Lighting the Passivhaus

Between 12th and 13th of April this year, I attended the twelth annual Passivhaus conference in Nuremberg. For those of you who have not yet heard of Passivhaus design it is a performance based set of design criteria, developed in Darmstadt, Germany about sixteen years ago with the aim of producing very low energy buildings.
The crux of the design performance for Passivhaus is that buildings be designed with high levels of insulation and air-tightness and use mechanical heat recovery ventilation (MHRV) and passive solar design principles with the end result that a building should require little or no space heating.
Passivhaus designs should perform to energy use criteria for heating and cooling of no more than 15kWh/m2a and have an overall primary energy consumption (inclusive of energy use for electrical appliances and lighting) of no more than 120kWh/m2a. To date over 6000 accredited Passivhaus designs have been built, primarily in Europe but with some in the US.
Well, I hear you say, all very good stuff, but what has this got to do with lighting design? Actually this could have a great impact on the way that we look at approaching lighting design for UK buildings in the future for the following reasons.
Firstly as we all know by now, in the UK just under 50% of CO2 emissions come from buildings in use and construction. As a signatory of the Kyoto Protocol the UK has agreed to try and meet targets for the reduction of CO2 and GHG (Green House Gases) with the aim of reducing these emissions by a minimum of 60% of 1990 levels by 2050.
In order to try and meet part of these GHG reductions the UK Government has set a target that all new homes in England should be ‘zero carbon’ by 2016 with the target for Wales for ‘zero carbon’ homes being 2011! There are also plans to extend these targets to all new buildings.
Largely speaking, in terms of building design, in order to achieve near to or ‘zero carbon’ buildings, one of the acknowledged best proven methods to date, is the use Passivhaus design principles. This is because our buildings currently consume the vast proportion of energy in use for heating and cooling.
As we strive towards increasing the performance in terms of energy reduction in buildings and look towards lowering and eventually negating the need for space heating, the other sources of energy consumption start to develop a greater significance e.g. lighting.
This means that in the future low energy building, there will be greater pressure on ensuring that lighting energy loads are controlled and reduced. This will also put a greater emphasis on the integration of natural lighting with artificial lighting in building design, so as to maximise ‘free’ solar energy both for daylight and solar gain. Thus, it is likely that lighting designers and engineers will have to be more creative with light sources and equipment and pay greater consideration to the holistic impacts of their designs, so as to produce attractive, functional, well controlled and low energy solutions. They are also likely to have to work at earlier design stages of a project so as interface with the entire design team and avoid bolt-on lighting design solutions. This could be a good thing since it will give lighting designers greater power in influencing a building’s overall design.
In terms of the European approach to low energy building design, according to the PassivHaus Institut, the city of Frankfurt has now adopted the Passivhaus standards as requirements for all new public buildings and Denmark has set a target that all new housing should meet Passivhaus standards by 2020. The US military are also currently building some test Passivhaus designs for their troops in Germany to see if this method of design will be applicable for all their buildings worldwide. Also according to the Passivhaus Institut, there are calls on the European Parliament
‘to propose a binding requirement that all new buildings to be heated and/or cooled and be constructed to passive house or equivalent non-residential standards from 2011 onwards, and a requirement to use passive heating and cooling solutions from 2008’.
Whether or not Passivhaus standards per se will be adopted as the norm in the UK in the future is yet to be seen, however the route that is being trodden is quite similar, towards an overall reduction in energy use for all new UK buildings inclusive of the lighting design.