European project promotes rooftop greenhouses

Reducing greenhouse gas emissions is a major international concern in the fight against global warming, threatening our entire ecosystem. The construction sector obviously has a major role to play and, if energy retrofitting of buildings is one way to contribute, another solution could well come from above...

In this context, European countries have committed themselves to the "GROOF" project, for "Greenhouses to Reduce CO2 on RooFs", which in Luxembourg is supported by the CDEC (Conseil pour le Développement Economique de la Construction) with the support of the INTERREG NWE programme. The budget of the project is around €4.9M and co-financed at 60% by Interreg.

It is an innovative cross-sectoral approach to reduce CO2 emissions from the construction and agricultural sectors by combining energy sharing and local food production.

11 Partners coming from France, Belgium, Germany, Spain and Luxembourg are involved and led by CDEC (Council for Economic Development of the Construction sector) in Luxembourg : Training Institute for Construction skills (IFSB /LU), University of Liège (BE), Groupe One (BE), Cluster Eco-Construction (BE), Scientific and Technical Centre for Building Technology (CSTB /FR), Gally Farms (Fermes de Gally /FR), ASTREDHOR (FR), EBF GmbH (DE), Trier University of applied Sciences (HS-Trier/IfaS /DE), Autonomous University of Barcelona (E).

The idea is to use roof greenhouses as powerful equipment with the aim of:

recover the heat produced and not consumed by the building actively (by the ventilation and heating system) and passively (30% waste heat through the roofs on average) in a plant production,
collect CO2 produced by people and building activities to "feed" plants,
reduce CO2 emissions from transport by producing plants locally.

Thus, the ecosystem formed by the roof greenhouse and the existing support construction requires much less energy than if the greenhouse were separated. The greenhouse itself is an additional activity located outside the building but which shares energy in order to make both constructions more efficient.

This international project has 3 main objectives to maximise its impact over time:

Today: Implement 4 demonstrators ("Pilots") in France, Belgium, Germany and Luxembourg with the purpose of demonstrating the technical feasibility and the profitability.
Tomorrow: Support rooftop greenhouse project carriers in NWE by providing them with a feasibility study free of charge.
Make the effort sustainable: Identify barriers but also opportunities at legal, financial and technical level for implementing a greenhouse with a CO2 emission reduction purpose on North-West Europe rooftops.

The experience gathered during the project will be shared in guidelines disseminated at the end of the project.

The work plan is simple and directly related to the main objectives.

The first step is dedicated to the sustainability of the efforts made during the project. It is related to the identification of barriers and opportunities in order to provide the best suitable guidance to the future project carriers located in North West Europe. The work done by the Project Partners will be used to reveal the advantages of rooftop greenhouses in matter of CO2 emission reduction to the public deciders and facilitators. GROOF Partners will collaborate to unlock the regulatory environment of NWE cities in order to foster the development of rooftop greenhouses projects.

Concretely, GROOF competence teams in Construction, Energy, Agro-socio-economics is looking to cooperate with existing European rooftop greenhouses to learn the keys of success which lead them to a successful implementation.
In parallel of that, GROOF Partners will do a state of the art analysis in collaboration with local entities to determine the regulatory context, the building context and the urban farming context in FR, BE, LU, DE, NL, IR, CH and UK.

The second step of the Project, starting right at the beginning as well is the development of the pilots in France, Belgium, Germany and Luxembourg.

Two of them will have a commercial purpose and will demonstrate their profitability. One will be both commercial and pedagogical. One will be experimental. GROOF Partners will follow and assess the Pilots during the entire life of the project. This starts by analysing the design of the greenhouses before their implementation and make the useful adaptation to ensure the CO2 emissions reduction requirement is met. They will then follow the development through different monitoring and improvement phases.

For the last step, GROOF is looking for rooftop greenhouse project carriers located in North West Europe. The applications will be collected in 2019 through an open call for project. The selected candidates will receive a feasibility study performed by GROOF experts on their specific project. This approach aims at fostering the development of rooftop greenhouses with a CO2 emission reduction purpose in NWE and kick start a massive demonstration of the many advantages a rooftop greenhouse can bring.

For more information:
www.groof.eu