Bavarian Pilot Project Presents the House Which Will Eliminate Your Car Sustentation Bills

Munich, October 12^th –  Today, several Bavarian companies and institutions – among them carbuilder BMW, the Technical University of Munich (TUM), and the Fraunhofer Institute for Building Physics (IBP) – presented the results of a joint project in energy self-sufficiency.

Having built a house with energy performance in mind, the project partners monitored its performance over the course of 18 months real-life use. Today, they presented groundbreaking results: The house did not only allow a family household of four to live without restrictions, it also provided enough energy to fuel an electric car almost entirely without paying additional electricity bills – the only exception being winter time.

This feat is enabled by a unique union of thermal and electrical storage systems, precisely chosen building materials and innovative design. All these components are rooted in the strengths of the Bavarian partners involved:

• As a part of the Fraunhofer Society, Europe’s largest provider of R&D services with around 23,000 employees, the Fraunhofer IBP specializes in developing solutions to construction problems by making use of unconventional building materials.
• Where German universities are among the global leaders in technology research related to environmental concerns, the TUM is one of the only 11 universities awarded with special grants for their particularly forward-looking orientation by the German government.
• BMW has traditionally embraced new technologies at an early stage and has just renewed its commitment to electric cars and future-orientation in its new corporate strategy ‘Number One NEXT’.