, mobility) should be developed.
- Developing of all renewable sources (e.g. sustainable biomethane) without favouring one. Create an EU-wide level playing field for the solutions by defining key performance indicators.
To be efficient and affordable, the EU strategy to decarbonise heating and cooling systems must be holistic,performance based and create an EU wide level playing field with common key performance indicators to make the efforts and results visible and comparable. There is no ‘one fits all solution”.
Without a skilled, qualified and sufficient workforce the EU strategy implementation will fail.
Therefore, the non-legislative actions to accelerate implementation should be done in close cooperation with the EU HVAC associations. REHVA is ready to cooperate.
To know more about the upcoming Heating and Cooling startegy, and read the REHVA contribution to the public consultation, click