Categorie: 0-energy
It’s time to shine a light on an old technique: shutters. (No, I’m not following in the footsteps of Lowtech Magazine, but sometimes our paths cross).Shutters are as old as building itself, even predating the invention of glass. There was no glass back then, so how do you keep the…
In projects with students, it regularly clashes between economic and environmental cq climate objectives, and thus also between real estate and building physics tutors. Or between ‘the project developer’ and the ‘energy calculator’. And the battle is fought over the heads of the students ; they have to find a…
Since we are in an energy transition , in which we completely switch to renewable energy, the energy at building level will mainly have to come from solar energy. We assume that, the more local energy the better, and a ‘0 energy house’, including compensation for material energy, to be…
Slowly understanding growth that with regard to CO2, it is not so much about gradual reductions, but about staying within an absolute maximum: the Carbon budget. The maximum amount of CO2 that can still be emitted to maintain a chance of a maximum of 1.5 degrees of warming. Recently I…
As we want to get rid of fossil fuels, we will at least have to develop everything now without fossil fuels. And in any case the operational energy. In the case of new buildings this leads to “0-energy buildings”, which generate as much renewable energy as required, locally, and thus…
Now that Corona has us tight down, we see that countries are being thrown back on themselves. Local production of medicines and protective clothing is being started up, and there is growing belief that we need to arrange much more locally. Some were already aware of this and explored its…
So I went to Eigg. I had already heard about it, and also wrote about it, on the basis of information collected at a distance. But I wanted to know what was really behind it, and why it had happened. Where? On the island of Eigg, off the West coast…
In the Netherlands most houses are heated by natural gas, but now we want to phase out that gas heating. Which of course is in principle easy: just close the tap, which is in the gas-fields in the North of the country. What would happen then, apart from a lot…
The Co2 emissions of our housing stock needs to brought to 0. And in the Netherlands we have the target to become natural gas free as well , and even sooner. Plans how to act are launched one after the other. But they are all object-oriented, the house, or technology-oriented,…
Why didn’t we realize this before… Since a year or two there has been a working group of a number of collaborating researchers in Europe, under the wings of an international NGO (iiSBE) who are investigating what the ‘carbon budget’ implies for the construction sector or the built environment. The…
