The Thermography and Consulting Campaign of the Austrian state Styria was initiated five years ago by the department of housing funding (A 15). The campaign helps building owners with practically relevant building renovation measures and is coordinated by the Grazer Energieagentur (energy agency of the city of Graz).
Dramatically increasing energy prices and the future EU building directive, which require “energy certificates”, make it obvious: an energetic modernisation of existing buildings is a reasonable and necessary investment in the future. For a broad implementation, there is a need of new instruments, for example a combination of comprehensive information and consultancy as well as ecologically oriented public support.
AEE INTEC carries out consultations for solar thermal applications for single and multi-family houses as well as plannings for tiled stove applications in combination with solar thermal systems.
PHOT: SUNMASTER
The development of the use of solar energy in Austria and Europe since the start of the 1980s as well as the Austrian companies and industries involved in marketing this technology, have been documented in the study "Solar energy - a significant economic factor".
One of the important goals of this study was the determination of the number of jobs provided in the thermal solar energy sector and the added economic value created by this sector. Furthermore, the predicted effect of achieving the goals given in the European Commission white paper "Energy for the Future: Renewable Sources of Energy", was investigated in order to better evaluate the economic significance of the use of thermal solar energy.
GleisdorfSolar 2004
AEE INTEC organises excursions, seminars, symposiums and workshops to all topics in our working field.
On the background of increasing costs for the main materials of solar thermal collectors polymeric materials offers a significant cost-reduction potential for all-polymeric flat-plate collectors in the low temperature field of application. However, as the long-term service temperature of cost-efficient plastics is limited for potential applications in solar absorbers an appropriate design including overheating protection is essential. The stagnation behaviour may be controlled by thermotropic layers. Such layers change their light transmission behaviour depending on the temperature. Development objectives for such layers were calculated by theoretical modelling.
The operation of ten thousand Austrian office and administrative buildings ensures an enormous annual consumption of energy, where climatisation plays a central role. The cooling in office and administrative buildings in the European Union show a demand of 193 PJ, which is a crude oil equivalent of 4,608 million tons (EU, 2000)...
The energy needed for heating, cooling and ventilation of buildings in the industrial countries represent over 30% of the entire primary energy demand. The building sector is therewith, next to the sectors “transportation” and “agriculture”, one of the main contributors to the greenhouse emission CO2. These facts and the goals in the Kyoto agreement show the importance of the identification of sustainable solutions for the building sector, which will long- to middle-term considerably reduce the emissions that arise from the operation of a building.
The building sector presently covers approximately 40% of the total energy demand in the EU. This energy demand can be reduced to 22% through implementation of relevant saving measures, if the economical frameworks are advantageous. These figures clearly show the importance of working active with “the increase in the energy efficient in buildings”. Important, legal frameworks shall be created through the implementation of the EU building directive.
Source: Nussmüller Architekten
This project treats a global renovation of a residential estate built in the 1960s in the context of council housing in a laggard region. The point is to optimise the renovation in all partitions which include habitation with a systemic approach in an interdisciplinary team.