wohnsolar!

Currently there are almost 13 million square meters of collector area (flat plate and vacuum collector) installed in Austria. 95% of these are solar thermal systems running in single-family houses. The remaining part is applied for the heat generation in multiple-family houses, tourism, sports facilities and in district heating networks. Although approximately half of the Austrian population lives in multiple-family houses, only 1000 systems where installed up to now. This is a factor 10 lower than the collector area installed on single-family houses.

The goal for this project is to reach the target groups (from building promoter, architects and planners to end users) with the topics “sustainable construction” and “energy supply with environmental energy sources” and thereby greatly increase the market penetration of solar thermal systems in multiple-family houses.

A highly ambitious goal for the results of this project is to gain a building promoter in each federal state, who will include sustainable construction in his working approach and who will involve a minimum standard of energy efficiency and sustainable construction in all of his future projects.

This building promoter should at the same time serve as a “light house” function and motivate other companies to copy its approach.

The essential steps of project to reach the targets are:

• bundle the existing knowledge gained from national and international projects within “sustainable building” and “energy supply with environmental energy sources”
• Know-how transfer to all relevant target groups: workshop for planners, catalogue on quality criteria, planning handbooks – definition of best practice examples
• Support precise implementation projects by applying an integral planning approach
• updating of the criteria catalogue through cooperation with ongoing quality assurance projects (Haus der Zukunft)
• tight cooperation and coordination with the program “solarwärme” and “Haus” from the climate protection initiative “klima:aktiv” from the federal ministry for agriculture, forestry, environment and water management.