Active house : reality or utopia ? Simulation under dynamic conditions of a case study in extreme climates, and related designing and energy variables emerged

In the last decades, the need to replace fossil sources with clean and renewable ones and to reduce energy dependency and greenhouse gas emissions of buildings has become increasingly strong. The Directive on the Energy Performance of Buildings (EPBD) has stipulated that by 2020 all new constructions within Europe should reach nearly zero-energy levels. The following research is based on the study of one of the most efficient buildings existent, in terms of energy demand and consumption, respect of the environment and indoor comfort, but still poorly spread worldwide: the Active House, also known as the house which produces more energy than consumed. The study aims to demonstrate whether it is possible to obtain an Active House even in northern extreme climatic conditions, lowering as much as possible the heating energy demand without resorting to the renewables, but only focusing on the envelope’s quality, and it emphasizes the importance of the use of a dynamic simulation tool in doing it. After a brief introduction on the theory known about this kind of building (chapter 1), the research takes into consideration seven case studies placed at different latitudes within the European context, and analyzes the differences and the characteristics that remain unchanged despite the latitudes, trying to draw up the principal guidelines of an Active House (chapter 2). Afterwards it is considered the case of a sustainable project placed in central Norway (chapter 3), and it is used the dynamic simulation to analyze the actual demand of energy of the building, the indoor comfort and the envelope’s performance, in order to test whether the building is Active or only low-energy (chapter 4). The simulations over the same project are subsequently ran at the latitudes of the case studies analyzed previously, to prove how climatic conditions and latitudes greatly affect buildings’ energy demand. Lastly, thanks to the dynamic simulation results, the case in exam is subjected to changes mainly on the envelope, and after the last dynamic simulation it is obtained an almost zero energy building. Renewables are introduced in the final part to cover only the electricity demand of the building.