The Goal of Green Building and Sustainable Architecture is Achieve by Zero Energy Building

A net zero-energy building (ZEB) is a residential or commercial building with greatly reduced energy needs through efficiency gains such that the balance of energy needs can be supplied with renewable technologies. Despite the excitement over the phrase “zero energy,” we lack a common definition, or even a common understanding, of what it means. In this paper, we use a sample of current generation low-energy buildings to explore the concept of zero energy: what it means, why a clear and measurable definition is needed, and how we have progressed toward the ZEB goal. It is difficult to find a building, which can be named the first Zero Energy/Emission Building (ZEB). One of the reasons could be that maybe ZEB is not a new concept for a building, it is just a modern name for buildings, from times before district heating and electricity, heated with wood or straw and lighted with candles and domestic animals? Nevertheless, in the late seventies and early eighties appeared few articles, in which phrases ‘a zero energy house’, ‘a neutral energy autonomous house’ or ‘an energy-independent house’ were used.