The initiative started three years ago in the Czech Republic seems to rock all over Europe! After recieving several awards, Czech Sustainable Houses (CSH) won EUSEW 2018 Sustainable Energy Award last week.
Czech Sustainable Houses – closely working together with the Central and Eastern Europe Sustainability Energy Network (CEESEN) – already proved to be a great success, acknowledged by awards like the UN Prize for Social Benefits (SDG, 2015), the Energy Globe Award for Energy Innovation (2017), and the Manager of the Year 2017 for its founder Pavel Podruh. Last week the European Sustainable Energy Week gave place to the distribution of the award, that also honoured the Czech Sustainable Houses (CSH)in the category of Young Energy Leaders. WiseGrid, Saerbeck Bioenergy Park and PEACE_Alps project were also on the prize-list.
“This award offered by the Brussels Institution is a great honour for us. The fact that we have built our initiative without any subsidy and with almost no marketing budget and yet recieve such appreciation, demonstrates that it is certainly possible to mobilize society towards sustainability using publicly available means of communication”, said Pavel Podruh, the founder.
A high-level jury selected the winners of EUSEW 2018 Sustainable Energy Awards from the shortlist of 12 finalist across 4 categories – Consumers, Public Sector, Businesses and Young Energy Leaders.
CSH builds on the activities of the Czech Off-Grid House project whose focus is broadly expanding and does not deal only with the extreme case of so-called off-grid (completely source-independent) constructions but with a whole range of partial possibilities of self-sufficiency in various forms and sizes of buildings. This includes the study of so-called hybrid, off-grid passive, low-energy or even active buildings and technologies. CSH’s activities range from a large, architectonic student competition, through public workshops and exhibitions, to sensibilisation of the topic of self-sufficiency, to the design and preparation of real estate. Student competitions take part every year, and the topic of self-sufficiency is developed by almost 1000 students per year from all relevant universities, which makes CSH the largest student architectural competition of its kind in the Czech Republic.
CSH participated at CEE Energy Transition Conference 2017 in Prague with inspiring presentation on Stakeholder Engagement Model. CSH is now working closely with Central and Eastern Europe Sustainability Energy Network (CEESEN) on development of Strategic Research Roadmap and Action Plan in order to establish National Technology Platform.