Indoor Comfort in School Buildings: The Case Study of Palermo

Buildings primary energy consumption in developed countries accounts for about 40% of whole uses. Therefore, the European Union has released many regulations, concerning energy saving issues; particularly, it has enacted Directive 2002/91/EC regarding the energy performance of buildings, and its Recast Directive 2010/31/EU, that promotes the Nearly Zero Energy Building targets, introducing more strict parameters in this aim. Furthermore, the latter Directive asks Member States to include within their national plans measures aimed at supporting public authorities to become early adopters of building energy efficiency improvements. In the same time, Public Authorities should implement effective examples of use of energy efficiency criteria in public buildings. Furthermore, energy consumption of buildings depends significantly on the criteria used for the indoor environment, as well as building design and operation, as clearly indicated in the standard EN 15251. Recent studies have shown that costs of poor indoor environment for the employer, building owners and society, as a whole are often considerable higher than the cost of the energy used in the same building. In this context, the school buildings play a key role. They should have high levels of indoor environmental performances. In the present work, the authors analyse comfort conditions of a school in Palermo (Italy) in order to stress attention on the building design weakness. The analyses have highlight that the requirements for indoor environmental quality and for energy efficiency may be controversial sometimes. It finally emerges that energy refurbishment actions will have to start from the requirements of indoor environmental quality.