Pro­mot­ing high qual­ity

Us­ing spe­cif­ic ex­amples, Pro­fess­or Ben­jam­in Krick of the Pass­ive House In­sti­tu­te showed how im­port­ant it is to re­duce the space heat­ing de­mand of a build­ing first. "What we im­ple­ment today in build­ing con­struc­tion will re­main with us for the next few dec­ades. If I have to re­place the win­dows any­way, then I will have triple glazed win­dows in­stalled. The same ap­plies for the roof and for the wall plaster: if these build­ing com­pon­ents are re­newed, then I should also add thermal pro­tec­tion to these meas­ures," ad­ded Jes­sica Grove-Smith of the Pass­ive House In­sti­tu­te. As an in­cent­ive, it is es­sen­tial to pro­mote only those meas­ures which will lead to a high level of en­ergy ef­fi­ciency. Me­dio­cre meas­ures, on the oth­er hand, must not be sup­por­ted any fur­ther, said Grove-Smith.

Act now!

Facts on cli­mate change were provided by Pro­fess­or Di­ana Ürge-Vor­satz of the UN's In­ter­gov­ern­ment­al Pan­el on Cli­mate Change (IP­CC). The cli­mate sci­ent­ist warned that more and more fre­quent ex­treme weath­er events as a res­ult of cli­mate change should be taken ser­i­ously and that something needs to be done about this. CO₂ emis­sions must be re­duced to net zero, ex­plained Ürge-Vor­satz. The build­ing sec­tor plays an es­sen­tial role in solu­tions for this. Be­sides re­du­cing emis­sions through great­er en­ergy ef­fi­ciency, she called for the trans­form­a­tion of every build­ing with PV sys­tems in­to a mini power plant. "We can­not wait any longer. The next two dec­ades will be de­cis­ive for see­ing how the cli­mate af­fects hu­mans in the next two hun­dred years," stated Ürge-Vor­satz.

An at­tract­ive in­vest­ment

Pro­fess­or An­dreas Pink­wart, Min­is­ter for Eco­nom­ic Af­fairs of the Ger­man state of North-Rhine West­phalia and Pat­ron of the 25th In­ter­na­tion­al Pass­ive House Con­fer­en­ce, poin­ted out that build­ings built to the Pass­ive House stand­ard do not only con­sti­tu­te a con­tri­bu­tion to the en­ergy re­volu­tion and cli­mate pro­tec­tion, but also rep­res­ent an at­tract­ive in­vest­ment. The con­fer­en­ce it­self was an im­port­ant plat­form for co­op­er­a­tion and know­ledge trans­fer. Dirk Mobers of the En­ergy Agency of North Rhine-West­phalia (En­er­gieAgen­tur.NRW) and co-or­gan­iser of the con­fer­en­ce called on private per­sons and hous­ing de­vel­op­ment com­pan­ies to build bet­ter than the leg­ally re­quired stand­ard. He de­man­ded also to in­clude sol­ar tech­no­logy in the pro­cess. Mobers men­tioned Ger­man cit­ies like Co­logne and Bonn as ex­em­plary re­gions which had com­mit­ted them­selves to the Pass­ive House stand­ard.

Dis­tricts - a rising trend

In his speech, the Dir­ect­or of the Fed­er­al En­vir­on­ment­al Agency, Pro­fess­or Dirk Mess­ner re­ferred to the so­cial as­pects: en­ergy ef­fi­cient con­struc­tion and ren­ov­a­tion of­fers a high level of liv­ing com­fort which oc­cu­pants rate very highly. "Let us build houses and dis­tricts which are good for the people," said Mess­ner. Dr Hart­mut Murschall of the Min­istry of Eco­nom­ics in North Rhine-West­phalia pre-sen­ted such a so­cial concept: more than 50 cli­mate pro­tec­tion hous­ing es­tates in which as­pects re­lat­ing to en­ergy ef­fi­ciency, ar­chi­tec­ture and urb­an plan­ning play an equal role have already been com­pleted, with an­oth­er 50 planned.

