CEPHEUS - A Europe wide passive house implementation

»The Passive House standard: High comfort, minimal energy consumption, negligible heating costs – Pollution prevention pays!« CEPHEUS – a project involving the construction and scientific evaluation of ca. 250 housing units built to Passive House standards in five European countries – has set itself the following goals: • To demonstrate technical feasibility (in terms of achieving the targetted energy performance indexes) at low extra cost (target: compensation of extra investment cost by cost savings during use) for an array of different buildings and designs implemented by architects and developers in a variety of European countries; • To study investor-purchaser acceptance and user behaviour under real-world conditionsfor a representative range of buildings; • To test the implementability of the Passive House quality standard throughout Europe with regard to cost-efficient planning and construction; • To provide opportunities for both the lay and the expert public to experience the Passive House standard hands-on at several sites in Europe; • To give development impulses for the design of energy- and cost-efficient buildings and for the further development and accelerated market introduction of individual, innovative technologies compliant with Passive House standards; • To create the preconditions for broad market introduction of cost-efficient Passive Houses; • To illustrate, for the concrete example of the Hannover-Kronsberg subproject, the potential of the Passive House standard to provide a basis on which it is possible to meet the energy requirements of new housing in a manner that is both cost-efficient and, in sum over the whole year, produces zero greenhouse gas emissions (climate neutrality criterion); • To present this sustainable – fully primary-energy and climate neutral – approach to the energy supply of new housing developments at the EXPO 2000 World Exposition in Hanover, in conjunction with all CEPHEUS subprojects.