Energy-plus building
edifices with surplus electricity
An energy-plus building (also called: plus energy building, plus-energy house, efficiency-plus house) produces more energy from renewable energy sources, over the course of a year, than it consumes. This is achieved using a combination of microgeneration technology and low-energy building techniques, such as: passive solar building design, insulation and careful site selection and placement. A reduction of modern conveniences can also contribute to energy savings, however many energy-plus houses are almost indistinguishable from a traditional home, preferring instead to use highly energy-efficient appliances, fixtures, etc., throughout the house.
"Plusenergihuset" (the plus energy house) was the Danish term used by Jean Fischer in his publication from 1982 about his own energy-plus house.
PlusEnergy is a brand name, used by Rolf Disch, to describe a structure that produces more energy than it uses. The term was coined by Disch in 1994 when building his private residence, the Heliotrope as the first PlusEnergy house in the world. Disch then went on to refine the concepts involved with several more projects built by his company, Rolf Disch Solar Architecture, in order to promote PlusEnergy for wider adoption in residential, commercial and retail spaces. Disch maintains that PlusEnergy is more than just a method of producing environmentally-friendly housing, but also an integrated ecological and architectural concept. As such, PlusEnergy is intended to be superior to low-energy or zero-energy designs such as those of Passivhaus.
Technical approach
The PlusEnergy approach uses a variety of techniques to produce a building that generates more energy than it consumes.
The public source identifies “Energy-plus building” as edifices with surplus electricity. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Energy-plus, building and edifices.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 31, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q685004. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1982 and 1994.
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This entry incorporates text from “Energy-plus building” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.