PassiveHouseDataBase - International Passive House and Passive House Plus Database

Status

completed

Summary

Motivation

The project’s objective is to establish a platform for international passive house stakeholders by means of an European-wide database to transfer comprehensive knowledge of the energetic standard of passive houses and to promote sustainable and resource-saving buildings.

In particular, the database is intended to support implementation of the climate protection and energy strategy targets of the United Nations (UN) and the decisions of the European Commission, the European Parliament and other national or international bodies due to its international acknowledgement. From 2020 onwards all new buildings within the EU have to meet the requirements of a "nearly zero energy building", which are based on passive house components.

The database is evidence for the practicability of state-of-the art and energy-saving building standards between a passive house and a passive house "plus". Therefore, it is proved that the passive-house standard makes a decisive contribution to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions in Europe by 25 – 40% by 2020 and at least 80% by 2050 (according to the emissions level of 1990). This reduction is considered as an absolutely necessary measure to contain dramatic worldwide climate changes as far as possible.

For this purpose, the core cooperation scheme under this project comprised both planning and implementation of the database and merging the data stocks of databases so far developed separately by the project partners IG Passivhaus Österreich and PHD GmbH. Those databases are developed by IG Passivhaus Österreich and funded by subsidies granted under the framework program „House of the Future“ as well as a database financed by own funds and developed by PHD GmbH (www.passivhausprojekte.de). The data contained in both databases have been prepared within the project, their contents reviewed for providing a structure to be applied all over Europe and harmonized for European-wide use due to quality assurance reasons. This was mostly done by using experience already gathered by PHD GmbH. The database implemented within the project serves as basis of a first European-wide - later on international - database operated jointly by the two project partners. The purpose of pooling and extending the data stock is to offer in a more attractive way and increase external feedback.

Additionally, cooperation with partners under the „Passnet“ EU project and with further international partners was established to ensure promotion of the international aspects of the database and expansion of the data stock. Currently, the database contains 2088 buildings, thereof 765 from Austria, which are available in 14 languages. Both the number of buildings and languages is constantly increasing.

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 to provide a clear analysis of the functionality and quality of passive houses and passive house “plus” buildings. This will help to establish the world’s largest database for highly efficient buildings within a very brief time span. In early 2011 there will be more than 3000 passive houses documented in detail and according to uniform quality standards. Some of them will be passive house “plus” buildings and more than 300 buildings will provide evaluation results as well.

Project management

Johannes Kislinger
IG Passivhaus Österreich

Project or cooperation partner

• Passivhaus Dienstleistung GmbH
• Institut für Konstruktion und Materialwissenschaften der Universität Innsbruck, Arbeitsbereich Bauphysik
• BOKU – IKI Wien, Arbeitsgruppe Ressourcenorientiertes
• Bauen Dr. Alexander Keul, Angewandte Psychologie

IG Passivhaus Österreich
Johannes Kislinger
Mariahilfer Straße 120
A-1070 Wien
Tel./Fax: +43 (1) 5221334
Mobile: +43 (664) 9341143
Web: www.igpassivhaus.at