Hamburg Introduces "Passive House" to China

Air-conditioning seems like a must in the extremely high temperatures in Shanghai, but it inevitably consumes a large amount of the city's energy. The city of Hamburg has introduced a new building concept, the "passive house," to the Shanghai Expo. The house can keep cool in summer and warm in winter without an air-conditioner.

Zheng Chenguang has the report.

People are waiting outside the Hamburg House in the Shanghai Expo, hoping to experience the "passive house," which displays the top-level environmental technology for future homes.

The number of visitors is strictly controlled in this red-brick house, in order to keep the indoor temperature at around 25 degrees Celsius without any power input.

Lars Anke, director of the Hamburg Liaison Office in Shanghai, explains the definition of a passive house.

"Passive house is actually a German energy standard for buildings, a high and complex standard on energy-efficiency buildings. What classified a passive house is we don't need any traditional energy sources for this building. So it's, on one hand, very energy-saving. On the other hand, it's very environmental-friendly. And it saves a lot of energy due to very high quality standard. For example, we don't need any air-conditioning in this building."

He says the passive house offers comfortable living at a primary energy requirement of less than 50 kilowatt-hours per square meter, and can save up to 90 percent of the energy demand compared to normal buildings.

Chenbo, a guide at the Hamburg Liaison Pavilion, tells visitors the four core technologies that the architecture uses.

"The first is its special design. The second is the geothermal heat pump for generating hot and cold water. The third is because it is high-efficiency and airtight. And the last one is the ventilation system with waste heat recovery that provides fresh air. All the four points are indispensable and form the system of the passive house."

More than 20,000 buildings are certified for passive house standards around the world, but it is the first such house in China.

Lars Anke believes the passive house has a huge future in China because it doesn't need very expensive and complex high-tech applications.

"And what characterize the passive house is that it's not a high-tech building, so you don't have complicated building technology which is pretty vulnerable for mistakes as well, it uses low tech so you can achieve very high goal of energy and environmental standard with lots of simple measures."

Anke also says Chinese architects can take ideas from this building and apply them to large-scale development projects, as they can also achieve high energy-saving aims.

For CRI, I am Zheng Chenguang.