Resilient Cooling Guidelines from the IEA EBC Annex 80

The world is seeing a rapid increase of cooling of buildings1. This is driven by multiple factors, such as urbanization and densification, climate change and elevated comfort expectations together with economic growth in hot and densely populated regions of the world. Additionally, disruptive events, such as extreme heat and heat waves are occurring more often and are expected to become a common phenomenon by mid-century. The trend towards cooling seems inexorable. It is therefore mandatory to steer this development towards sustainable solutions.
Against this background, it is the motivation of this guidebook to support practitioners to implement highly efficient, low-carbon, resilient cooling solutions, technologies, and strategies and contributing to a sustainable built environment. Resilient cooling aims to avoid heat stress to people and to maintain safe and operable conditions in buildings in the event of externally induced disruptions. It therefore goes beyond the upkeep of thermal comfort. This guidebook focuses on the design of resilient cooling against such disruptions.
The Resilient Cooling Guideline is based on findings of the international research project of the Energy in Buildings and Communities (EBC) programme Annex 80 Resilient Cooling of Buildings provided by a group of scientists from numerous institutions in various fields such as architecture, engineering, building science and building physics.
The Resilient Cooling Guideline addresses both free-running and mechanically cooled buildings and aims to answer the following question: How can I/we design a “resilient cooling” building?
For such, it is important to understand the underlying concepts of resilience regarding buildings, the available technological solutions, and the methods and tools used to evaluate options. Several chapters are sequenced to assist practitioners in these areas, as shown in Table 1.2. Two chapters provide practical examples of application of the guidelines for case-study buildings.