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Mainstreaming Personal Comfort Systems
Can the construction and property industries implement innovative practices and technologies to improve building performance and thermal comfort?
This series of perspectives considers personal comfort systems: decentralized building thermal control, in which occupants control their local environments with personal devices while the amount of central space conditioning (HVAC) is scaled back.
Personal Comfort Systems have been shown to improve thermal satisfaction and reduce energy demand. So why hasn't it been implemented? What are the barriers preventing its adoption? What can be done to overcome this?
In the context of the climate and energy crises, clothing can reduce the energy demand associated with thermal comfort.
How can this low-energy approach to personal thermal comfort be implemented?
The IOT can coordinate PCS & HVAC systems to improve energy efficiency.
Part of a a new series on Personal Comfort Systems: How barriers to this promising approach can be overcome.
First in a new series examining how barriers to this promising approach can be overcome.
Latest Commentaries
Cities-Scale Research to Address Climate Change
Gerald Mills (University College Dublin) considers the big challenges for cities amid global climate change (GCC) and discusses the need for an inter-disciplinary approach among urban climate sciences to overcome obstacles. A distinction is made between global climate science, which focusses on Earth-scale outcomes, and urban climate science, which refers to processes and impacts at city-scales, including buildings, streets and neighbourhoods.
Climate Change, Overshoot and the Demise of Large Cities
William E. Rees (University of British Columbia) explains why urbanisation has been a significant contributor to ecological overshoot (when human consumption and waste generation exceeds the regenerative capacity of supporting ecosystems) and climate change.1 Civil society needs to begin designing a truly viable future involving a ‘Plan B’ for orderly local degrowth of large cities.