The city district of Bahnstadt in Heidelberg, Germany, has passed the test—its monitoring system has confirmed it meets all of the energy efficiency values it strived for.
Measurements were carried out by monthly meter readings of the total heat consumption in several blocks with more than 100 apartments in each. Last year, the average consumption of 1260 housing units with a total living area of more than 75,000 m² (807,293 sf) was 14.9kWh, which resulted in approximately 80 percent savings and was lower than the Passive House limit value of 15kWh.
“The evaluation of the consumption data proves that the efforts made by the City of Heidelberg to design an entire city district to a high standard in terms of energy efficiency based on future-oriented specifications and corresponding quality assurance have been tremendously successful,” said Søren Peper of the Passive House Institute.
Bahnstadt is a significant project for Passive House. It is a mix of residential and commercial buildings covering 116 ha (287 acres) of land previously used as a freight railway station. Once it is fully developed, up to 12,000 people will be living and working in it.
Read the full report on Bahnstadt here.
For more on the Passive House concept, see the forthcoming November 2015 issue of The Construction Specifier.
