Passivhaus Trust reposted this
We love this quote by Jeff Colley, Editor of Passive House Plus: "Once you’ve reached Passive House, there is no next level. Once a builder has learned how to achieve Passive House, there will never be a need to upskill to a higher thermal performance standard. Passive House is the summit." It truly hits the nail on the head. Passive House sets the benchmark for energy efficiency, comfort, and sustainability, leaving no room for compromise or the need for "next steps." It’s a performance standard that doesn’t just meet today’s expectations but exceeds them for generations to come. But it raises some important questions: why isn’t it the standard everywhere? What are the blockers holding back widespread adoption? How do we wake the industry up quicker to the long-term benefits of this approach? We’d love to hear your thoughts! #MosArt #PassiveHouse #SustainableDesign #EnergyEfficiency #FutureProof #GreenBuildings #BuildingStandards #SustainabilityLeadership
In my opinion Pasivhaus standard is absolutely the current summit, but one of the wonderful things about human ingenuity is that we continue to set ourselves new targets and expand our boundaries, no matter how high we climb, or no matter how tough the initial climb may have been. Human ingenuity is precisely why Passivhaus standard exists. It created a new target, which created new boundaries for designers to explore, and is a credit to those who created the standard... but from my perspective we're not done exploring just yet, and the boundaries are never fully defined as long as human ingenuity exists. It may only be a slight climb more, but every small change we make in reducing the impact of the built environment on our natural environment is a worthwhile change.
I doubt we have reason to go beyond the heating demand summit but as Gwilym Still says we have a long way to go on embodied carbon and we can make significant improvements over Passivhaus on total energy demand (PER/EUI etc). Imagine if we put the same effort into DHW energy demand as we do into building fabric!
It would be naive to think one energy model or one standard is the end of the line, there is always more to learn.
Indeed it is and the “views” of when you get there are amazing.
But the Passivhaus standard itself evolves so perhaps that quote is slightly misleading. Not to mention other aspects of building construction not related to thermal performance.
Passivhaus Director and MEP Engineer at Max Fordham LLP
2moI like Passivhaus, and think it's better than the alternatives I've seen. But I don't think it's the acme of thermal performance or the built environment, there are projects out there usefully achieving better-than-Passivhaus levels of airtightness, and considering other important aspects of construction like embodied carbon, use of bio-based materials, etc. Rather than the summit, I've heard it described as a good base camp to work from!