Craig Morris has been doing some of the best reporting on the emerging renewable superpower, Germany.
He has now produced a movie on the subject, broken down into a number of shorts on his website.
I’ll be posting them here one by one, or check out the site to watch the rest.
We just installed 5 kWp on the roof of our new house today! Okay, in Austria, but we speak German here. 😉
The array will produce around 5500 kWh a year. My family will probably need 3500-4000 kWh (heating/cooling inclusive), so the house will be an EnergiePlusHaus.
Excellent news Neven, congratulations!
I’d love to do the same but my options in a ground floor flat are a bit limited at the moment.
It took us more than 5 years to get to this point, Andy (and still not done, never done). It takes a lot of time to improve things, and they can be destroyed in the blink of an eye. But I guess that’s one of life’s lessons to be learned.
If we ever get to achieve everything we want to, then there’s no point living!
20 years ago I coated a 1.2m satellite dish in aluminium foil and was awestruck with what it could do.
Of course, being English, the first thing I did was to make a cup of tea with it :), using a candle to coat the base of a pan with soot to absorb the heat.
Was just a few quid for a fusion powered boiler. I’ll make a portable one for next summer, put it in the shared garden for a few days and see what it can do.
As a household that’s about the German average for annual electricity consumption.
Are there (m)any Passivhaus(es) in Austria? That’s a design philosophy that really needs to catch on quicker, especially on North America.
Are there (m)any Passivhaus(es) in Austria?
I believe that per capita Austria has the most Passivhauses in the world. Unfortunately it’s still only 5% of new houses being built.
We’re also trying to build one, but as we designed it ourselves and are building most of it ourselves, I’m not sure we’ll be reaching the standards required by the official certificate. But we’ll get close enough.
What’s very important is that it is built out of wood, otherwise it takes much more energy and CO2 to build. A Passivhaus made of brick and concrete doesn’t really reach its goal (to save energy). At least, that’s how I look at it.