Passive Cooling Strategies for Thriving in a Changing Climate: A Prototype Retrofit Housing Energy Modeling and Simulation Framework

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 7 calls for universal access to afford able, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all, and is expected to influence the near future trends in many countries across the European Union. The retrofitting of buildings is an important milestone in the evolutionary development of energy-efficient residential buildings, yet a significant proportion of the south-eastern European social housing stock is inadequate in this area. This paper investigates the thermal performance of 288 flats in three different nationally representative collective housing archetypes in the southeastern Mediterranean island of Cyprus, where the climate is subtropical (Csa) and partly semi-arid (Bsh), as designated in the Köppen climate classification system. The participants’ experiences and thermal sensation votes were assessed to predict individual aspects of adaptive thermal comfort, and the relevance thereof on overheating, and in situ measurements—including indoor air temperatures, thermal imaging survey, recorded building-fabric-element heat fluxes, on-site environmental conditions monitoring, and review of household energy bills to accurately deter mine actual energy use—were collected. The results indicated a lack of diurnal temperature variations within the sample flats, which suggests that internal operative air temperatures remained relatively high throughout the day and night; indoor air temperature ranged from 28.5°C to 36.5°C, and there was a difference of +5°C between the actual and the simulated/ predicted operative air temperatures.