Liberalising the heat market is, in theory, possible. It would operate in the same way that enables owners of domestic-scale wind turbines, or any other electricity producer, to sell surplus into the grid and draw power from the network.

The building sector has become much greener. To get such credentials it has adopted methods borrowed from other industries, such as life cycle analysis ( LCA ), which looks at the environmental impact of a building at every stage from its creation to its decommissioning.

Niklaus Ledergerber, president of the cultural heritage preservation commission of the Swiss canton of Appenzell, is an expert in local building history. He tells youris.

Scientists aim to create a sustainable future for the Strickbau building technique , typical of the Swiss Appenzell region. The challenge is to use modern features respecting historic architecture to bring them back from the verge of extinction.

A new Directive, dubbed the energy performance of buildings Directive (EPBD), brings the new concept of net -zero energy buildings (NZEB) meaning buildings with a zero energy balance that have a better level of energy performance than the standard energy efficiency requirements in current building codes.

The biomass found in forests represents an abundant, renewable, and low cost resource that does not compete with food production. It can play an alternative role to petroleum derived-resources and thus reduce oil dependence.

It was developed under the €2.88 million EU funded Digital Environment Home Energy Management System ( DEHEMS ) project. A number of plug-in home energy monitoring meters are already available on the market.

Going from modern energy efficient houses to historic buildings must have been a big leap for you.

Window refurbishments stand out as a viable approach to dramatically reduce energy loss. As their first case of study, the project’s researchers chose to upgrade the windows of the ‘Waaghaus’ (Public Weighing House), a building located in Bolzano, Italy, that is over seven-century-old.

In 2006 the Technical Building Code (CTE) has come into force in Spain. The Code provides for a reduction of energy demand of buildings from architectural design and a reduction of conventional energy consumption through the use of solar thermal water to produce heating and photovoltaic panels to generate electricity.

Professor Karsten Voss works at the school of architecture at the University of Wuppertal in Germany.

What projects are you working on at the moment? We are involved in a German research program called Energy-optimised Construction. It funds monitoring of buildings.

In the European funded project FIBLYS (or FIB anaLYSis) three industry and four research partners from Czech Republic, France, Germany and Switzerland have created a multi-nano tool named FIBLYS .

Photovoltaic cells have been known for a long time. In semiconductors such as silicon crystals sunlight creates an electric current, which can directly be fed into the power grid.

A significant challenge for researchers in the field of rechargeable batteries is to construct batteries which can be charged and discharged quickly with only minimal energy capacity loss .

Within the EU-funded research project N2P (Nano To Production) researchers work on nanostructured surfaces of solar cells.

The sun has enough power to supply the whole earth with energy. But as long as renewable energy is more expensive than energy produced by coal or nuclear plants, solar energy won’t be first choice.

Professor Claes-Göran Granqvist and colleagues at Uppsala University in Sweden have recently received about 2 million euros from the European Research Council to develop new materials making buildings more energy efficient.

A researcher who is using nanotechnology on the active layer of organic solar cells is Dr.

To help steer wind farm owners in the right direction, Charles Meneveau, a Johns Hopkins fluid mechanics and turbulence expert, working with a colleague in Belgium, has devised a new formula through which the optimal spacing for a large array of turbines can be obtained.