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ZEB
annual report 2014
SUMMARY
In 2014 we completed the first demonstration
buildings together with our partners
Arild Gustavsen
Centre Director ZEB
|
Professor NTNU
2014 has been a year with many important
results for our Research Centre on Zero
Emission Buildings (ZEB). The first
demonstration buildings were completed; the
new residential building Multikomfort Larvik,
the renovated office building Powerhouse
Kjørbo, and the first dwellings at Skarpnes.
The demonstration projects show how new
and existing technologies can be combined
into making state-of-the-art zero emission
buildings. All projects have received a lot
of attention in the building community, both
in Norway and internationally. Multikomfort
Larvik is nominated for the Mies van der Rohe
Award 2015, The European Union Prize for
Contemporary Architecture, which is granted
every two years to acknowledge and reward
quality architectural production in Europe.
Snøhetta is the architect and Br. Dahl and
Optimera are the building owners.
We have studied barriers against high
environmental ambitions located on the side
of the building owner and how the additional
cost of an energy efficient building is framed
in the Norwegian public. The main barriers
against maintaining high environmental goals
in large building projects were identified
in internal goals that are not binding,
environmental product declarations (EPDs)
that are difficult to use, and transitional
periods in the planning and building process.
We found four dominant ways of framing
additional costs of energy efficient buildings: a
focus on innovation, on environmental costs,
on energy efficiency measures and on direct
profitability for the construction firm. These
frames influence profoundly how the numbers
that are presented as “additional cost” are
produced, presented and evaluated.
Optimizing the building envelope and its
components is one of the key factors in order
to reduce the energy demand of buildings.
One study investigates the potential of using
new and promising glazing technologies like
thin polymer and glass films to improve the
thermal performance, and another study
explores the solar properties of a double
glazing unit filled with a phase change
material (PCM). A third study deals with the
search for the optimal window-to-wall ratio
(WWR) in different climates for an office
building. The optimal WWR value was found