Passive solar principles used in a middle sized Dutch town

In 1976 City Council of Schiedam (NL) had to decide about an addition of 6,000 new homes to the town (70,000 inhabitants.). The decision was made that all the new addition to the town had to be as sustainable as possible. Most of the new addition is completed now. It is an example of how much can be done without adding to the cost of construction. Sometimes even lower costs are obtained. Sustainable building begins with energy conscious design. More or less from the beginning passive solar principles were applied. A dramatic decrease - factor 4 - in energy need for space heating was reached. The cost of construction was hardly effected by this tremendous improvement. In one example even factor 10 was obtained, this added 10% to the cost of construction and could be done much cheaper now. In the later projects, when energy use for space heating was lowered so much that this need came in the same order of size as the energy nee for domestic hot water, solar collectors were added as a standard item as well. This addition proved to be relatively easy. In Schiedam several thousand houses are proof of the fact that passive an active solar principles successfully can be applied on a large scale in the (more or less) Northem European climate.