Charvat P.
Year:
2008
Languages: English | Pages: 8 pp
Bibliographic info:
AIVC VIP 27, 2008, 8 pp

The Czech Republic is a landlocked country located in the centre of Europe. The area of the Czech Republic is 78,866 km2 and its population is about 10.4 million people. The Czech Republic was part of the former Czechoslovakia until 1993 and it has been a member state of the European Union since May 2004. The Czech Republic is an industrialized country enjoying a decent gross domestic product (GDP) growth (6.6 percent in 2007). The GDP per capita is currently at about 82 percent of the average of the 27 EU member states. The largest cities in the Czech Republic are Prague (1.2 million), Brno (0.37 million), Ostrava (0.31 million), Plzen (0.16 million) and Olomouc (0.1 million).
The Czech Republic is a signatory of the Kyoto protocol with the obligation to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 8 percent from 1990 levels. The greenhouse gas emissions were down 26 percent in 2007.
The building ventilation market in the Czech Republic concentrates around commercial buildings (shopping malls, banks, movie theatres, restaurants, airports, etc.), where balanced mechanical ventilation with heat recovery is mostly used (usually as part of the central air-conditioning systems). The balanced mechanical ventilation systems are also used in newly built private office buildings, which very often have glass facades. The school buildings are usually naturally ventilated. Balanced mechanical ventilation is commonly used in lecture halls at universities but rarely used in offices and classrooms. The regulations for residential ventilation are rather loose with natural ventilation by opening windows considered satisfactory in most situations.
Thanks to its mid-continental location the Czech Republic has a moderate climate with four distinct seasons. Space heating accounts for most of the energy use in the building sector. Space cooling has been rather rare and it is mostly used in commercial buildings. Mechanical cooling is rarely used in residential buildings, schools and hospitals. The final energy consumption by sectors in the Czech Republic in 2006 can be seen in Fig. 1.
Industry accounts for the largest portion of final energy use. The share of transportation is lower than in other developed countries. Households account roughly for one quarter of the final energy use. The pie chart in Fig. 2 shows the breakdown of energy use in households. The coal-fired and wood-fired boilers are still quite common in family houses in the country what makes the share of solid fuel consumption in households relatively high.
The last census in the Czech Republic took place on March 1, 2001. Various data on the housing stock were collected in the census. The basic structure of the Czech housing stock can be seen in Table 1. The discrepancy between the total number of dwellings and the number of permanently inhabited dwellings does not mean that there were half a million uninhabited dwelling in the Czech Republic in 2001. A dwelling is considered permanently inhabited if someone refers to it as the place of permanent residence. If neither the owners nor the tenants use the dwelling as their place of permanent residence (e.g. students renting an apartment while studying in a city) the dwellings shows in the statistics as not permanently inhabited.

Original title:
Trends in the Czech building ventilation market and drivers for changes