The Nordic Built “Active Roofs and Facades” project is supported by Nordic Innovation allowing for strong development of leading Nordic competences in the area of building renovation.
This is achieved by creating transnational Public Private Partnership models to support the development towards nearly zero energy building solutions and associated performance documentation – which is required in the EU building directive.
The proposed cooperation with the building industry on developing models and the demonstration of “Active House” based sustainable renovation will create a strong Nordic alliance.
The project runs from 2014 to 2017 and will involve companies which are represented in the Nordic countries, and companies from the international Active House Alliance, www.activehouse.info. The development will use the best transnational competences and networks, creating greater possibilities to export technology.
The background of building renovation in both Nordic and European projects, where actual energy use is quite often 30-40% higher in practice compared to what was expected from calculations, and where innovative solutions are seldom used, is very much connected to the way the building industry is organised. Here, consultants will normally only want to operate in a conservative way, because they are not only selling their expertise, but also the insurance that goes with it, and also because consultants fees have been considerably reduced, so it is common to work with well-known large suppliers who can contribute to large parts of the design process. This means there is a tendency to not choose the most energy efficient solutions but to allow more mediocre and old fashioned solutions, that the suppliers prefer. Also, because it is common knowledge that detailed performance of equipment in practice is never controlled, then there is no incentive to perform better, and higher energy use will often be explained by the user behaviour.
A main issue of the proposed Nordic Built project will be to realise the renovation projects in a much better way and secure positive involvement of consultants, so they can be more proactive, e.g. by full scale testing of innovative solutions before large scale implementation, and by monitoring key performance indicators as a basis for negotiating guarantees of performance results as part of the overall procurement process, something which also might be used to avoid normal tendering in connection to development of renovation projects.
An important challenge is to introduce holistic oriented demands in the so-called Nordic Built Charter in practice in involved demonstration projects. See: http://www.cenergia.dk/da/images/Nyheder/2014NordicBuilt/150108nordicbuilt.pdf
Added value in Nordic Built Active Roofs and Facades in Sustainable Renovation Coordinated by the Danish energy specialist company Cenergia, the project will utilise the results from the recently finalised EU-Concerto project Green Solar Cities ( www.greensolarcities.com ).
These results will be presented in a book by Routledge/Earthscan in early 2015. See: www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415731195/
The main results from Copenhagen are illustrated in the two small videos below: http://vimeo.com/98926904 and http://vimeo.com/98926905
