The Bitten & Mads Clausen Foundation, main shareholder in Danfoss A/S, celebrated first day of construction for what will become one of the world’s most sustainable residential buildings. Danfoss House will be ready for inauguration in 2023. Chairman of the Board of Danfoss A/S broke ground today.
The Bitten & Mads Clausen Foundation began construction of one of the world’s most sustainable residential buildings - built with the with commonplace materials and already existing energy-efficient technologies.
Buildings and their construction consume one-third of the world’s energy and account for nearly 40 percent of all CO2-emissions. The new four-story Danfoss House in Sønderborg plans to be as close to net zero as possible. It will set a new and leading standard for sustainable residential buildings and become a vibrant application development center (ADC) where Danfoss develops and tests new technological solutions together with the residents in the 15 residential homes.
The ambition is for Danfoss House to achieve German Sustainable Building Council (DGNB) platinum certification, the highest sustainability certification under the globally recognized DGNB standard. Currently, only 12 residential buildings in the world have achieved DGNB platinum certification.
Peter Mads Clausen, Chairman of the Board of the Bitten & Mads Clausen Foundation, said, “The purpose of Danfoss House is to show that it is possible to build to the highest sustainability certification with technology that already exists today.”
Danfoss House is supporting ProjectZero, whose goal is to reduce the Sønderborg area’s CO2 emissions to zero by 2029. According to ProjectZero’s 2021 report, energy consumption has been reduced by 17 percent since 2007 and CO2 emissions by 51.7 percent since 2007.
In 2022, the International Energy Agency (IEA) will host its seventh annual global conference on energy efficiency in the city of Sønderborg.
DGNB platinum
The ambition is for Danfoss House to achieve DGNB (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Nachhaltiges Bauen/the German Council for Sustainable Construction) platinum certification, the highest sustainability certification under the globally recognized DGNB standard. In this regard, construction is evaluated according to five criteria: environmental quality, economic quality, social quality, technical quality, and process quality.