International Energy Agency EBC Annex 80 | Resilient Cooling of Buildings – Midterm Report

This midterm report sums up the developments of Annex 80 between October 2019 and July 2021. Commencing with an initial Expert Meeting held in person in Vienna, Austria, subsequent work efforts by the Operating Agent (OA) and its team included conference calls and the second through fourth Expert Meetings which were held online due to the COVID-19 pandemic. 75 participants from 17 countries and 36 institutions actively took part in the fourth Expert Meeting. 22 institutions confirmed their participation with official letters in the first half of the Annex working phase. 
The formation of a common understanding of concepts and definitions of resilience was the focus of the group during the first period of the Annex. Members with different scientific backgrounds developed an understanding of and discussed various approaches to resilience in relation to the cooling of buildings. They published their findings in three peer reviewed journal papers: (1) “Resilient cooling of buildings to protect against heat waves and power outages: Key concepts and definition” by Attia et al., (2) “Conceptualising a resilient cooling system: A socio-technical approach” et al. and (3) “Resilient cooling strategies – A critical review and qualitative assessment” by Zhang et al. . Another focus of the Annex to date has been the development of a framework for assessing cooling technologies (the production of such a framework is a core objective of the Annex generally). The team of experts have thus far established a central question of “Resilience against what?” as a guide the in the creation of this framework. Execution on the development of the framework will be a focus of the remaining project period.  
Annex members have investigated several disruptions and shocks that are addressed by resilience. The group identified two major threats for the cooling of buildings: extreme heat events and power outages. Others such as extreme rain events, flooding, landslides, or storms influence the built environment too but are not as strongly connected to the cooling of buildings and therefore, Annex members have decided not to address these disruptions. This identification of threats consequently led to the development of a concrete and consistent groundwork for further evaluation. Different task groups were set up to define thermal boundary conditions, to generate future weather files and to compile key performance indicators for the assessment of cooling technologies through dynamic simulations. This division of work was successful in fostering cooperation between scientists across subtasks and produced outcomes viable for further research. Each subtask’s activities are presented in the following paragraphs. The groups summarized their results and published short technical reports. The weather data task group are planning to publish their methodol-ogy and results as scientific paper (which takes more time and effort than a technical report and will there-fore come in the future).