TITLE:
Demonstration of the Nearly Zero Energy Building Concept
AUTHORS:
Marjana Šijanec Zavrl, Gašper Stegnar, Henrik Gjerkeš
KEYWORDS:
Nearly Zero Energy Building, Demonstration Project, Cost-Optimal, Highrise
JOURNAL NAME:
Journal of Geoscience and Environment Protection,
Vol.3 No.6,
August
25,
2015
ABSTRACT: Nearly zero energy buildings (nZEB) will
become an obligatory energy efficiency standard in Europe. Following to common
guidelines in European legislation, the countries investigated technical and
economic framework for the preparation of detailed national technical
definition of nZEB. Slovenia accepted the nZEB criteria in early 2015. This
paper describes the technical and economic background for identification of
economically viable concepts of highly energy efficient apartment building. The
highrise demonstration building Eco Silver House revealed that meeting nZEB standards
was not an easy task, not so much for technical reasons, but mostly due to the
processes, inadequate skills, not fully compliant regulation and insufficient
possibilities for interaction between the building and energy networks.
Analysis of cost effectiveness showed that the Eco Silver House fulfilled
minimal requirements of cost-optimal for apartment building with Net Present
Value of 272 EUR/m2 and Primary energy use of 79 kWh/ m2?a in line with the
Slovenian national cost optimal study of minimum energy performance
requirements from the year 2014. At the time, the requirement of 50% share of
renewables in final energy use is not fulfilled, but will be easily reached
when EU2020 energy efficiency targets set in the Slovenian Energy Act regarding
the RES share in district heating systems and public power grid will be
gradually implemented. The demonstration project FP7 EE-HIGHRISE confirms that
in spite of the barriers, the nZEB minimum requirements defined on profound theoretical
studies can be met in practice.