Dear Colleagues,

Energy efficiency has long been identified as the ‘first fuel’ of the energy transition and crucial to curtailing emissions and reducing resource exhaustion, particularly in the built environment which consumes 20% of the world’s energy. While improvements have been made in areas such as home appliances, significant improvements to thermal energy efficiency in buildings and districts remain elusive, and energy use for heating and cooling remains high. Furthermore, the typical energy renovation rate is 1%–2% of the building stock per year, with average energy intensity improvements generally less than 15%. These challenges are compounded by global warming, which increases cooling demand and also drives adoption of cooling technologies in geographies where they have not traditionally been used.

Successfully reducing and decarbonizing energy use for heating and cooling requires an urban planning approach that moves beyond individual buildings to consider district and regional level energy systems, notably for the integration of geospatially constrained energy resources (such as geothermal energy), for the implementation of thermal distribution networks, and to determine a suitable mix of current and emerging technologies. The focus of this Special Issue will therefore be on the following areas:

• Spatial analysis of thermal energy supply and demand—thermal demand and resources, district heating and cooling systems—from the local scale to regions and countries;
• Strategies for resilient thermal energy system transformation and retrofitting with respect to global warming and extreme climate events (e.g., heat waves);
• Approaches for driving thermal energy efficiency improvements: policy studies and best practices, efficiency improvement programs, novel models for driving energy efficiency improvements—with particular consideration for comparisons across different regions (countries) and scales (e.g., national vs. local action).

The contribution of this Special Issue will be on furthering the understanding of energy system transformation at the building and district scale, subject to global warming impacts and spatial constraints. 

Dr. Jonathan Chambers
Guest Editor

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• energy
• heating
• cooling
• districts
• geospatial