The Wexford Pilot is back in its planning stage, as Wexford County Council (WCC) needed to review the project once more. The plan is to combine two sites and densify this combined site. Therefore, this pilot will not be onsite by the end of the project – but our H4.0E Irish partners can use the design for the H4.0E platform development. After completion onsite, this pilot can still take part on the monitoring being overseen by TUDelft within the H4.0E project. This is quite important as the Wexford pilot is the most promising in terms of offering a model for low carbon, cost-effective housing.
WCC plans to develop this pilot as an apartment block constructed in timber frame construction type, which is novel here in Ireland, and will provide a good example for future social housing developments. During 3CEA’s work with Wexford County Council, they were able to convince WCC to make the 3CEA Low Carbon First-Fabric approach the standard for further construction projects.
For example, now the use of Ground Granulated Blast-furnace Slag (GGBS) as a cement substitute will be utilised in all future new build and retrofit projects. This is indeed a great win in the efforts to mitigate the impact of cement as a Carbon Hotspot. This will allow WCC to save embodied CO2 emissions on a large scale in practice.