Passivhaus: Does Your House Speak German?

There aren’t many states redder than Utah. [19]
—Brian Passey, Gannett News Service, 2008 Ironically, the most ambitious U.S. action in the fight against global warming is coming from big cities and their mayors. It seems preposterous on its face. Each city’s emissions are only a tiny fraction of the global pie. Cities can’t force utilities to shift to renewables, or make Detroit produce smarter cars. Nonetheless, some of the biggest U.S. mega-cities are stepping up in a big way on global warming. [13]
—Jonathan Lash, World Resources Institute, 2008

Global warming is as much an economic opportunity as an environmental challenge.
—Jay Inslee, 2008, Member of the US House of Representatives

A typical passive solar home, as pioneered in Darmstadt, Germany, consumes 5% of the energy of a traditional home that relies on a furnace. In a passive solar building, the structure is designed to maintain interior thermal comfort throughout the daily and annual cycles of sunlight at the same time as reducing the need for active heating and cooling systems. In other words, a passive solar house does not have a big furnace in the basement. A passive house does have superb insulation, many south-facing windows, and a heat exchanger. The heat exchanger takes heat from outside air and exchanges it for cold inside air. Properly designed windows and roof overhangs can maximize solar gain for interior heat and light in the winter and minimize it during the summer.

Over 15,000 passive homes have been built, mainly in central Europe, where energy costs are high and the winter is cold. [23] If this technology works well in Austria, Switzerland, or Germany, imagine how well it will work throughout the United States. To date, very few passive homes have been built in this country. [8] In addition to solar gain through well-placed windows, Passivhaus buildings make extensive use of intrinsic heat from internal sources, such as waste heat from lighting, major appliances, computers, or others devices, as well as body heat from the people and animals inside the building. Because Passivhaus buildings require constant low-volume air circulation, residents experience high-quality, clean interior air in which each room is the same temperature.

Low-energy buildings may also use passive-absorption chiller technology that is hundreds of years old and reliable. Used to manufacture ice long before electrical power existed, absorption chillers employ a heat source, such as sunlight or a flame, to provide the energy needed to drive the cooling system. The system uses a liquid with a very low boiling point in a closed loop. The liquid is heated into a gas, which absorbs some of the heat, and this provides a cooling effect, just as sweat evaporating can cool the skin. In an absorption chiller, the refrigerant is changed from a gas back into a liquid so that the cycle can repeat itself continuously. In a nutshell, the revolution in cleaner, quieter, healthier, and less-energy-hungry homes, schools, and workplaces is just getting under way.

Online figure

Figure 12.2 US economy-wide marginal cost curves for greenhouse gas reduction, 2020Collectively, state action plans can be aggregated and graphically illustrated on a cost curve that shows the dollar cost or savings per ton of GHG removed for each specific policy measure. Source: [20]

Bibliography

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Online resources

• Climate leadership in northeast North America
• Climate politics in Mexico in a North American perspective
• Communicating climate change motivating citizen action
• Second generation climate policies in the United States
• More articles on Environmental Policy
• 1Sky
• climate change.us Arizona Climate Change Action Group
• Center for Climate Strategies
• energycenter.org/glossary Consumer Energy Center Glossary
• DoRight Enterprises
• Energy Action Coalition
• Envirolution
• Focus the Nation 2008
• Footprint Network
• ICLEI?— Local Governments for Sustainability
• Midwest Ag Energy Network
• National Teach-In
• Natural Step
• New Economics Foundation
• New Mexico Climate Change Advisory Group
• North Central Bio-Economy Consortium
• Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory
• Salt Lake City Green
• US Climate Network
• US EPA Clean Energy Programs
• US Mayors Conference Climate Protection
• US Partnership for Education for Sustainable Development

Action items

• Action 1: Green Buildings and Building Design
• Action 16: Urban Responses to Climate Change in Coastal Cities
• Action 31: Communicating Information for Decision Makers?— Climate Change at the Regional Scale

Instructor resources

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