The Sustainable Lifestyles Accelerator – Catalyzing Change (SLA)

The new 3 year-project "The Sustainable Lifestyle Accelerator" started these days with its official kick-off meeting at the Wuppertal Institute in Germany.

The project aims at mobilizing more than 70000 private households in seven countries (Denmark, Finland, Germany, India, Mexico, Spain, Switzerland) to analyse and reduce their resource consumption and climate impact by behavioural and lifestyle changes related to housing, mobility, food, consumption and leisure activities.

The ACCELERATOR will provide tools for footprint calculation, individual roadmapping and experimenting, and sharing experiences for up-scaling in a two-lane project design where the households in each country are guided via either online or offline tools (or their combination). Local stakeholders like municipalities, academia, consumer associations, companies and retailers will play a major role for upscalling this project and creating a real societal momentum of change. 

Project management, online platform and co-creation processes for comunication, roadmapping and the general implementation strategies have started. It is planned to create a strong local support network in each country within the next weeks in order to launch the call for participation for private households and families before summer.
Project website: www.suslife.info 

Norman Foster Solar Award and Plus Energy Building Award Jury 2018

Building Integrated Photovoltaic is an important approach when it comes to sustainable building concepts based on the use of renewable energies. Producing more than 100% of its energy demand by itself and besides being a well-designed piece of attractive solar architecture is an ambition, which is not easy to meet by a building. The Norman Foster Solar Award, organized by the Swiss Solar Energy Agency, is an instrument to recognize and disseminate successful projects, which achieved these two objectives in a convincing way.

This years Norman Foster Solar Award and Plus Energy Building Award Jury, consistent of international experts from academia, industry and associations, deliberated intensively about the qualities of each individual project, before deciding the winners in both categories. New questions like building-grid interaction, energy storage and energy flexibility of buildings played a role in the discussions, beyond the aesthetic and functional qualities of BIPV. Our experience with BIPV projects and our knowledge about smart buildings and cities allowed us to contribute essentially to the discussions, representing ETSAV / UPC in this important international jury.

The winners will be officially announced and awarded together with the Swiss Solar Prize winners in an award ceremony in October 2018 in Geneve.

Annex 74 - Competitions and Living Labs

The first "Annex 74 - Competitions and Living Labs" Meeting has taken place at the EMI headquaters in Szentendre, Hungary, place of the next Solar Decathlon Europe Competiton in July 2019. Partners from 7 countries started to work on the knowledge platform and management of this 3-year collaboration program within the International Energy Agency's (IEA) Energy in Buildings and Communities (EBC) Program.

Annex 74 is a IEA EBC-based platform mapping and linking the competition and living lab experiences worldwide and working towards further improving existing as well as developing new formats. Annex 74 intends to stimulate the technological knowledge, the scientific level and the architectural quality within future competitions and living labs based on the development of a systematic knowledge platform as well as the link to know-how from previous and current IEA activities. The Annex is intended to be a think-tank with a focus on the education of the next generation of architects and engineers by university-based competitions and living labs.

Beside an intensive work programm, the international experts group hat time to get introduced to the SDE 2019 competition site, by the Competiton director Károly Matolcsy. 16 international teams will participate in this new European edition of the competition and a post-competition evaluation as living labs is planned on the site for a period between 6 month to 2 years. 

The next Annex work meeting will take place in November 2018 in Dubai during the Solar Decathlon Dubai Competition and linked to an international workshop on building monitoring and evaluation.