Passivhauswohnen³: Facility Management for Residential Property Developers: A Key to Optimizing the Reduction of Energy and Operation Costs

Status

completed

Summary

Motivation

Passive housing technology ensures even today an astoundingly high and realistic economical savings potential. The possibilities, of additionally influencing the energy and operating costs, namely beyond the costs of primary energy, are still undervalued. This especially applies for multi-story buildings. A quality and incentive model, which can play an important role here, will come from the private property developer's level and will initiate change processes from the end user's behavior.

Contents and Objectives

As the residential property developer and general contractor, he/she reacts early enough as an applicant to the building law aim that passive housing will also be ordered as the new standard in large volume residential building.

Therefore, it will be supervised through the assistance of energy engineering authorities by means of a two-level concept: in this process, the interdisciplinary project team is involved pro-actively with the technological building challenges, at the same time it will also bring directly into focus the advantage of the end user's utilization. The research process orientates itself on three main work assumptions: work assumption 1: the "human" effect factor determines the energy efficiency! Work assumption 2: the successful implementation and trial stage of the passive house system establishes itself decisively from the "idealist tolerance" of the earlier-user generation! Work assumption 3: if the passive house should play a role in the ecological and environmental policy ranges, then it must become a "mainstream product"!

Methodological Approaches

Applied two dimensionally, "the quality and incentive model" PASSIVHAUSWOHNUNG³ focuses on the combination of two different problem areas. The first focus rotates around the property developer, whose areas of conflict, namely the ecological and economical, are increasingly under pressure. The second focus is concentrated on the interest of the future user whose concern for energy and operational cost efficiency are out of self interest (resp. should be concerned with).

1. Successful implementation of passive house standards in the building development process of KMU. The organizational framework for this project is based on elements from the risk and quality management areas. The focus is on a KMU specific or respectively, a (new) corporate classification of the entire project development and building process.
2. The foundation and evidence of passive house standard advantages through the instruments "facility management" and "operational costs guarantee" for private residence. The prospect of having 55% less energy and operation costs through PASSIVHAUSWOHNEN³ is demonstrated by a realistic overall plan: with help of an exclusive operational cost guarantee, a professional operational cost controlling, as well as specially trained building managers - in collaboration with the owner's association - past experiences will be skillfully challenged and newly regularized.

Expected Results

The technological advancement has also reached a historical peak in the field of environmental building. Today's innovation deficit is, in this respect, no technical deficit, but can be assumed to be more of an "implementation deficit".

A quality and incentive model, that is geared towards self motivation, should, in this regard, provide specific information:

1. action recommendations, provides the arrangements necessary for the implementation of passive house techniques, especially for those applied on a KMU level and
2. provides answers to the question, on what scale the new regulation and co-ordination instruments are necessary to aid energy efficient behavior in a residential context.

Securing Acceptance

Up till now, the decision for passive house residency is on a voluntary basis and shows a strong user sided identification with the built environment: the "passive house idealist" knows about the climate technical circumstances of comfort air conditioning appliances and shows a high tolerance level with technical disturbances. This target group stands opposed to the common residential user, who when buying a new passive house apartment simply assumes that "everything works": a cold apartment that doesn't heat up to the desired temperature immediately is not acceptable. The scenario: the first possible accusations are blamed on the property developer secondly, they are blamed on the image of passive house and along with this, the credibility of passive house technique as an applicable method for climate protection. To work against this scenario, it is essential to merge the interests of the various key policy makers effectively and target-oriented (property developers, building project facilitation departments, energy consultant institutes).

Application of the Results

The accumulated project result leads into action-specific suggested categories: on the one hand for state political building project facilitation, on the other hand for the Energy Institute Vorarlberg. The Energy Institute will then hand over the developed contents to the educational and advanced training programs in order that the regional property developers who will then be able to access these regional overlapping project results.

Furthermore, the empirical saved facts should encourage a discussion that involves the expansion of the residential building facilitation instruments.

Project management

Dr. Jeanette Moosbrugger
Hefel Wohnbau AG

Project or cooperation partner

• DI Martin Ploss
  Dr. Eckart Drössler
  Energieinstitut Vorarlberg
  Stadtstraße 33 / CCD
  6850 Dornbirn
  Tel.: +43 5574 31202-85
  Homepage: www.energieinstitut.at

Dr. Jeanette Moosbrugger
Hefel Wohnbau AG
Wolfurterstr. 15
6923 Lauterach
Tel.: +43 55 74 74302 - 70
Fax: +43 55 74 74302 - 41
E-Mail: j.moosbrugger@terminalv.at
Homepage: www.hefel.at