Daylight performance: Daylight quality and control of energy consumption

The European Commission’s Daylight-Europe (DL-E) project set out to produce design guidelines for practitioners wishing to incorporate daylight utilisation principles within buildings as a means to displace the electrical power consumption associated with artificial lighting. The intention was to produce these guidelines in a designer-friendly format, where notable examples are used to illustrate the operational and integration aspects of the different possible approaches.
Within the project simulation was applied to several existing buildings incorporating different daylight utilisation technologies. For each case studied, performance has been assessed in terms of HVAC and electrical system capacities, fuel consumption, environmental emissions, thermal and visual comfort and glare sources.