Implementation of passive house requirements in TENDERS for design and construction activities
Passive house concept is quite easy to be understood both by experts and buildings end-users. Passive house standard as comprehensive set of quantitative requirements and quality assurance methods represents also a useful way to ask for high performances and nearly zero energy buildings in public procurement procedures and in private market, in order to give reliable guarantees to clients and buildings occupants.
Public tenders requesting passive house projects could be useful to increase the capacities and the opportunities for this market. And on the other hand this could provide local administrations with high quality buildings with lower (and also much lower) operation costs for energy bills, leading to an overall savings for the local public bodies.
Many examples of public buildings built according the Passive House standard are described as beacon projects in PassREg. For examples we can see kindergartens, day-care centers, schools, social housing buildings, cultural centers.
Documents (main texts and related technical annexes) of public and private tenders are suitable to be easily integrated with overall passive house requirements. They can be expressed both as energy performances (energy need for heating and cooling, total primary energy demand, etc.) and comfort requirements both as limits on building components and systems (envelope thermal transmittances, glazed surfaces properties, airtightness level, efficiency ratio of heat recovery, electrical specific fan power or energy demand for the mechanical ventilation system, etc.).
Also the passive house calculation method and the quality assurance procedures can be easily required in the tenders specifications. All the performances and technical features of Passive Houses can be requested asking for numerical and quantitative performances and limits typical of the standard and / or asking directly that the Passivhaus certification label have to be reached.
The Passive House process is affordable also in order to ask actual actions for quality assurance and check tests on field (e.g. intermediate and final blower door test to check the airtightness level of the building envelope, in-situ controls to calibrate airflow rates of the mechanical ventilation systems, etc.).
An interesting example of a public building designed and built according the Passive House principles is the public school “Raldon” of the Municipality of San Giovanni Lupatoto (Verona - Italy). This school building , after it was designed and built according public tenders developed by the Municipality, reached the Passivhaus certification. A comprehensive document on this has been developed and it’s available here File:2 PR PH requirements in TENDERS eERG v1.pdf
