Carbon Neutral Home

VELUX Group develops a climate-neutral ‘Home for Life’

The building sector represents 40 per cent of global CO2-emission. Buildings of the future, like the VELUX Group’s single family unit ‘Home for Life’, will help reduce this figure with respect to indoor climate and architecture.

The building industry is facing serious challenges in terms of buildings of the future. Statistics show that people in the EU spend 90% of their time indoors and buildings account for 40% of all energy consumption. Hence, the VELUX Group has launched its own vision for sustainable buildings of the future, a concept by the name of Model Home 2020. The objective is to create climate-neutral buildings that optimise indoor climate, fresh air and daylight.

‘Home for Life’ is the first of six houses to be built in Europe as part of the Model Home 2020 concept. ‘Home for life’ is located in Lystrup outside Denmark’s second-largest city, Aarhus. Over the next year a family of four will live in the house which enables a real-life energy monitoring with the aim to develop the next generation of climate-neutral buildings.

The VELUX Group has a long tradition of working with experiments and Model Home 2020 is a natural continuation of that tradition. VELUX founder Villum Kann Rasmussen’s philosophy was that ‘One experiment is worth more than a thousand expert assumptions’. Model Home 2020 is part of the VELUX Group’s strategy to take an active part in developing sustainable buildings of the future, designed to synthesise a perfect balance of energy efficiency, indoor climate, architecture and leading cleantech solutions.

Each of the six houses of the Model Home concept is an experiment with the purpose of bringing us closer to the vision of designing a home that reflects the balance between climate, architecture and daylight while also developing inspiration for new standards in CO2 neutral buildings.

‘Home for Life’ systematically uses the energy from the sun. The daylight area of the house is twice the size of the daylight area of a conventional low-energy building. Strategically placed solar-cell operated roof windows offer a balanced amount of daylight to the bedrooms and the kitchen-dining room area. All roof windows have dynamic, solar-cell operated blinds on the inside and awnings on the outside. This is a family home that actually produces more energy than it consumes.

“We have built an energy-efficient house that is both comfortable to live in and offers visual appeal. That is at the heart of the concept of the holistic home – it caters for people’s health and well-being while also actively using renewable energy from the sun. We combine the features of our products to admit daylight and heat into the home, reduce heat loss at night and also manage to control the indoor climate,” says Lone Feifer, Strategic Project Manager, VELUX A/S.

The other building experiments in the Model Home 2020 concept will be situated in Austria, United Kingdom, Germany, France and Denmark, which beside ‘Home for Life’ will present ‘Green Lighthouse’, a new faculty building to Copenhagen University. The two houses in Denmark will be built as a joint venture by VELFAC and the VELUX Group.