Categorie: retrofit
(this text was send as an open letter to the installations industry , media and policymakers, on 26 March 2020) What is happening around the corona virus today, is understandable and needed, health is paramount. Let that be clear. But we experience with Corona, what we will also have to…
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…
It sometimes seems that the built environment, and the adjustments to achieve a sustainable society, are of the same nature everywhere. But that is by no means the case when we zoom out, to Europe for example. There should be no less than 250 million homes become energy-neutral.* [1] A…
As I wrote more often, the Netherlands is focused on developing zero energy retrofits. Most of these initiatives address the whole house, packed in thick prefab elements, and powered by PV panels for the ( reduced) heating demand plus the full household demand. I have my doubts about this extensive…
It started dawning, the past weeks, as I was listening to some presentations on several events I visited. Have you ever wondered what in fact it means, renovation or retrofitting houses and buildings for 0-energy performance? A focus on operational energy, for heating and ventilating, has become completely irrelevant. It…
