Solar City Horsens

Solar City Copenhagen was established in 2004 in co-operation with the City of Copenhagen and based on the initiative with the ''PV plan for Valby'' which was launched in 2000 aiming at establishing a large-scale demonstration of solar cell integration in an entire city, namely Valby in Copenhagen, with the purpose of achieving a total contribution from solar cell power of 15% of the total electricity consumption in Valby in 2025 (see also www.eurpeangreencities.com\solivalby\index.htm) illustrating visualisation examples of solar cell integration in Valby. The Solar City Horsens project was also a follow-up project to the previous EFP project ''Solceller & Arkitektur - Solar City Copenhagen'', which, however, had its primary focus on the utilisation of solar cells and not as much on low energy buildings. The Solar City Horsens project had a subtitle called ''PV roofs for low energy building of the future'' which clearly showed the intention of including low energy buildings as well in the project. There has been a very favourable anchoring of the EFP project in relation to the municipality of Horsens, and the link to the city renovation acitvities directed towards the western part of Horsens has also been fine and well supported by the strongly involved head of department, Lene Krogh. In spite of this, it has not been easy to gain reasonable influence on the building acitivity in Horsens based on the EFP project. The main reason for this was probably due to the intense building activities in the period from 2004 to 2008 making it hard to realise why time should also be spent on integration of solar cells. However, by means of a minor prolongation of the project, the implementation of the planned extent of demonstration oriented activities was a success, and in relation to this, a rewarding co-operation with Vitus Beirng/VIA in Horsens was created to the effect - based on a student competition - that a 0 energy test house with sophisticated low energy solutions combined with the use of an innovative solar cell solution at the roof was realised. This house, called ''EcoLab'', was inaugurated on May 19, 2010 at a one-day conference taking place at VIA. Based on the increased focus on climate and energy, which was established during 2008, the Solar City Horsens project was a relevant project closely related to the new agenda in Europe according to which new buildings shall be constructed as ''almost 0 energy buildings'' by the end of 2020, for public buildings, however, as early as 2018. In this respect, solar cells play an important part, and this is well consistent with the fact that they have achieved a very considerable price reduction within the last 2 years leaving the economy at best with a simple bay-back time of less than 20 years, while a 20-12 years of pay-back time may be expected during 2015.