Climate change and global warming as an anthropological phenomenon, which is significantly a result of fossil fuel consumption in the building environment, needs to be addressed urgently. In this regard, ‘Nearly Zero Energy Building and Communities (NZEB&C) has been introduced in order to establish a bilateral solution including building energy efficiency and renewable energy resources application at both building and neighbourhood levels simultaneously. Both the energy performance of the existing building and their energy systems should be improved to be more efficient and the demand on the built environment needs to be fully supplied by the local renewable resources by 2050. NZEB means the annual energy usage of a building is equal to the annual on-site energy generation while the consumption is at the lowest level. Addressing the energy systems integration, energy network efficiency, and application of renewable resources at the community level is more efficient and cost effective in the long term compared with the individual building measures. In the proposed panel, the importance of NZEB&C will be addressed. During this session NZEB, where sustainable building level measures are combined with local renewable potentials (NZEC) to balance the energy demand/supply and create an optimum link between a buildings and communities from smart energy management perspective will be discussed in detail. Smart thermal grids (STGs) are able to perform the same function as Smart Grids (SGs), but are introduced in order to allow the integration of the decentralized heating and cooling sources and to provide the required energy when needed through efficient resource utilization and intelligent management. In this panel the integration and interfacing of the two important concepts (STGs-SGs) will also be addressed. In this connection the result of the two recent completed European projects, Smart Urban Isle[i] and KoWaNet[ii] will be presented to demonstrate the synergies of the
