Australian Zero Emission House

Zero emission houses cannot be achieved solely through improvement of individual building components (e.g. windows, appliances, heating and cooling equipment, lighting). Also needed is a revolutionary approach to building design and operation that can achieve 70%-80% reductions in energy demand, coupled with careful integration with on-site renewable energy supplies and thermal and electrical storage. An affordable ZEH also requires cost optimisation of these technologies and systems.

The AusZEH House Design Tool integrates a house energy consumption tool (based on an enhanced version of CSIRO's AccuRate software) with a supply-demand matching optimisation model (HOMER, from the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory), and deals with the technical and economic optimisation of the individual house-renewable energy demand and supply system. DST1 will enable evaluation of demand-reduction technologies and their integration given the building, location, construction and occupant scenarios (e.g. a young family at home, a couple working full-time, etc).

The AusZEH House Design Tool is still under development and will be available ???

Potential users and benefits of House Design Tool are:

• Consumers - to guide ZEH investment decisions
• Building service engineers or consultants - selection of technology types and capacities; sizing the renewable energy system
• Builders and developers - optimization of system configurations with respect to lifecycle costs: capital, replacement, operation and maintenance, fuel, and interest; development of discrete energy supply options/packages (like the way they offer now kitchen upgrade packages)
• Technology companies - investigating market-competitive performance-cost targets for new or existing products (e.g. solar panels)
• Planners - in combination with DST2 to perform sensitivity analyses to answer general questions about technology options and to inform planning and policy decisions.