Powerhouse Brattørkaia, a new office building located in Trondheim, Norway, has become the biggest energy-positive smart building in the country, it claims that it can create more power than it consumes over its lifespan.
The building sits by the harbor and connects with Trondheim Central Station through a pedestrian bridge. It achieves its energy-saving goal through the use of solar panels and leveraging environmental elements.
Powerhouse Brattørkaia, a new office building located in Trondheim, Norway, has become the biggest energy-positive smart building in the country, it claims that it can create more power than it consumes over its lifespan.
The building sits by the harbor and connects with Trondheim Central Station through a pedestrian bridge. It achieves its energy-saving goal through the use of solar panels and leveraging environmental elements.
How does the building work?
The south-facing building is equipped with almost 3,000 square meters of
solar panels that have converted the pentagonal-roof into a large area enabling the building to become an energy-host. It's said to be capable of generating around 485,000 kWh per year and consume 4.9 kWh/m2. The building's electricity can be generated by solar cells, heat exchangers and heat pumps. Likewise, the sea, which is another natural resource, is used to heat and cool the building.
The location of solar cells and windows are positioned to achieve maximum sun intensity in order to optimize daylight conditions and reduce energy consumption. For instance, in the areas most exposed to the sun, the buildings internal solar-heating will be turned off, until the building is longer exposed, whereby the solar-heating will be resumed. The floors and offices of the building are designed to efficiently circulate hot and cold air, and special concrete is used to help regulate the temperature.
In order to reduce energy consumption on lighting, as another example, the building has adopted a concept called "liquid light," which allows lighting to be dimmed up and down according to people's activity and movement within the building's rooms, which is powered by an
artificial intelligence system.
Sitting 63-degrees north of the Earth's equator, where the amount of sunlight significantly varies by seasons, Powerhouse Brattørkaia stands for a unique opportunity to explore how to harvest and store solar energy under challenging weather conditions.
“Energy-positive buildings are the buildings of the future. The mantra of the design industry should not be ‘form follows function’ but 'form follows environment' . This means that the design thinking of today should focus on environmental considerations and reducing our footprint first, and have the design follow the premise," said Snøhetta founder Kjetil Trædal Thorsen of design and architecture firm Snøhetta to
Smart Cities World.
Building as an energy distributor
Powerhouse Brattørkaia claims to produce more than twice as much electricity as it consumes daily on average. In addition to supplying renewable energy to itself, it also provides energy to neighboring buildings, electric buses, cars and
boats through a local micro grid.
Jaguar Land Rover and IOTA Foundation, a German foundation focused on new distributed ledger technologies development, have demonstrated a use case at the building's opening event.
Certain car models from Jaguar have incorporated smart wallet technology using the IOTA Tangel distributed ledger. The car can purchase electricity from the Powerhouse Brattørkaia building using the
digital wallet, and therefore be certified as a green energy vehicle. Car owners have several opportunities to earn points (digital money) while driving, for spotting and reporting potholes on the road to an urban agency.
Powerhouse Brattørkaia is developed by Norwegian property developer Entra, construction company Skanska, environmental organization ZERO, architecture firm Snøhetta and consulting company Asplan Viak.
Powerhouse Brattørkaia has received the BREEAM Outstanding certification, the highest ranking by the world’s leading sustainability assessment method for a property’s environmental, social and economic sustainability performance.