Raphael Bointner

Energy efficient design in shopping centres — A pathway towards lower energy consumption energy demand scenario modelling until 2030 for the shopping centre building stock in France and Poland

The European shopping centre building stock can provide a high energy saving potential while implementing energy efficient design measures. Todays shopping centre gross leasable area is 112.1 million m2, which makes up approximately 6.7% of the total wholesale and retail building floor area in the EU-28 and Norway in 2013. This building stock is expected to growth especially in the emerging markets. Thus, we analyse the energy saving potential in shopping centres in two selected countries by implementing energy efficiency measures. Based on shopping centre market data and key energy figures, scenarios of the energy consumption are being calculated until 2030.

Cross-country analysis of the implementation of nearly zero-energy building standards across Europe

Sustainability of the European society and economy will be based on renewable energy and resource efficiency. This implies among others the large scale deployment of nearly Zero-Energy Buildings. The technology is already available and proven; however the large scale uptake of nearly zero-energy building construction and renovation is a big challenge for all market actors. A substantial gap in reliable data on current market activities makes it difficult for policy-makers to evaluate the success of their policies as the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive requires the EU-Member States to define nearly zero-energy building standards for new buildings and energy efficiency requirements for building renovation. Thus, the subject of this paper is to show the implications of a current policy scenario until 2050 in terms of the quality of the building stock, the related final energy demand and finally the associated investments and costs in four selected countries, namely Italy, Norway, Romania and Spain. As the results show there is a high potential for energy savings by 2050, which is partly lost due to the lack of strong building standards as assumed in the current policy scenario.

The influence of experience and knowledge on reactor safety in Germany

After five decades of nuclear power generation in Germany, the government decided to phase out nuclear power plants until 2022 as a consequence of the Fukushima disaster in 2011. Electricity generation is accompanied by human and technical errors, which questions if the nuclear phase-out has an influence on reactor safety. Past errors, available as so-called reportable events of nuclear power plants, can be approximated with experience measured in cumulated electricity generation by applying the Duffey–Saull method with a high coefficient of determination (R² = 0.84). Errors are declining with growing experience, which means the reportable events per TWh are declining over time. Today, approximately 0.9 reportable events per generated TWh occur and, given unchanging operational conditions, it is expected to remain at this magnitude in the near future. Moreover, knowledge induced by public Research and Development expenditures may supplement experience in reducing reportable events. Thus, the cumulative fission knowledge stock of Germany was added to the Duffey–Saull method for the first time. By adjusting the knowledge depreciation rate within this extended method, the prediction of reportable events is more accurate. Best results were obtained with 10.8% depreciation rate, which is also in line with the literature.