The price of building energy-neutral residential areas

In recent years, the Dutch government increased its demands on the housing industry with respect to energetic sustainability. Associated, some private developers acknowledge the necessity to raise this energetic sustainability above the legal standards, to meet demands of a specific group of housing customers. However, they are confronted with bottlenecks from the housing market that often prevent them from doing so. The most important bottleneck seems to be the assumption of developers and housing customers that sustainable building implies higher costs. Both stakeholders mainly focus on investment costs, and don’t pay attention to exploitation costs. It is expected that providing an unambiguous insight into eventual differences in total costs of ownership between dwellings that meet minimum sustainability standards and dwellings with an increased level of sustainability will influence the attitude of both stakeholder groups towards the feasibility of sustainability. The objective of this article is to give this insight. A model is developed that (1) calculates these differences in total costs of ownership and (2) supports project developers and housing consumers in choosing the right level of sustainability during the development of new dwellings. The model has been verified by applying it to a case study: Blixembosch, a residential area in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. The result shows that it is possible to develop an energy-neutral residential area which on average – in the long term – makes annual savings for housing consumers.