Definition of Subject
Performance based energy metrics and Passive Design Standards, history, development, methods and tools, current state of implementation, and future outlook.
Introduction
The Passive House Building Energy Standard is the most ambitious energy standard in the world. Buildings account for 40–50% of the total US carbon emissions – depending on how the sector is defined – stemming from buildings. The Passive House design and construction approach proposes to slash space conditioning energy consumption of buildings by up to an amazing 90–95% and overall energy use of space conditioning and household electricity by 70–80%, depending on which reference baseline home or energy code is used for comparison. Thousands of homes as well as educational and commercial buildings have been built or remodeled to meet the Passive House standard in Europe. Widespread...
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Abbreviations
- Airtight construction:
-
A method of construction for building envelopes that is aimed at the lowest possible result close to zero infiltration when tested for air leakage.
- Balanced mechanical ventilation with heat recovery:
-
Highly energy efficient mechanical equipment for airtight homes to provide equal amounts of fresh air at all times to the inhabitants as well as to exhaust the same amount of air to remove moisture, stale air, and indoor pollutants while recovering the energy at the highest possible level, which is useful to maintain thermal comfort in the building.
- Passive house building:
-
A building achieving close to thermal stasis by optimizing heat loss and gain through the building shell (primarily by limiting transmission losses through climate-specific insulation levels of its components and appropriate window specifications) so that thermal comfort in winter and summer can be maintained mostly without energy input and during the peak temperature periods with only very small amounts of energy input of roughly 1 W/sqft.
- Superinsulation:
-
Adequate, climate-specific amount of insulation to balance heat gains and losses in a cost-effective manner.
- Thermal Bridge free:
-
A building component, for example, a stud in a wall, is considered to be thermal bridge free when it has a lower conductivity than 0.006 BTU/(ft°F).
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© 2013 Springer Science+Business Media New York
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Klingenberg, K. (2013). Passive House (Passivhaus). In: Loftness, V., Haase, D. (eds) Sustainable Built Environments. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5828-9_351
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5828-9_351
Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY
Print ISBN: 978-1-4614-5827-2
Online ISBN: 978-1-4614-5828-9
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