In Freiburg, south-west Germany, a city hall has been designed to do something unusual for a government building: produce more energy than it consumes. Completed in 2017, the city’s latest town hall combines high-performance solar panels with an energy-efficient design that sharply reduces the building’s demand for heating, cooling, ventilation and lighting. The World Green Building Council lists City Hall Freiburg at Fehrenbachallee and describes it as a surplus-energy building, noting that photovoltaic units on the roof and sun-exposed parts of the façade generate more electricity than the building requires. The project goes beyond simply adding solar panels to an existing office. Its insulation, ventilation, heating and cooling systems were designed together as part of a wider energy concept. Freiburg’s official tourism site also notes that construction began in 2014 and that, after completion in 2017, the building was expected to generate more energy than it needed.
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