Experiences from teaching graduate students how to design net Zero Emission Buildings in Norway

Abstract

The ambition of the Paris agreement is “carbon neutrality” by 2050. But what is “carbon neutrality”? How do we design a “carbon neutral” building? And how to teach this concept to engineering students? TBA4171 is an advanced course in Building Technology, given as the last course before the final thesis for the master students in building technology at NTNU. This paper describes how we use flipped-classroom and problem-based-learning to teach these concepts, and presents the results from the student projects. TBA4171 is targeting students specializing in building materials, building physics or fire safety in buildings. But the course also attracts students specializing in building processes and real estate management. In the course, the project of the students is to redesign five different current state-of-art Norwegian single-family houses to net Zero Emission Buildings. The students are given full access to BIM drawings, bill of quantities, EPD of materials and an LCA of each building. The students engage in an iteratively optimized design process, investigating the influence of geometry layout, material selection, energy performance, technical installations, and implementation of renewable energy sources. Life cycle based GHGe accounting are done for each design iteration to investigate where the biggest emission savings are obtained, and how the final building design complies with the Norwegian approach to net zero GHGe performance. The results show that graduate students are capable of designing net Zero Emission Buildings. They achieve this, primarily by optimizing material use (e.g. reduced use of concrete and steel) and geometrical layout (solar heat gains during winter/shading during summer and space for PVs). The results show that is possible to design net Zero Emission Buildings if provided with data on material and energy mix. The results also show that problem-based-learning is a powerful method of teaching these concepts to graduate students.