Living blue and green – what does it mean?
Oslo’s natural surroundings have given rise to clichéd slogans that would make the most hardened marketers blush. But what’s happening with sustainable real estate in Oslo today has nothing to do with marketing, or slogans.
This is business of the most serious kind, done to meet a most demanding future. “When we announced that we wanted to build a 22 storey powerhouse in Oslo, the main reaction was not negative, it was simply incredulous,” says Emil Paaske, CEO of Veidekke Eiendom, contractor for the M17 high-rise project. Now he is hoping for permission to scale the heights that will allow M17 to achieve its sun-seeking goals.
His experience is shared by colleague Sonja Horn in Entra ASA, currently embarking on their own energy-positive project, Oslo Solar. “To build solar-powered highrises in the dense heart of a Nordic capital will be ground-breaking,” she relates. Entra is going for green in other ways as well: “To support the city's ambition of making the bicycle a smart transportation choice, conventional parking spaces have been exchanged for an attractive solution for bicycle parking,” Horn says.
To be classified as a powerhouse, a structure has to generate more energy than it consumes. Not easy to accomplish in an urban setting anywhere on the globe, much less in the far north. Oslo Solar will use 8300 square meters of solar panels, fixed wherever the sun shines, to meet its energy requirements. “The roof will be angled at 45 degrees to optimize the energy harvest at Oslo’s latitude,” Horn adds.
“The costs for energy efficient buildings are coming down, just as they did when energy passive houses became popular,” Horn maintains. “Now energy efficient buildings are in demand, and that is driving technology forward, and costs down.”
Together with their partners in the Powerhouse alliance, Entra has previously shown that it is possible to refurbish an office building up to energy positive standards, through the realization of Powerhouse Kjørbo, a campus complex to the west of Oslo.
Now the two highrise projects are nothing short of world news. Sonja Horn and Emil Paaske know of no other skyscraping, urban, net power-producing projects in the world today. And both Oslo Solar and M17 are immediately adjacent to public transportation, shrinking their environmental footprints even more.
“For us, this is about taking climate ambitions seriously,” says Emil Paaske. “We're skipping a generation of passive houses and leaping ahead to powerhouses.” The next step is for Entra and Veidekke to secure the political support necessary to realise their green goals.
With Oslo’s new city government recently elected on a sustainable platform, help should not be far off.
For more information, contact Christina Dupré Roos,
Christina@blue-c.no
Oslo: the Green Capital of Europe? Find out on the Oslo Region Stand at MIPIM: P-1, M50/51, 3 pm today
