Building Energy Audits-Diagnosis and Retrofitting towards Decarbonization and Sustainable Cities

Dear Colleagues,

Continuing on the success of the first Special Issue that was published in early 2021 with 12 article reprints and 54 contributing authors from 7 countries, reaching about 100 citations and over 15,300 views by early 2022, we are proceeding with an enhanced second edition of a Special Issue entitled “Building Energy Audits—Diagnosis and Retrofitting Towards Decarbonization and Sustainable Cities”

Building audits, in one form or another, can be used to systematically collect the necessary data in order to gain adequate knowledge and a better understanding on the operations, energy use and prevailing indoor conditions of buildings. The data can be used to identify, quantify and prioritize renovation measures for higher energy efficiency and lower emissions, improve indoor environmental quality for better and healthier living and working conditions. Findings can also be used as input during building certification and studies for assessing the cost effectiveness of renovations. At larger scales, the data can be exploited to develop performance baselines and benchmarks, methods and tools for understanding the building stock in order to facilitate the decarbonization and sustainability assessment of the built environment, assess and improve the outdoor environment and the well-being of area residents, among others.

Topics of interest for this Special Issue include, but are not limited to:

• Methods and tools for building energy audits, surveys, diagnosis, inspections, assessment;
• Non-destructive testing, measurement, monitoring, and analysis of data;
• Energy efficiency and conservation measures;
• Calculation, measurement, and verification of energy savings;
• Model calibration and gap analysis;
• Energy performance contracts and certificates, risk analysis, and assessment;
• Benchmarking energy use and carbon intensity, baselines and breakdown for end uses, financial assessment, and cost analysis;
• Auditing, monitoring, and assessing decarbonization and sustainability efforts;
• Facilitating audits, inspections, and data collection using information from smart systems, remote data collection and virtual audits;
• Exploiting automated processes using novel methods to collect and process data for large-scale built environments from geographic information systems (GISs) and global earth observations (GEOs), among others;
• Quantifying energy and carbon savings from renovations of large portfolios and building stocks;
• Case studies, large-scale assessments and lessons learned from the field.

Dr. Constantinos A. Balaras
Dr. Tomasz Cholewa
Guest Editors

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