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ET Cetera Building outside trees sky street

Sustainable office building

Sustainable office building with cables from NKT

References
Sustainable office building

Key Facts

Client and end-customer

Bravida and Castellum

Location

Västerås, Sweden

Duration

Spring 2021 - spring 2023

Cable

EXLQ, AXQJ, FXQJ and Qaddy^®

In Västerås, Sweden, real estate company Castellum is building a new office building. In spring 2023, Northvolt, a Swedish battery developer and manufacturer, specialising in lithium-ion technology for electric vehicles will move in as the only tenant in the building. With its own solar cells, energy storage and ZeroCO₂ certification, the building is already being called Sweden's most sustainable building.

The new office building will be 16,500 m² and Northvolt, which is adjacent to their existing campus on the site.

- It has gone incredibly fast, we started in the spring of 2021 and already in September 2022, we put the shovel in the ground, says Michael Lundblad, project manager at Castellum, also responsible for the sustainability aspects in the project.

The project started with workshops on what Northvolt needed from its office. Among other things, they wanted a wooden facade and a wooden structural frame that is visible from the outside. In addition, they had high sustainability requirements. The building will have both solar cells and its own energy storage system, as well as its own cooling and heating production, which will go a long way towards getting it ZeroCO₂ certified.

High environmental requirements for cables

- It was decided that the building should be certified according to LEED and ZeroCO₂. Castellum's social and economic sustainability requirements were then added to the project. We want social and economic sustainability at as many stages as we can control," explains Michael Lundblad, adding that:

- Thanks to the ZeroCO₂ certification, we have to look at the ZeroCO₂ value in the EPDs which goes almost down to the screw and nut detail-level. We've had to make very careful choices and that's good.

The cables supplied by NKT to the project (EXLQ, AXQJ and FXQJ) are all halogen-free and environmentally listed in the Building Materials Database and can be included in Nordic Ecolabelled buildings. All cables are also manufactured with 100% renewable electricity.

- It is important for us that our products maintain a high level in terms of sustainability, as more buildings have increasing sustainability requirements, says Per Blomkvist, Key Account Manager at NKT.

In addition to cables, NKT is also supplying Qaddy’s to the project, a smart solution for electricians. A Qaddy holds 500 m of installation cable or 200 m of cable in flex tubes. It saves both back and shoulders as it does not need to be lifted to be moved. In addition, it can be handled by a single person, thus saving time.

- Qaddy simplifies a lot. After all, we want to get as many meters on the drum as possible, but for it to still be manageable. The fact that it can be pulled around saves us a lot of time," says Mikael Schönberg, Project Manager at the contractor Bravida.