Dutch Action Plan for Sustainable Building: a win-win combination of energy savings in buildings and environmental improvements to reduce CO2 emissions

Harry Vreuls and Ireen Vergeest, Netherlands Agency for Energy and the Environment

Keywords

Abstract

In 1996 the Dutch Ministry of Housing, Spatial Development and the Environment (VROM) began a two-year Action Plan for Sustainable Building, which was later extended to 1998-99. Under this plan energy-saving measures are combined with ways to reduce the material flows compared to the building process, to increase the use of environmentally friendly products, and to reduce water usage etc.

Continuous monitoring has proven that this comprehensive approach speeds up the introduction of combined energy-saving measures, although energy is just one of the aspects in the sustainable building concept. This is a win for energy savings. Energy is always a good starting point for projects on sustainable buildings: local authority energy plans are extended to cover sustainable building plans, or general water saving is combined with savings on domestic hot water, etc. Therefore, using experiences from several energy-saving programmes makes implementing a sustainable building programme far easier and more successful. Thus a win for sustainable building.

This paper not only explains this process to show this win-win combination, but also presents in detail, the quantitative results of the Action Plan for Sustainable Building 1996-97. Figures show that about half the newly built houses achieve a lower energy level than the legal (Energy Performance Coefficient; EPC) level, and that energy-saving measures are still the most popular way to improve the sustainability of buildings. The expected long-term effects of the first two-year period are additional energy savings equal to 8 million tons of CO2 reduction by the year 2020.