The report was undertaken as part of a PhD research, funded by the CRC for Low Carbon Living Ltd. supported by the Cooperative Research Centres program, an Australian Government initiative and a research student scholarship granted from the Australian Building Codes Board. 

Current and newly built buildings will inevitably experience the effects of climate change, therefore, the design and performance of these buildings should consider weather data that includes some of the effects of climate change, instead of only using historical weather data. However, climate change weather data suitable for buildings performance simulation are typically unavailable.

Highlights

Highlights

• The authors simulate the operation of battery storage using data from low-energy households.
• The authors calculate the impact on the annual amount and cost of imported electricity.
• The authors calculate the payback period of various battery storage configurations.
• The authors estimate the ideal amount of storage for households with existing PV systems.

Abstract

Australian cities are experiencing more heat stress in the 21st century than ever before. Public life in a majority of Australian cities suffer from heat stress in urban heat islands. This paper presents the concept of spatial heat resilience as the capability of the built environment to support outdoor activities during heat stress conditions. Outdoor activities and urban microclimate parameters were observed in selected public spaces of Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide. Outdoor neutral and critical thermal thresholds are determined.

Outdoor thermal discomfort pushes citizens into air-conditioned buildings and causes increased demand for water and electricity in the majority of Australian urban heat islands. Citizens’ spatial and activity preferences during heat stress conditions are under investigation in this paper. Citizens’ outdoor activity choices in different thermal environments were surveyed in Adelaide from September 2013 to April 2014.

In Australia, various City Councils, including the City of Adelaide, are pursuing carbon neutrality at municipal-scale based on their operational greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. As passenger transport is a major component of city operational GHG emissions, there is an opportunity for shared mobility services to play a role in reducing those emissions. This preliminary carbon modelling report has focussed on the GHG benefit from expanding shared mobility services in the Adelaide Local Government Area, although the results should be equally valid in other similar inner-urban precincts.

Building energy performance simulations are limited to typical meteorological weather conditions available in simulation software. Such simulations are insufficient for analysing energy performance sensitivity to a range of probable weather conditions. This research presents a method for developing robust meteorological weather data that can be used for energy performance sensitivity analysis without the need to access historical weather data. The method decomposes dry bulb temperature (DBT) and global horizontal solar radiation (H) into deterministic and stochastic components.

Smarter urban futures require resilient built environment in the context of climate change. This chapter demonstrates the application of satellite-based surface cover and temperature data to support planning for urban heat resilience. Landsat 7 ETM+ and Landsat 8 data is used to analyse the correlation of urban surface covers to the urban heat island effect in Adelaide. Methods for data source selection, surface cover classification, surface temperature calculation and analysis are detailed in this chapter.

Distributed electrical energy storage can help reduce the CO2 emissions associated with the use of electrical energy, better enabling distributed generation of energy from sources such as rooftop photovoltaic (PV) systems.