KNOTZER, ARMIN1

1) Dipl.-Ing., AEE – Institute for Sustainable Technologies (AEE INTEC), dept. Sustainable Buildings, a.knotzer@aee.at

Until 2008 there was an unbroken development towards high thermal-energetic building standards in Austria, based on the EPBD 2002 and the Kyoto climate goals. The economic crisis brought up first doubts on the ambitious targets of the building sector and investors were not able to achieve these high performance standards feasibly. Contrary to these developments and after the release of EPBD 2010 the Austrian standard “OIB Guideline No.6” [2] has been tightened again, but now is queried. Did officials outpace technicians and politicians with these rules? Can less rigorous building standards be smarter when complemented with renewable energy generation, maybe with even better primary energy and CO2-emission balances?

In order to find answers to these questions AEE INTEC together with national project partners analysed different energy supply systems of single buildings and building clusters with different thermal standards. The energy supply systems were developed in expert discussions, checked by experienced technicians and fed into simulation tools like Polysun and TRNSYS. Results were generated for different ratio of e.g. solar thermal or PV on-site-generation regarding primary energy and CO2-emission assessment. The results show that smart buildings could be both, very energy efficient “passive” ones or less energy efficient “active” ones upgraded with renewables-generation on-site.

Keywords: Energy Efficiency, Smart Active Buildings, Renewables