90 2nd PALENC Conference and 28th AIVC Conference on Building Low Energy Cooling and Advanced Ventilation Technologies in the 21st Century, September 2007, Crete island, Greece Design and control of building-integrated solar energy utilization systems - Achiev- ing Net-Zero building energy consumption in Canada A.K. Athienitis Concordia University, Canada ABSTRACT This paper describes major elements of the design of three low-energy solar homes in Canada. Two of these are part of a demonstration program. The major features of the houses are: 1. direct gain passive solar design that emphasizes utilization of distributed thermal mass in the south-facing part of the ground foor; 2. a building-inte- grated photovoltaic-thermal (BIPV/T) system; 3. a two- stage ground-source heat pump with ECM (electroni- cally commutated motor) fan used to heat/cool air in the house or an air source heat pump using BIPV/T air as the source to heat a storage tank; 4. a foor heating system in- tegrated in the foor mass of the direct gain zone; 5. a mul- tizone programmable thermostat. Emphasis was placed on architectural and aesthetic integration of the BIPV system and utilization of heat recovered from the roof. 1.INTRODUCTION Recently there has been substantial interest in the design and construction of low-energy and near net-zero energy consumption homes. Charron and Athienitis (2005) de- fne a Net-Zero Energy Solar Home (NZESH) as a home that utilises solar thermal and solar photovoltaic (PV) technologies to generate as much energy as its yearly load. These homes are designed to be very energy ef- fcient and in most cases to utilise passive solar building approaches to minimise their loads. Passive solar design is one of the most effective means to reduce energy con- sumption for heating in Canada when R2000 (NRCan 2005) or equivalent levels of insulation are utilized. Natural Resources Canada launched the Advanced Houses Program (NRCan, 1993) in the early nineties to help develop and test innovative methods of reduc- ing energy consumption, provide better indoor environ- ment, and to reduce the environmental impact of hous- es. Ten different Advanced Houses were built across Canada as a result of this program. A similar method of establishing technical requirements as the R2000 standard was established, however, they went beyond R2000 which deals only with space and water heating, to include total purchased energy. Their goal was to use half the energy of a typical R2000 home, or one quarter of the energy and half the water of conventional Canadian homes. Figure 1 compares the annual total energy of a house built under the Advanced House pro- gram with an R2000 (NRCan 2005) and a conventional house (NRCan 1993). Figure 1. Typical total annual energy consumption of three types of houses in 1993 (NRCan, 1993). Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation launched in mid-2006 a competition entitled Net Zero Energy Healthy Housing (NZEHH) – recently renamed EQui- librium Housing. Twenty teams, selected from across Canada by CMHC, submitted design proposals in Janu- ary 2007 as part of this competition and twelve were selected to build the homes. The objectives of the ini- tiative are to develop grid-tied homes with net zero en- ergy consumption over a twelve-month period; homes that are highly resource effcient during construction and operation; homes that have a high quality indoor environment and homes that are affordable to certain defned target markets. This paper describes frst the design of a low energy so- lar home that attempts to exceed the energy performance of an Advanced House while being more cost effective than a Net-Zero Energy Solar Home. The average an- Net-Zero Energy Solar Home. The average an- . The average an- nual net energy consumption of an Advanced House was in the range 46-110 kWh per square meter of foor area. Two of the demonstration houses being built un- der the Equilibrium program are also briefy described. The design of a single family detached solar home usu- ally starts with selection of the single storey, two-storey PALENC 2007 - Vol 1.indd 90 3/9/2007 1:23:35 µµ