The needs of engineers from the research community towards nZEB: A case study

ABSTRACT

The importance of increasing the share of nZEB on the building stock is becoming more and more urgent. Many studies with surveys can be found in literature focusing on the perspective of the occupants or the building owners about nZEBs. In this study, however, a survey has been conducted focusing on engineers to identify their needs from the scientific community toward the path of nZEB implementation in Greece. The results are split into four categories: building information and system technology, importance of nZEB to engineers and their customers, current decision criteria, and the use of scientific results. Among others, the results show that engineers believe that heat pumps would be the main technology in nZEBs, the customers are not so interested as the engineers about energy efficiency, the economic feasibility is the key decision criteria with an average payback period of seven years and 16.3% average acceptable investment increase due to nZEB, and the engineers have high interest for scientific results oriented in practice.

KEYWORDS:

• NZEB
• designers
• engineers
• survey
• decision criteria

Acknowledgements

This research is co-financed by Greece and the European Union (European Social Fund – ESF) through the Operational Programme «Human Resources Development, Education and Lifelong Learning» in the context of the project “Reinforcement of Postdoctoral Researchers - 2nd Cycle” (MIS-5033021), implemented by the State Scholarships Foundation (ΙΚΥ).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the State Scholarships Foundation []