Framtidens Hus

The company Sol & Energiteknik wanted to examine the possibility to make a standard house totally energy independent. Based upon this I have, during the spring of 2007, examined the possibilities available at the market today through litterature studies, contact with several companies and reading reports at the internet. The first thing to examine has been to determine the energy consumption for a standard house, and find out if there are better technologies to be used for energy conservation. My conclusion in this matter is that there are possibilities today for building a house more energy efficient. When I had reached the point at which my design for the house was decided, I also had to choose the different products to use to produce energy as well as to store that energy. To produce heat and electricity to the house I decided to use a wind turbine and a solar water heater. The most difficult part of designing a house that is energy independent is that the produced energy must be stored somehow. Storing the heat is relatively easy beacuse the heat can be stored in a large water tank. The electricity is a bigger problem beacuse it must be stored in batteries, which today are too expensive to be used in a standard house. In the future producing and storing hydrogen might be used to produce electricity, but today that technology is both expensive and not tested enough. My final conclusion is that a standard house can not be built to be totally energy independent today, unless it is very expensive to connect the house to the electricity network. As an alternative solution I came up with a proposal for a house which is connected to the electricity network and have some amount of own produced energy. This house prooved to be a good investment if you choose to build it today, and it could be a very good investment in the long run beacuse energy prices increase every year