Recent natural and human-induced emergencies have highlighted the vulnerability of the built environment. In order to immediately answer to people’s needs while managing an emergency, any intervention should be more proactive and take into account renewable technologies that can be applied in anemergency situation. Very few examples of renewable energy systems in emergency situations are presen...

Sustainable campus management at Freie Universität Berlin has long placed special emphasis on climate protection and the goal of assuring sustainable development within the scope of its own institutional responsibilities. The university illustrated this by founding its own administrative unit for energy and environment management in 2001. Since then, the university has gradually implemented var...

Energy use in homes and buildings represents an important part of the load electrical systems [...]

The UK Sustainable Development Strategy requires that society makes prudent use of resources so as to protect the environment and at the same time maintain high and stable levels of economic growth and employment. The key to sustainable waste management is waste minimisation, the reduction of waste at source. Waste minimisation clubs have been a central feature of the UK program to encourage th...

Program on Energy and Sustainable Development (PESD) at Stanford University. His research focuses on policy instruments to address climate change, the role of state-owned enterprises in fossil fuel production, and how to deliver energy to lowincome populations. Dr. Thurber co-edited and contributed to Oil and Governance, a major volume on national oil companies, and he is currently working on a...

The need for monitoring countries’ overall performance in sustainable development (SD) is widely recognized, but the methods for aggregating vast amounts of empirical data remain rather crude. This paper examines the so-called ‘benefit of doubt’ weighting method as a tool for identifying benchmarks without imposing strong normative judgement about SD priorities. The weighting method involves li...

Wind is a promising sustainable energy resource that can help in reducing the dependence on fossil fuels. Models and tools can be effectively used to assess the resource availability, the possible exploitation, and the environmental impact. The aim of this work is to propose an Environmental Decision Support System (EDSS) for the sustainable design of wind power plants both in terms of the site...

It is described a prototype residential unit ensuring comfortable interior conditions at minimum energy cost through the interaction of three autonomous architectures: a) a spatial arrangement of tectonic elements; b) an assembly of sustainable material components; and c) a cognitive architecture of control systems. The prprototype is an experiment on sustainability, connectivity, energy consum...

This paper analyzes the sustainable domestic biomass potential for bioenergy in Switzerland. Relevant biomass resources were selected based on expert interviews and literature analyses. A definition of technical and sustainable biomass potentials was developed. The technical and sustainable biomass potentials were then assessed based on technical and sustainability constraints. The sustainable ...