Jaya Skandamoorthy (BRE director of Enterprise and Innovation) attended a meeting at bere:architects today with Virginia Cinquemani (BRE Innovation Park) in order to establish the building and training and disemination programme around our competition-winning Chestnut House low cost passivhaus prototypes at the Watford Innovation Park.

The semi-detached pair of houses, designed in collaboration with the Prince of Wales' Foundation for Building Communities, will be completed in time for a ministerial opening in September 2012.

Sturgis Carbon Profiling have also been closely involved in the project, performing Life Cycle Analysis of the building with the aim of "...making the building a truly Zero Carbon home from both Operational and Embodied Energy, by taking consideration of renewables and sequential benefit." Their analysis includes the following categories:

• Product Manufacture (carbon arising through production process)

• Construction (carbon arising through site works etc.)

• In Use (carbon arising through heating, lighting, cooling and repair/replacement)

• End of life (de-construction only, not including any recycling potential values)

The project for the Innovation Park will also form an extension of our Passivhaus Cost Project (PHCP) with two leading housing associations, Hastoe and Orbit. The aim of this project is two-fold: (1) to define a cost reporting methodology to objectively investigate, compare and report the cost of UK housing. (2) to achieve passivhaus homes without additional investment cost above the cost of current minimum standard housing. For further information, see: http://bere.co.uk/research/passivhaus-cost-project-phcp

Additionally the project for the Innovation Park will accelerate our development of a software package linking PHPP energy modelling software to full Building Information Management, streamlining the connection between design and manufacture, with the intention of completely overcoming the knowledge-gap between design and manufacture.