"The mantra of the design industry should not be 'form follows function' but 'form follows environment'. This means that the design thinking of today should focus on environmental considerations and reducing our footprint first, and have the design follow this premise."

Snøhetta founder Kjetil Trædal Thorsen

Architects statement:

Powerhouse Brattørkaia is located in Trondheim, Norway, 63° north of the Earth’s equator, where sunlight varies greatly between the seasons.* This presents a unique opportunity to explore how to harvest and store solar energy under challenging conditions.
The 18 000 m2 office building is situated by the harbor and connects to Trondheim Central Station via a pedestrian bridge on the rear end of the building.
On average, Powerhouse Brattørkaia produces more than twice as much electricity as it consumes daily, and will supply renewable energy to itself, its neighboring buildings, electric buses, cars and boats through a local micro grid.
The aim of the project is threefold; to maximize the amount of clean energy produced by the building, to minimize the energy required to run it, and to serve as a pleasant space for its tenants and the general public. The building’s site has been carefully chosen to ensure maximum exposure to the sun throughout the day and seasons. Its skewed, pentagonal roof and the upper part of the façade is clad with almost 3 000 m2 of solar panels, strategically placed to harvest as much solar energy as possible.
Over a year, this amounts to a total of about 500 000 kWh with clean, renewable energy. In effect, the building dually functions as a small power plant in the middle of the city. Ample space for energy storage is built into the building footprint, allowing it to store surplus energy in the summer months of near total daylight, to then use it in the winter months when daylight is at a minimum.
The building is extremely energy efficient, leveraging a series of technologies to radically reduce energy use for its daily operations. This is accomplished through insulating the building for maximum efficiency, installing intelligent solutions for air flow to reduce the need for heating, heat recovery solutions for ventilating air and greywater (wastewater from all sources except toilets), using seawater for heating and cooling and implementing only energy efficient electrical appliances. Daylight conditions are optimized throughout the building design and artificial light use is kept at a minimum.
For its efforts, Powerhouse Brattørkaia has received the BREEAM Outstanding certification, the highest possible ranking by the world’s leading sustainability assessment method for an asset’s environmental, social and economic sustainability performance. Its solutions support the UNFCCC Paris Agreement that pursues efforts to limit the global temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

For some perspective, Trondheim has an annual average of 1,343 hours of sunshine compared to Perth, Western Australia with 3,200 hour annual average.

PROJECT TEAM:

ENTRA http://entra.no

Building owner. A real estate company leading the way in high, quality energy efficient buildings.

SKANSKA http://skanska.com

Construction. A multinational construction and development company based in Sweden.

ZERO (Zero Emission Resource Organisation) http://zero.no

Norwegian environmental organisation with the philosophy that “if new facilities are made emission-free, then when existing plant and methods are phased out due to old age, society is left with emission-free facilities”.

ASPLAN VIAK http://asplanviak.no

Norwegian engineering and architectural consulting firm. Services include architecture, urban and land use planning, building and construction, energy and environmental engineering, geo info and visualisation, landscape architecture, community analysis, community planning, technical installations and water and environmental engineering.

IVAR KVAAL http://ivarkvaal.com

Photography