Many building standards are available worldwide to support zero-carbon energy buildings. However, most of them only define compliance before occupancy, overlooking the real building usage and its implications for meeting zero-carbon targets. The ZERO Institute, in collaboration with different research groups and programmes at Oxford, has initiated a Living Lab in Holywell House to develop, test, and demonstrate novel techniques and technologies to achieve real-world zero-carbon energy buildings. The living lab, named ZEBRA – “Zero-carbon Energy Building Research Activity” – started in 2023 and has actively progressed to achieve novel insights while learning and transforming the ZERO Institute Home to net zero.
The first research output has set up a novel post-occupancy evaluation and intervention (POEI) protocol to analyse real building performance and support cost-effective and zero-carbon interventions. The novel approach has been tested and demonstrated in the ZERO Institute home, providing novel insights to support building decarbonisation. The results have demonstrated that building energy management interventions are the most important actions to reduce the performance gap to net zero, reducing energy consumption by 20 % and carbon emissions by 24 %. The results also highlighted the critical role of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), which may represent up to 49 % of energy use in the future zero-carbon building scenario if overlooked.
The first research article resulting from this initiative has been published in the journal Energy and Buildings, and it is available in open access at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enbuild.2023.113766.
Novel control technologies are now under development and testing to demonstrate and expand this initial contribution to a real-world net zero. The ZEBRA living lab is open to all researchers who want to join this initiative towards a real-world net zero, starting from the home of the ZERO Institute.
