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A Passive House White House

March 31, 2009 in green building, policy by nils | Add your comment

What if the White House were a Passive House?

What if the White House were a Passive House?

David White, an architectural energy technical consultant at Transsolar, sent a letter to President Obama recommending the Passive House as a new energy efficiency standard:

I'd like to draw your attention to one approach to energy efficient building, which is called Passive House ... the most stringent residential energy efficiency standard in the world.

White goes on to describe the Passive House approach in more detail, and ends with this call for a subsidy and/or mandate.

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Thermal Bridges, Passive Houses in the UK, and Spray Foam

March 24, 2009 in energy efficiency, green building, materials by nils | Add your comment

On the fence

Chain link fence (get it?) - (image by James Jordan, CC 2.0 licensed)

As I've been surfing green building sites and articles over the last week, I ran across these interesting items. I hope you find them useful.

Thermal bridging occurs wherever assembly components with low R-values relative to surrounding materials span from the inside to the outside of a building assembly.

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Green Building Incentives – Arlington County’s Approach

March 23, 2009 in green building by nils | Add your comment

Court House Plaza

Arlington's Courthouse Square (image by Helgas Lobster Stew, CC 2.0 licensed)

I posted last week about my project, along with some other Menlo Park residents, to get some incentives for energy efficient buildings into the Menlo Park building code. I put out a tweet on Twitter the other day to see if any of my "tweeps" had suggestions for me. Chris Cheatham, of the Green Building Law Update blog, turned me on to the Arlington County (Virginia) incentives.

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Code Changes And Incentives Are Critical For Energy Independence

March 18, 2009 in accelerating change, energy efficiency, green building by nils | 1 comment

Clovers at Blarney Castle Garden

Clovers at Blarney Castle

Patricia hit the nail on the head in her last post, No Blarney here! - Turning up the Heat:

Where are the codes and incentives?

Or rather, how do we get people to build and renovate houses to energy efficiency levels that are significantly above code?

The Architecture 2030 website has a great reference on how much beyond code you must build to achieve their interim and final energy efficiency goals. For example, in California's we have a new 2008 version of the energy efficiency code, usually called "Title 24." To meet the Architecture 2030 interim goal of buildings that use half as much energy as their conventional peers (the "initial 50% reduction target"), buildings in California need to be 10% more efficient than required by this new building code.

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Slideshows About The Passive House Concept

March 17, 2009 in energy efficiency, green building by nils | Add your comment

Bronwyn Barry's Passive House Conference Report

Bronwyn Barry's Passive House Conference Report

I was contacted the other day by Bronwyn Barry, a designer and rater at Quantum Builders, and a member of the Passive House California organization up in Berkeley, so I did what any normal internet user would do - I Googled her. And I was excited to find, as one of the first results, a slideshow she'd made and put up on Slideshare. It's a trip report from her visit to the 3rd Annual North American Passive House Conference held in Duluth last November. And, not only is Bronwyn's presentation there, but there are several others, including one from Tim Eian, a German-born architect now working in Minnesota, and several others:

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Biohaus: First Certified PassivHaus in the U.S.

March 13, 2009 in green building, opinion, policy by nils | 2 comments

Front View of the Waldsee BioHaus

Front View of the Waldsee BioHaus

The other day I posted about one of the first passive houses built in the U.S. I just ran across another passive house example - this one is the first U.S.-built home to be certified to the German Passivhaus standard. The house was built at the Concordia  Language Villages in Minnesota in 2006, partially funded by the first-ever grant to a U.S. recipient by the German environmental foundation Deutsche Bundesstiftung Umwelt (DBU).

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The First U.S. Passive House – Super-Efficient, Affordable

March 11, 2009 in green building by nils | Add your comment

The Big Wall of Windows

The Big Wall of Windows

While the passive house concept is taking off in Europe, where over 10,000 passive houses have been built, there are still very few in the States. I have posted before about Nabih Taleb's passive house remodel in Berkeley, and I've heard about a few more which I'll be posting soon. But this month the Taunton Press's Green Building Advisor website is featuring an article on America's first "passive house."

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Introducing New Silicon Valley Passive Homes Website

March 9, 2009 in accelerating change, green building, policy by nils | Add your comment

Silicon Valley From Space

Silicon Valley From Space

Over the weekend I put up what I hope will be an important resource in the goal of achieving 100% zero-net energy homes in California by 2018 - a new website for the Silicon Valley Passive House Coalition.

From the site:

SVPH is helping local municipalities to set challenging but practical goals for maximizing energy efficiency and carbon emission reduction in the local communities of the San Francisco Bay Area and Northern California.

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First Shot, or Swan Song?

March 5, 2009 in energy efficiency, green building, policy by nils | Add your comment

Skyscraper

A commercial real estate development (image by MK Media Productions, CC 2.0 licensed)

The NAIOP, also known as the Commercial Real Estate Development Association, released a report last week "showing" that building green is not a winner in terms of payback. Apparently timed to coincide with a Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing on improving building energy code standards, the report found, according to a New York Times/ClimateWire article, that:

A 50 percent energy improvement beyond federal standards is technically impossible. A 30 percent target is achievable, but only by adding a million-dollar solar system that could take up to 100 years to pay for itself

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Middle Class Task Force Meeting in Philly Focuses on Green Jobs

March 4, 2009 in economy, green building, jobs, policy by nils | 5 comments

One of the Middle Class Task Force panels at the Philly meeting

One of the Middle Class Task Force panels at the Philly meeting

If you're not reading the new whitehouse.gov blog, you're missing out.

This liveblog about the "Middle Class Task Force" meeting in Philly last week from whitehouse.gov was great. Speakers included John Podesta, former Clinton staffer and now with the Center for American Progress; Van Jones from Green for All (based in the Bay Area), Fred Krupp from the Environmental Defense Fund, a bunch of cabinet and administration appointees, and representatives from labor like Leo Gerard of the United Steelworkers of America.

Some highlights:

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