International Passive house and Passive house Plus Database

The realised database will serve as a European wide and later as an international database, which will be operated only by the project partners and will serve as communication platform for Passive House players. Furthermore, the database will serve as an evidence for the practical feasibility for energy efficient buildings from passive houses to plus-energy buildings.

 

Project description / tasks

Status

ongoing

 

 

Summary

Motivation

The objective of the project is to establish an international work and communication platform for international passive house stakeholders by means of a European-wide database to transfer in-depth knowledge about the energetic standard of the passive house and thus make a decisive contribution to demonstrate and promote sustainable and energy efficient buildings.

 

 

Contents and goals

In particular, the database is to serve as an internationally acknowledged database for decision-makers of the European Commission and the European Parliament as well as all national and European bodies for implementing the European climate protection and energy strategy objectives for 2020 and, in accordance with the recommendations of the European Parliament of 31 January 2008, to contribute to establishing the passive house as the general standard in Europe by the year 2011. Pursuant to the resolution tabled by the EU Parliament on 4 February 2009, it shall help to achieve the target of a zero net energy balance in new residential buildings from 2015 onwards. This is to ensure that the urgently needed targets can be reached, according to which Europe, by the year 2020, has to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by as much as 25 - 40 % and, by the year 2050, by at least 80 % of the level of 1990, in order to still contain the dramatic changes of worldwide climate as much as possible. Another important aspect of the database is to serve as a platform for proving the practicability of state-of-the-art energy-saving building standards between those of passive houses and passive houses "plus".

 

 

Methods of treatment

For this purpose, the core cooperation scheme under this project comprises both planning and implementation of the database and bringing together the data stock of the databases so far developed separately by the project partners IG Passivhaus Österreich and Passivhausdienstleistung GmbH (PHD GmbH). Those databases include the database funded by subsidies granted under the framework programme "Building of tomorrow" and developed by IG Passivhaus Österreich (www.igpassivhaus.at) and a database financed by own funds of PHD GmbH (www.passivhausprojekte.de). The data contained in both databases will be edited in the project, their contents reviewed for providing a structure to be applied all over Europe and harmonized for European wide use to safeguard quality. This is done mostly by using the experience already gathered by PHD GmbH in respect of quality assuring structures and their essential development. The database to be implemented under the project is to serve as the basis of a first European wide, later on international database, created for an indefinite period of time, and operated jointly and solely by the two partners of the project. The purpose of pooling and extending the data stock is to make the database offering in the target sector more attractive and increase its response.

Additionally, cooperation with partners under the EU project "Pass-Net - establishment of a co-operation network of Passive House promoters" (www.pass-net.net) and with further international partners is envisaged so as to ensure sustainable promotion of the international aspects of the database and expansion of the data stock. As a first step, it is planned to prepare the data offering in nine languages.

 

 

Expected results / conclusions

The purpose of the new evaluation tool is to give a first systematic overview of a larger number of buildings including metered and empirically established values and figures and, in doing so, to provide a clear analysis of the functionality and quality of passive houses and passive house "plus" buildings. This will help to establish, within a very brief time span, the world's largest database for highly efficient buildings, which, as early as by the end of 2010, will have documented in detail and according to uniform quality standards more than 3000 passive houses, some of them passive house "plus" buildings, of which more than 300 buildings will provide evaluation results as well.

 

 

Project partners

IG Passivhaus Austria
Network for information, quality and further education

Project and cooperation partner

 

Contact address

Ing. Günter Lang, IG Passivhaus Österreich
Hollandstraße 10/46, A-1020 Wien
Tel.: +43 (650) 900 20 40
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