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Sustainable School Buildings: Some of the Latest Dutch Examples of Nearly zero Emissions Buildings
Abstract
In the Netherlands with respect to sustainable educational building there is a continuous development going on from
sustainable building, to Passive House schools, to nearly Zero Emission Buildings to even Energy positive buildings. The
Dutch government started a special funding program to stimulate the innovation of high performance schools. Some of
these schools were built as extreme sustainability friendly schools while also much attention was given to comfort and
health aspects. Three of these new schools were investigated: two passive house schools and the first net ZEB designed
school are analyzed, measured and their results were compared with 13 other recent but more traditional designed schools,
as well as with schools from earlier research. The results showed that concerning Indoor Air Quality and thermal comfort
the new environmental schools did not perform very well. This is a disappointing result which indicates that is necessary to
pay enough attention to the basic functionalities of a school (health and comfortable indoor environment) instead of
focusing too much on sustainability.
Citation
Zeiler, W.; Boxem, G.; Waard, M. (2012). Sustainable School Buildings: Some of the Latest Dutch Examples of Nearly zero Emissions Buildings. Energy Systems Laboratory (http://esl.tamu.edu); Texas A&M University (http://www.tamu.edu). Available electronically from https : / /hdl .handle .net /1969 .1 /148922.