Great praise for first ever on­line format

This year the par­ti­cipants shared their praise for the 24th In­ter­na­tion­al Pass­ive House Con­fer­en­ce in the chat win­dow as the con­fer­en­ce was held as an vir­tu­al event for the first time on ac­count of the COV­ID-19 pan­dem­ic. More than 800 par­ti­cipants from 40 na­tions tuned in and listened to the lec­tures on en­ergy ef­fi­cient con­struc­tion and ret­ro­fit solu­tions from their own screens. The vir­tu­al Pass­ive House Café was open
24/7 for in­ter­na­tion­al net­work­ing.

We are happy to look back to sci­en­tif­ic lec­tures, build­ing tours and the ac­com­pa­ny­ing in­form­at­ive trade ex­hib­i­tion in on­line format. Thanks to all speak­ers, poster presenters, ex­hib­it­ors as well as to our part­ners and sup­port­ers and last but not least to all of you who par­ti­cip­ated in our 24th In­ter­na­tion­al Pass­ive House Cn­fer­en­ce!

In the open­ing plen­ary of the 24th In­ter­na­tion­al Pass­ive House Con­fer­en­ce the cli­mate re­seach­er Prof. Stefan Rahm­storf ex­plains that we have been already known for a long time that hu­mans can have an im­pact on the cli­mate and that we have to rap­idly re­duce em­mis­sions world­wide. The rel­ev­ance of the Pass­ive House stand­ard for cli­mate pro­tec­tion was il­lus­trated by Wolfgang Feist. He built the world's first Pass­ive House build­ing in Darm­stadt ex­actly 30 years ago, in the au­tumn of 1990. Feist ex­plained that "due to their low en­ergy de­mand, Pass­ive House build­ings are a ba­sic pre­re­quis­ite for sup­ply­ing build­ings en­tirely with re­new­able en­ergy. With this, the en­ergy trans­ition in the build­ing sec­tor can be suc­cess­ful. A healthy liv­ing en­vir­on­ment is an ad­ded ma­jor ad­vant­age for oc­cu­pants of a Pass­ive House build­ing".

In­tens­i­fied ret­ro­fit­ting

The first key mes­sage of the con­fer­en­ce: Con­struc­tion act­iv­it­ies at the in­ter­na­tion­al level need to be placed even more strongly on en­ergy ef­fi­cient ret­ro­fits. Many speak­ers, in­clud­ing some from Tyr­ol, Glas­gow, Van­couver and the US state of Wash­ing­ton poin­ted out that new builds are now only pos­sible to a lim­ited ex­tent due to the short­age of build­ing land. Con­nec­ted to this, they presen­ted nu­mer­ous ret­ro­fit pro­jects which had drastic­ally re­duced their en­ergy de­mand with ren­ov­a­tion to the En­erPHit stand­ard. For Monte Paulsen, a Pass­ive House ex­pert in the Ca­na­di­an Province of Brit­ish Columbia, “swiftre­fur­bish­ment of ex­ist­ing build­ings in the in­dus­tri­al­ized na­tions is among the top pri­or­it­ies for sur­viv­al of civil­iz­a­tion on this plan­et".

Drastic sav­ings

"The sav­ings of heat­ing en­ergy nat­ur­ally de­pend on the re­spect­ive build­ing, es­pe­cially on its pre­vi­ous con­sump­tion. In a typ­ic­al case, about 75 per­cent en­ergy can be saved after a com­plete ret­ro­fit to the En­erPHit stand­ard, in some build­ings, sav­ings of more than 90 per­cent may be achieved”, ex­plained Pro­fess­or Wolfgang Feist, founder of the Pass­ive House In­sti­tu­te. In this re­gard, seri­al ret­ro­fits us­ing pre­fab­ric­ated build­ing com­pon­ents are re­ceiv­ing in­creased at­ten­tion. These al­low time-sav­ing and cost-ef­fect­ive mod­ern­isa­tion. The ar­chi­tect Stefan Oehler from Ber­lin presen­ted a fu­ture-ori­en­ted concept based on the seri­al ret­ro­fit of 12 hous­ing units from the 1930s in Hameln, Ger­many. The in­stall­a­tion of a large in­su­lat­ing ele­ment for the façade only took 20 minutes to com­plete.

Build­ing bet­ter than code

The second key mes­sage of the con­fer­en­ce: The polit­ic­al frame­work con­di­tions for en­ergy ef­fi­cient and cli­mate-friendly con­struc­tion need to be more strin­gent. This was also de­mon­strated by the spe­cif­ic­a­tions of the European Uni­on re­lat­ing to nearly zero en­ergy build­ing (NZEBs). A build­ing con­struc­ted to the Pass­ive House stand­ard may save around four times more en­ergy than the re­spect­ive latest na­tion­al spe­cif­ic­a­tions. With cli­mate pro­tec­tion and a healthy liv­ing en­vir­on­ment in mind, those wish­ing to con­struct or ret­ro­fit build­ings should there­fore go sig­ni­fic­antly bey­ond the code re­quire­ments, ac­cord­ing to the key­note speak­ers. For the ur­gently needed en­ergy trans­ition in the build­ing sec­tor, train­ing and fur­ther edu­ca­tion should be in­tens­i­fied, both in the area of the trades and at the uni­versity level.