Group Energy Conservation

NOA represented the REMED Interreg Euro-MED project in the 2nd Greece-Cyprus partners' meeting of the Euro-MED Programme’s "Green Living Areas" Mission. Organized by the Region of Western Greece and the University of Patras, the meeting took place online on September 4, 2026, focusing on the transfer of project results to new entities and geographical areas. Key project results were presented, and discussions covered experiences regarding the implementation of pilot actions, successes achieved, and the potential for transferring the solutions developed—or currently under development—to new contexts.
REMED Interreg Euro-MED was positively evaluated and selected to move forward into the project's new phase dedicated to the transfer of results. Five more countries and national entities will be joining this new phase to transfer the results in Albania, Bulgaria, France, Portugal and Slovenia.
More information on ReMED - Towards Climate Resilient Mediterranean Cities https://remed.interreg-euro-med.eu a collaborative effort of 9 partners from 5 EU countries, , expanding now to a total of 10 European countries.

Dr Constantinos Balaras was recognized by ASHRAE and awarded the Louise and Bill Holladay Distinguished Fellow Award that honors Fellows of the Society for continuing preeminence in research work and engineering. The award was presented by ASHRAE President Bill McQuade during the 2026 Annual Conference in Austin, Texas on July 27, 2026.
Watch the Plenary at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJnLDvaSTRw and slide towards the end to 1:34:08 for the award slot

REMED Interreg Euro-MED Final Conference it is time to pull it all together and present an overview of the accomplishments and deliverables of the ReMED project: TOWARDS CLIMATE RESILIENT URBAN CITIES. We have a couple of more months to put the final touches. Come September, all deliverables will be accessible and open for municipalities and interested professionals to get and use. Let's improve resillience of our built environment to climate change impacts, assess where we are currently, what are the priorities and how we can improve resillience for the benefit of people as building occupants and residents.
More information - Towards Climate Resilient Mediterranean Cities https://remed.interreg-euro-med.eu a collaborative effort of 9 partners from 5 EU countries.

REMED Interreg Euro-MED is getting ready for the FINAL JOINT WORKSHOP on June 23rd, from 15:45 to 17:00 CET.
Join us online - Free registration @ https://form.jotform.com/82961805184362
Get the latest insights on an innovative digital tool implementing the ReMED climate risk assessment system and decision-making model to support the analysis, selection and implementation of adaptation measures at neighbourhood and building scale.

A validated model for short-term prediction of cooling energy consumption in buildings - first step to forecast control of cooling, published in Journal of Building Engineering, 127: 116361. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jobe.2026.116361
Smart control of energy supply for cooling in buildings can significantly improve energy efficiency. However, existing modelling methods are often complex and rely mainly on artificial neural networks (ANN) and other machine learning techniques, posing various difficulties for integrating them in forecast control of cooling. Moreover, accurate cooling energy models are generally more demanding to develop than heating models. To address this research gap, this study proposes a novel, simple and physically based method for creating building cooling energy models that also take into account the characteristics of the existing cooling system. The approach uses measured cooling energy consumption and meteorological data-outdoor air temperature, wind speed and solar irradiance - to derive an equivalent outdoor temperature that represents the real thermal behaviour of the building during cooling operation. Proper selection of operating and weather data is essential to minimise the influence of unrelated factors. The method is demonstrated on an office building in Poland and a university building in Cyprus. For both case studies, the developed cooling energy models were validated, achieving for outdoor temperatures above 26 °C mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) values of 13.15% for the office building and 17.87% for the university building. To further assess robustness, Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) ANN models were trained using the same hourly inputs-outdoor temperature, wind speed and solar radiation. The ANN models did not significantly improve prediction accuracy, yielding higher MAPE values of 19.6–24.7% for the office building and 29.4–34.9% for the university building. The results highlight that buildings must be considered individually and show that the proposed method can provide a practical, transparent and accurate tool for estimating cooling energy performance. Future work will address occupant influence and integration into predictive control of air-conditioning systems.

“Decarbonizing Hospital Buildings” presented during the 1st International Conference “HEALTH in BUILDINGS – HYGEIA 2026” organized by the ASHRAE Hellenic Chapter, Technical Chamber of Greece (TEE), Hellenic Ministry of Health, Athens Medical Association, 27-29 May, 2026 @ Kos, Greece.
Access the presentation @ https://doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.29104.32005
This presentation is an overview of the new ASHRAE Guide on decarbonization for hospital facility managers, capital planners, hospital architectural and engineering teams, sustainability leaders, contractors and other building stakeholders. The Guide is part of the ASHRAE series on decarbonization that specifically shows how to reduce GHG emissions in hospital buildings. Hospitals have one of the largest carbon use intensities (CUI) of all building types that is documented with relevant European and Hellenic data. The challenges for decarbonizing healthcare buildings are much more complex than those for other buildings because of their unique needs in terms of the number and complexity of systems, infection prevention needs, regulatory environment, abundance of technology to deliver healthcare services, and needs for resilience. The Guide has been developed by ASHRAE and American Society for Health Care Engineering (ASHE). More information is available @ https://www.ashrae.org/about/cebd-technical-resources
Visit the Conference HYGEIA2026 website @ https://www.ashrae.gr//hygeia2026.php

How smart are European buildings? Case studies in Greece, published in Science and Technology for the Built Environment, 32(6), 742-760, 2026. https://doi.org/10.1080/23744731.2026.2659353
The smart readiness indicator (SRI) is a new common European scheme for rating a building and assessing its capacity to accommodate smart-ready services. The primary goal is to secure the proper indoor environmental quality in accordance to the occupant needs, with low energy use, utilizing control strategies with building domains including HVAC, domestic hot water, lighting, envelope components, use of electricity, electric vehicle charging, monitoring and control. The paper presents an overview of the structure and outlines the SRI calculation steps and the generic technical framework. It provides a synopsis of the default catalogues that include smart-ready services for existing buildings with simple installations and new buildings with more complex installations. Furthermore, it summarizes the overall process to aggregate the calculations into a single SRI score. Following the available method and tool, several field studies have been performed in Hellenic commercial buildings. The results are elaborated to reveal the relation of the buildings’ energy performance and SRI in the existing condition and the resulting improvements following different renovation measures. The main findings reveal that the overall assessment method and tool are easy to implement. However, the user needs some expertise to interpret the building characteristics and features of its technical installations to the prescribed different levels. The initial SRI scores for the investigated case studies ranged from only 4.1% with an overall low energy performance (ranked at energy class-D), up to 42.9% with a high energy performance (ranked at energy class-B+). The assessment of various renovation scenarios for improving the building controls increased the SRI to reach a score of 24.8% (from 4.1%) up to 68.1% (from 35.6%). The associated energy savings ranged from 12% to 18%, respectively.