Romania is attending this month Solar Decathlon Europe in Hungary, the world’s most important architecture and engineering competition, with the OVER4 project. The 2019 edition of the Solar Decathlon Europe 2019 competition takes place in Szentendre, Hungary, and has as its theme the renovation and rehabilitation of existing buildings. Solar Decathlon is a competition that challenges students around the world to design and build the most innovative and efficient homes powered by solar power.

The team of Romania, consisting of students from three universities in Bucharest, supported by Habitat Energy, competes with 15 other teams worldwide with the OVER4 project, a unique concept of integrated renovation.

The project aims at the renovation of a 5-level 770-83 block of flats, massively built in Romania during the communist era.

Due to the lack of a coherent renovation strategy, such a ‘deep renovation’ approach is necessary to bring us in line with the European directives on energy efficiency, CO2 emissions and ultimately the Zero Energy Building (nZEB) standard.

“For the Solar Decathlon Europe competition, we designed the Over4 prototype, a solar energy-independent, modular solar house and a more demanding standard of energy efficiency, the Passive House standard. It will be assembled three times and will be tested under the strictest conditions in the competition,” says the representatives of Romania.

The OVER4 project is equipped with the same SUNERG photovoltaic panels that have proved their efficiency in the 2012 and 2018 competitions for the EfdeN project.

In 2012, Habitat Energy equipped the Prispa house with a complete 8kW grid photovoltaic system using SMA components and SUNERG photovoltaic panels made in Italy, with Romania’s second place in energy efficiency. In 2018, in Dubai, EfdeN Siganature was equipped with a hybrid photovoltaic system made with SUNERG panels and ABB components, and Victron Energy also achieved a 4th place at the same energy efficiency test.