Aecom has helped develop Qatar’s first energy-efficient "passive house" for a comparative study.
As a scientific partner and consultant on the project, Aecom helped build two villas side-by-side to be used in a comparative study on the benefits of the passive house design in Qatar’s hot and arid climate.
Developed by the Passivhaus Institute in Germany, the passive house concept is a set of performance standards and construction strategies – including a super-insulated building envelope – that maximise thermal performance.
The experiment hopes to show that the passive house villa can achieve a 50% reduction in annual energy and water usage, (Credit: Aecom)
One villa was built to conventional standards. The experiment hopes to demonstrate that the passive house villa can achieve a 50% reduction in annual energy and water usage, and carbon dioxide emissions.
After an initial six-month period of testing to compare the villas’ baseline performance, the homes will be occupied by two families and monitored for a year.
Passive house standards were developed in Germany during the 1990s and are now the fastest-growing energy performance standards in the world with 30,000 buildings realised to date, Aecom said.
