Erne Campus

The world’s first educational building certified to Passivhaus Premium, and the first in the UK to hold Passivhaus Premium and BREEAM Outstanding together. We were the Passivhaus designer.

Erne Campus is the home of South West College in Enniskillen: a 200-metre crescent of four storeys, 7,167 m², for around 800 full-time students and the staff who teach them. The architecture is by Hamilton Architects with Mullarkey Pederson. Our part was the building physics, the PHPP model and the route to the Premium standard, worked alongside the design team from the early stages.

Passivhaus Premium is the top tier of the standard. It asks for the same very low energy demand as a classic Passivhaus and then adds enough on-site renewable generation that the building gives back a large share of what it uses. Erne does it at the scale of a college rather than a house. The fabric was tested at 0.36 air changes per hour at 50 Pa against a 0.6 limit, the heating demand sits at 8.4 kWh per square metre per year, and a 520 kWp rooftop solar array with battery storage carries the renewable side.

A 7,000 m² teaching building is a harder problem than a dwelling. The occupancy swings through the day, the ventilation has to hold CO2 down in full classrooms, and more than four kilometres of structural junctions had to be detailed free of thermal bridges and accounted for in the model. The campus it replaced ran on heating oil. Erne needs a small fraction of the energy, and its comfort and air quality have been monitored in use since it opened. It has since been recognised as a UN Centre of Excellence for High Performance Buildings.