Ready for 2020: the ‘nearly zero-energy buildings’ of Ozzano dell’Emilia, Italy

The new demanding European Directive on energy performance of buildings requires all new buildings to be ‘nearly zero-energy’ by 2020 and the ‘2-litre houses’ located in Ozzano dell’Emilia near Bologna, Italy, are a working demonstration of how to achieve this. What makes the project at Ozzano even more special is the fact that in combination with the energy saving criteria, it also takes into account the environmental footprint of all of the materials and applications used as a fundamental principle of the design. This is sustainable building design in practice.

The Ozzano Project includes five separate family houses and an Experimental Didactic Centre, which were all completed at the end of 2009.

The buildings and their performance will be monitored for five years.

The monitoring of energy consumption in the first few months of the house’s life saw a consumption of about 12-15 Kwh/m²/year for heating/refreshing and hot sanitary water, in accordance with ‘Passive House’ criteria.

However, taking into account of the contribution from renewable sources, the Ozzano complex ‘production’ covers not only the 12-15 Kwh/m²/year for heat and hot water, but also 80% of household electricity needs. It means that the Ozzano project could be easily considered as the first example of a ‘nearly zero-energy building’, already available 10 years earlier than the target set by the EU.