Alsace Énergivie (http://pole.energivie.eu) is an ecotechnology competitiveness cluster devoted to energy-plus-homes: it promotes the development of energy-efficient buildings which produce more energy from renewable energy sources (e.g. photovoltaics or cogeneration) than they import from external sources.
For this purpose, the competitiveness cluster has focused on three different axes: promote the transition to positive energy (e.g. moving energy-plus-houses and their technologies from the experimental stage to the industrial one); make this approach competitive; and develop appropriate standards (including the BEPOS standard and guidelines related to energy performance of buildings).
Alsace Énergivie concentrates on the following areas:
- Construction design (air management, use of low temperature heat, technologies for the integration of renewable energy in buildings…);
- Building (industrialization of the building processes, functionalization of materials, development of composite materials and multi-material assemblies...);
- Energy production and supply equipments, as well as control-monitoring systems (photovoltaic and wind turbine systems, cogeneration, heat recovery, control and monitoring of power networks, signal processing...);
- Industrialization and placing on the market of positive energy solutions that can be applied to building, more precisely to residential buildings, industrial and commercial areas, business parks as well as urban sites, either newly constructed or refurbished.
The cluster federates industrial players, mainly SMEs (Hager, Socomec, De Dietrich, Osram, Clemessy, Bubendorff, Clestra, Eiffage, etc.). It equally involves research organisms such as the Thematic Network for Advanced Research in Chemistry, the University of Haute-Alsace, INSA Strasbourg, CNRS, etc., thus gathering about 500 researchers.
Besides, it relies on the cluster behind the Effinergie label, which is one of the two existing labels in Europe for the development of energy-plus-homes, alongside with the German Passivhaus label.