A Critical Review on Concept and Fundamentals of Net-Zero Energy Buildings

In the last decades the fossil fuel depletion accelerated massively, leading to emitting huge volume of greenhouse gasses into atmosphere daily and caused earth to be warmer. New policies all around the world are planning to reduce nonrenewable fossil fuels to prevent a disaster on the earth planet. Renewable sources of energy (RES) like wind and solar are considered to provide future energy of the mankind activities. The primary step to have RES vast in operation, is smart grid which includes a lot of new technologies and standards. Undeniably this extensive change, requires sufficient research and investigation besides to huge governmental investment. On the other side, the first steps for implementing a smart grid or employing RES should be practical and less expensive. As a result, buildings, that are blamed for consuming about 40 percent of whole energy, seems to be a best point to start. In the next generation of building, the annual energy consumption is equal to generated on-site renewable energy and because of that they are called Net-Zero Energy Building (NZEB). By implementing NZEB widely, transmission losses will be omitted through distributed generation of NZEBs, alongside with conservational effect. NZEB could be grid-connected or off-grid which the best choice for remote isolate areas is. In this paper a review on new definition and advances in the field of NZEB is presented.

Keywords:

Net-Zero Energy Building (NZEB) , Microgrid , Distributed Generation , Stand-alone Generating System