Ven­tur­ing in­to new ter­rit­ory

Lord May­or Uwe Schneidewind ex­plained that the city of Wup­per­tal wished to be­come cli­mate-neut­ral by the year 2035. The Pass­ive House stand­ard rep­res­ents a cru­cial ele­ment for achiev­ing these am­bi­tious goals. En­vir­on­ment­al sci­ent­ist Ernst Ul­rich von Weiz­säck­er posed the pro­voc­at­ive ques­tion of wheth­er the con­struc­tion in­dustry already knew that the cli­mate had now be­come a very im­port­ant top­ic of dis­cus­sion. As Ernst Uh­ing, Pres­id­ent of the Cham­ber of Ar­chi­tects of North-Rhine West­phalia, put it: "Sus­tain­able con­struc­tion is a part of build­ing cul­ture". Build­ing and ren­ov­at­ing in an en­ergy ef­fi­cient way was a great op­por­tun­ity for build­ing own­ers to re­duce run­ning costs per­man­ently. He called on ar­chi­tects to ven­ture in­to new ter­rit­ory and im­ple­ment in­nov­at­ive design ap­proaches "step by step and brick by brick".

Ju­bilee cel­eb­ra­tion

Most of the 14 win­ners of the Pass­ive House Award 2021 par­ti­cip­ated via video stream to re­ceive their awards from the Pass­ive House In­sti­tu­te in Wup­per­tal in a vir­tu­al awards ce­re­mony. A total of 87 in­ter­na­tion­al Pass­ive House pro­jects were sub­mit­ted for this ar­chi­tec­ture com­pet­i­tion. This was fol­lowed by the triple ju­bilee cel­eb­ra­tions for the 30th an­niversary of the first Pass­ive House build­ing, the found­ing of the Pass­ive House In­sti­tu­te 25 years ago, and the 25th edi­tion of the In­ter­na­tion­al Pass­ive House Con­fer­en­ce, in­clud­ing in­ter­views on the back­ground his­tory and the match­ing cake.

100 speak­ers

Dur­ing the 4 days of con­fer­en­ce, more than 100 speak­ers de­mon­strated the di­verse ways in which en­ergy ef­fi­cient con­struc­tions and re­fur­bish­ments have been im­ple­men­ted all around the globe. In a total of 16 lec­ture ses­sions, they presen­ted new pro­jects and dis­tricts built to the Pass­ive House stand­ard and ret­ro­fits to the En­erPHit stand­ard, from around the world: in­clud­ing Spain, Italy, Canada, Po­land, the United King­dom, Aus­tria and China. Eco­lo­gic­al build­ing ma­ter­i­als, so­cial hous­ing con­struc­tion, sum­mer com­fort and vent­il­a­tion con­cepts were also dis­cussed in de­tail in sep­ar­ate lec­ture ses­sions. 

Anchored in policies

Edu­ca­tion and fur­ther train­ing, as well as strategies for even great­er an­chor­ing of en­ergy ef­fi­cient con­struc­tion and ret­ro­fit­ting in policies and ad­min­is­tra­tion, were also fo­cal points of the 25th In­ter­na­tion­al Pass­ive House Con­fer­en­ce. Suit­able com­pon­ents for cli­mate-friendly con­struc­tion were presen­ted by man­u­fac­tur­ers dur­ing the ON­LINE Pass­ive House Ex­hib­i­tion, in­clud­ing win­dows and vent­il­a­tion sys­tems. A vir­tu­al ex­cur­sion show­cased im­press­ive Pass­ive House pro­jects in Wup­per­tal and the sur­round­ing re­gion.

PHPP 10 re­leased

A par­tic­u­larly pleas­ing piece of news for de­sign­ers of Pass­ive House pro­jects was an­nounced at the con­clu­sion of the con­fer­en­ce: the tenth up­date of the en­ergy bal­ance tool PHPP has been re­leased. Among oth­er things, PHPP 10 takes in­to ac­count heat pumps as well split units and in­cludes a stress test for sum­mer com­fort. In ad­di­tion, PHPP 10 makes it pos­sible to com­pare the en­ergy bal­ance with meas­ured con­sump­tion data. The Eng­lish lan­guage ver­sion of PHPP 10 is planned for Spring 2022.