Henrik Ender, Architect, Certified Passive House Designer, and APHA member recently attended the International Passive House Conference. Read on to find out more about Henrik's experience at this fantastic event.

Review of 25th International Passive House Conference

What an overwhelming array of aspects there are to explore in the Passive House world!

The program of 25th international PH conference this year was once more packed to the brim with a broad spectrum of topics.

A thought-provoking reminder was given to the audience:

Diana Ürge-Vorsatz, Vice Chairwoman of the Working Group III of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), tabled future climate scenarios and summarised that in order to achieve ANY of these scenarios we need to make our buildings zero carbon NOW. (I am using capitals here to reflect the message as it was presented).

It was stressed that even if we want to end up with the worst case +5 degrees by 2100, we have to act now. Not just reduction in energy consumption, but zero carbon.

So, no leaning back in the armchair! Or as Marine Sanchez phrased the urgency: "The planet we think we live on no longer exists".

What to do to meet climate targets that are getting tougher year by year?

Of course, "Do it well"- you have heard it thousand times before from Passive House educators.

Across the conference it was agreed that energy efficiency is the best and most realistic approach to overcome challenges in the building sector and to achieve a building stock of a very low energy consumption.

Only with such a small remaining portion of energy demand from the building sector, Germany's plan to break away from fossil fuels (and nuclear) would be manageable.

German Federal Politicians spoke firmly to the building sector, shaking it up by asking if it was aware of the huge potential of contribution to climate protection.

Just glance at the program and the award categories - you may have noticed that the Passive House standard is no fringe case in the building sector anymore and these days it is applied well beyond single family homes.

In fact, a big focus of this year`s discussions was on upscaling the implementation of energy efficiency. Session 1 discussed large scale buildings and districts achieving the Passive House standard.

If you are interested in national energy supply issues, look up Bernd Steinmueller's ideas. He calculated that Passive Houses can be seen as 'power plants'. Ohh – interesting!

We know of their well insulating qualities from a comfort point of view, but has it occurred to you that their ability of storing 'warmth' for much longer than a standard home can be a real game changer for countries wanting to transition to a renewable energy network (Nudge nudge, Australia!)?

Wind and solar electricity production fluctuate unfortunately. Engineers and economists are wracking their brains to find non-fossil solutions to fill the national supply gap in 'dark doldrums' - drops in wind and solar power supply on a winter day.

Victoria, for example, is building battery facilities (...one went up in flames, ooops) to buffer energy peaks and energy troughs.

Now just imagine for a moment that all buildings were Passive Houses. The logic here is that PH buildings can be just left simply unheated for the duration of such a winter supply gap - say for 12 hours in which the internal temperatures would not drop less than 3 degrees.

Fluctuations in the supply chain wouldn't be such a determining factor for the national grid anymore. National energy production systems would not any longer needed to be sized to cover supply bottlenecks. Millions of dollars saved?

I suppose off-grid Australians would also be interested in the thermal inertia of their buildings for similar reasons?

Policy progression

Urban policies around the world are focusing on GHG emission reductions at the moment, with the first step what many call "Net zero ready" (e.g., Vancouver BC energy step code). The immediate step to follow in government agendas is the restructuring of their building codes. Anticipate that measures which we can find in the Passive House standard today will be sooner or later mass implemented in building codes around the world.

Government projects

"Conservation is the first resource" - Governments have not failed to understand this new mantra.

No doubt, the most encouraging success story of a government agency achieving their 'green' goals in non-residential construction was presented by Parks Canada, who have their new learning Centre in the Lake Superior National Marine Conservation Area currently under construction.

Perhaps fair to mention that Parks Canada already has conservation embedded in its mindset. Nevertheless, it was reported that policy makers seem love PH, as it fulfils government aspirations.

The project team settled with the Passive House standard along with non-toxic and low-carbon material choices (Living Building Challenge, Red List free) when they found out that PH among all options "lends itself very well to serve as a very robust platform to achieve the key steps of the federal eco pathway. PH can diver in a streamlined and economic and systemic way the federal 'green' targets. And all of that with the added bonus of resilience, comfort, health, wellness and quality and you name it..."

Nowadays Parks Canada really pushes the institutionalisation of the PH standard. It even calls out Passive House training for key builder`s staff as a contractual requirement; and on top of that it deploys their own PH qualified staff to oversee critical site activities. Tender documents call for accountability - the targets are firm, measurable, verifiable. Post-occupancy reporting was made a non-negotiable contractor obligation.

Most promising tech-talk:

The Austrian University of Innsbruck is developing facade-integrated decentralised heat pumps for apartment hot water generation.

The award for the driest tech-talk award goes tooooo – ironically - the presentation featuring moisture balancing properties of paper in libraries.

The most surprising tech talk:

Building 'climate neutral' is easily written into a marketing pitch, but is it really that easy to achieve? Not at all.

The Swedish project 'Circuitus' looked into the embodied energy in building materials and systems, modelling variants of an existing compact Passive House home.

Exhaustive Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) cases were prepared with the tool 'PH Ribbon UK'. The resulting comparison pointed out that Zero Carbon is still not quite reached even with best-practice energy efficiency, ecological materials (timber and straw) and your own renewable power production and even with the re-use (not recycling) of half of the building materials after a very long usage life of 50 years.

I would love to see local Australian LCA studies of this sort.

Here is a cool battery idea:

An architect was rather resourceful in re-purposing industrial batteries for the use in buildings. Replacement batteries from underground mining vehicles are easy to obtain in Scandinavia. Heavy and bulky units, though. They look definitely less snazzy than the shiny white Teslas.

It was mentioned that large suppliers of industrial batteries also offer the lease of batteries for use in buildings. Refurbishment of ageing industrial batteries seems to be also more common than I thought. Worth looking into!

Finally - it was announced that the new PHPPversion10 in German language is out - it won't be long until we also can upgrade to the English translation!

Sneak preview: Designing for summer comfort will be much easier with the new version.

Contributing overheating factors, such as user interactions with the building and future (or local) climate protections, can now easily be compared - either independently or by combining different aspects for the analysis of their compounding effect.

Words by APHA member Henrik Ender +&+Architects, Melbourne, September 2021

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