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3D printing (3DP) is considered as a promising technology in construction industry due to a number of advantages that among others include fast and accurate construction, as well as elimination of formworks and material waste. Although 3DP technology is at an early stage of adoption in construction industry, its positive contribution towards a more sustainable construction approach is well acknowledged. Nevertheless, various constraints prevent its further establishment that include among others lack of knowledge among construction actors, premature investigation regarding techniques and material properties, as well as limited work on design optimization, cost, and environmental impact performance analysis. This chapter aims to contribute towards this direction by analysing the 3DP cost and environmental impact of a number of brick units, forming walls with different geometrical complexity. Results show that while walls’ complexity is increased, there are no significant changes in cost, global warming and primary energy consumption. In contrast, through the application of traditional construction processes, the result values would have been increased proportionally to the degree of complexity. This proves the potential of applying the 3DP technique to the construction of any structure at no extra cost and without increasing the environmental impact. Also, it provides an indication of its potential to be included within a regenerative construction framework.

The European Union directive on the energy performance of buildings was revised and republished in 2010, as EPBD Recast, introducing new terms as cost-optimal and nearly zero energy levels. It mandated that by 2018 all new public buildings and by 2020 all new buildings will be constructed as nearly zero energy building. Thus, it proposed the calculation of long-term energy-related costs of buildings together with the annual primary energy consumption, as the cost-optimal calculation framework.

Belt conveyors (BC) due to their unmatched capacity are extensively used in all industry applications where large volumes of bulk solids need to be transported. The mining industry is among the greatest BC users that set the new standards of required reliability, durability and operational safety. In recent years the sustainable development of the industry with the special focus on its eco-efficiency, primary energy consumption and GNG emission, is of the growing public interest. Relatively low raw material prices force competitiveness in the mining sector. Both issues set the new, higher requirements of BC efficiency as large BC systems are significant consumers of the expensive electric energy. BC are designed and built with regard to relatively conservative standards, lagged behind the already implemented technological development of BC equipment and maintenance methods. This paper deals with the proposal of the novel approach to both defining new standards for BC equipment that incorporates energy labelling, Eco-efficiency Analysis approach and calculating BC resistances to motion and required drive power with object oriented methods. The approach is illustrated by the analysis of idlers energy consumption and their fatigue tests.

EA-8 hosts 3.6% of world’s population but only accounts for 1.5% of total global primary energy consumption (The World Bank 2017; IEA 2017a). With South Africa (the second economy of SSA and an outlier in the region) excluded, this unbalance gets even more pronounced, with 2.9% of world’s population consuming 0.2% of total primary energy. While the share of EA-8 population without access to electricity has fallen from 90% in 2000 to 61% in 2016 (IEA 2017b), the absolute number of people without access has instead increased by eight million as electrification efforts have been outpaced by rapid population growth.

Passive measures, particularly natural or hybrid ventilation rather than air-conditioning, can dramatically reduce primary energy consumption.

Increasing Heating, Ventilation, and Air conditioning (HVAC) efficiency is critically important as the building sector accounts for about 40% of the world’s primary energy consumption. Building Performance Simulation (BPS) can be used to model the relationship between building characteristics and energy consumption and to facilitate optimization efforts. However, BPS is computationally intensive and only a limited set of building configurations can be evaluated. Machine learning techniques provide an alternative method of modeling energy consumption. While not as accurate, they can be used to perform a “first pass” evaluation of large numbers of building configurations and hence to identify promising candidates for subsequent analysis. This paper presents an initial proof-of-concept implementation of this idea. A machine learning algorithm is trained on a dataset generated using BPS, and is combined with a Genetic Algorithm (GA) based optimization to evaluate tens of thousands of building configurations in terms of energy consumption, producing designs that are very close to the optimum.

The way we produce and consume energy is not sustainable. As of 2010, 90 % of primary energy consumption in Turkey is from fossil fuels, while the share of renewables is only around 6 %. Fossil fuel sources are the main contributors to human-induced climate change.

The oil industry currently plays a major role in the Canadian economy. In the future, further developments of the oil sector will be affected by the ability to transport crude oil (mainly from Western Canada) to consuming regions in Canada and abroad. This chapter analyzes different crude oil exportation scenarios based on existing pipeline expansions and the development of new pipelines. We use for this a multi-regional TIMES energy model for Canada. Our results indicate that: (i) the exporting capacity will be an important driver for oil production levels in Canada, and (ii) impacts on the other Canadian energy sectors are rather limited.

Trends in energy use are expected to increase all over the world as the population is growing together with its need for goods and comfort.