CULTURAL-E

Cultural-E is a EU-funded project which aims to define modular and replicable solutions for Plus Energy Buildings (PEBs), accounting for climate and cultural differences, while engaging all key players involved in the building life cycle.

Cultural-E focused on: delivering climate and cultural tailored solution sets and technologies for PEBs and demonstrating their feasibility, reliability and replicability; understanding the variables that building users bring to buildings and provide interventions designed to shift energy use practices; valuating the co-benefits (on top of financial benefits) from PEBs and promoting a favourable European “ecosystem of policies” for the realization of new PEBs.

The Cultural-E project applies social practice theory to understand users’ needs, habits, and interactions with home systems, emphasizing practices over individual behaviors. This approach informs strategies to prevent frictions with energy performance and indoor conditions. A major outcome is the PEB HUB, a collaborative platform empowering professionals to share experiences, best practices, and lessons learned about user behavior and adopted technology solutions.
Key technologies, including cloud-based House Management System, Active Window System, smart air movement system, and decentralized packed heat pump, were developed and tested under real and laboratory conditions. Such validated key technologies optimize the value/cost ratio of PEBs.
Combinations of solution sets tailored to four geo-clusters (mediterranean, oceanic, continental, sub-artic), were applied to two building archetypes (representing low rise and high rise residential buildings) and evaluated based on the energy balance, self-consumption rate, environmental impact, life cycle costs and indoor environment quality. The solution sets are combined with multi-system control strategies to optimize the overall building energy performance, maximize energy self-sufficiency and self-consumption.
Cultural-E also identified co-benefits of PEBs, such as improved user well-being, low cost of operation, and environmental impact and developed a methodology to assess their value for the community and the household.
The technologies developed in the project have been applied to four new multi-family residential buildings as demo-cases located in Italy, France, Germany and Norway.