Thermal storage cooling technologies

European legislation (EU Commission and Parliament, 2002, 2010) and worldwide standards and guidelines (California Energy Commission, 2016; Wright and Klingenberg, 2015), on the matter of energy efficiency of the construction sector, underline the need to reduce, as much as possible, the cooling energy demands of buildings, according to the universal future standards of net and nearly zero-energy buildings. Indeed, by considering the general trend of global warming (Santamouris et al., 2015), the reduction of costs of air-conditioning (A/C) technologies, and the hyper-insulation of buildings due to the necessity of high performances during the heating season (Ascione et al., 2015; Santamouris, 2016), in the near future, the requirements of summer air-conditioning, given the present level of building activity, would continue to increase.