Active House: A holistic approach to sustainable construction

Active House is a vision of buildings that create healthier and more comfortable lives for their occupants without negatively impacting the surrounding environment.

UK Construction spoke to Peder Vejsig Pedersen, Director of the Denmark-based Cenergia, about his work with the Active House Alliance, the Organisation’s remit and the challenges facing sustainability in the construction industry.

For the uninitiated, could you provide our readers with an introduction to the Active House Alliance?

The Active House Alliance was originally established in April 2010 during a conference held in Brussels. There, both the board of directors and the advisory board for the Alliance was agreed. The board of directors currently includes representatives from such organisations as The VELUX Group, Saint-Gobain and Hunter Douglas. The London-based architectural practice, HTA, is a member of the advisory board besides Cenergia and others.

Since then, the Alliance has – with a lot of specialist involvement – developed the Active House Specification. As part of this there are three key areas – energy, comfort and environment – and for each of these there are three sub-categories. Each category helps document the quality of a building project and its eligibility for the Active House label.

Previously, there has been a lot of discussion about how to show that a project lives up to the Active House standard. The Alliance decided upon a simple label, with a minimum demand in all nine areas of quality, so that successful developers are able to promote their project as being Active House compliant. A specialist institution has also been elected to verify projects that aim to live up to this standard. The Alliance has established networks to other associations worldwide and, in the UK, there is cooperation with the Good Homes Alliance.

How did you come to be involved in the Active House Alliance?

I was actually quite involved in the creation of the concept of the Active House Alliance. In 2005, Cenergia worked with The VELUX Group on an iconic project – sol tag or solar roof in English. This was a zero energy building, which used building integrated PV, heat pumps and so on. It was developed as an energy neutral rooftop apartment in Copenhagen and used as an exhibition house.

That was the start of our cooperation and, in 2006, The VELUX Group became very focused on the climate agenda and wanted to promote a standard for these kinds of energy neutral buildings.

How does the Active House Specification differ from The Passivhaus Standard?

I think Active House Alliance should be viewed in the context of European development in the low energy building sector. There has been some quite considerable success with Passivhaus – at Cenergia we made the first Passivhaus project in Denmark. But it was felt that the Passivhaus quality was limited to the climate shield. Though they’re very efficient buildings, comfort and sustainability are not the focus.

Some of the larger companies like ROCKWOOL and VELUX thought that it would be good to have a simple labelling system that had the same qualities as Passivhaus, but with additional focus on energy, comfort and environment also.

Can buildings be comfortable, energy efficient and environmentally friendly, whilst also remaining cost effective?

It’s very possible, but you have to be smart. We’re seeing the same thing with Passivhaus. Though there’s a lot of insulation involved, it is more to do with the qualities that you aim for rather than the cost to avoid potential code breaches.

For Passivhaus, we have seen that you need to have high performance windows. But triple glazing decreases in cost the more that it is used, meaning – at least in Scandinavian climates – that it is becoming the standard solution.

The concept of heat recovery has also become a standard feature in new buildings during the last five to ten years, and with it the demand for air tightness has risen. It’s something new but it adds to the comfort of the building while also ensuring better ventilation and very low heat loss.

We’ve seen the same development for solar solutions. Solar PV systems have dropped in price very rapidly and now, in Denmark, you can actually buy facade and roofing materials that can be architecturally integrated so that they look almost like a normal aspect.

If it’s not a matter of cost, is the challenge changing attitudes in the construction industry?

Yes. That’s where the challenge is, I think. The EU building directive arrived in 2002 and, in 2006, it was introduced into the Danish building regulations. Since then, we have worked within the ever increasing demands of these directions. Still, if you follow new regulations – the Danish Building Regulations 2015, for example – you can also employ the Building 2020 standard, which is 25% better and normally involves some sort of renewable energy.

But the big challenge is not really new builds, where renewables cost relatively little and are now part of standard practice, but existing buildings. It’s a very different situation in different European countries. The social housing sector has a lot of old concrete buildings from the sixties, for example. In Denmark, there is a special system for social housing – tenants pay an extra fee of five to ten percent on top of their normal rent. That fee goes into a special fund for social housing stock, meaning that social housing associations can apply for funding for the renovation of their buildings.

This is possible in Denmark, but in Sweden they don’t have that kind of fund. They need to find other ways of financing improvements to existing building stock and that can be more difficult.

How does the UK’s sustainably credentials stack up against other countries in Europe?

We have done several projects in the UK over the years, with EU funding in some cases. It was always a little more difficult than in Denmark because of the simple fact that energy in Denmark is very expensive. We have a lot of taxes on both electricity and heating, while the UK has less than half the cost, and with no VAT on energy. This means that the business of improving a building becomes more difficult because the payback is not as good.

On the other hand, my impression is that there is now a focus on this and the overall climate agenda in the UK.

Generally speaking, is the construction industry doing enough to encourage the use of sustainable construction techniques? What more can be done?

That’s a good question. The idea behind the Active House label is the focus on certain qualities and the documentation of those qualities. It has not been standard practice to show how good a building is performing on different criteria, but there’s no doubt that this will be a demand in the future and it is part of the EU building directive. All countries will need to introduce performance documentation of buildings before 2020.

What we have seen is that it’s actually Sweden – our neighbour country – that has put this into practice. It is part of their building regulations and that has changed their whole way of working.

The construction industry, together with building owners, must focus on how to measure building performance across a range of criteria. This has a tremendous effect on the quality of Swedish building projects. We’re hoping that this will come to Denmark in the next few years, but all European countries will need to follow it eventually.

How do you see the Active House Alliance continuing to develop in the future?

Once we’ve introduced the labelling system this spring, the hope is that it can be linked to a focus on performance documentation. You will be able to calculate that a building lives up to a certain standard, while also showing how a building performs in practice.

For more information about the Active House Alliance, please visit: http://ift.tt/1kDyjch

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