German Passive House

I was lucky enough to go to a Peak Oil conference last year with my friend David. (See the Community Solutions website for downloadable presentations)  This conference focused on a "Plan C" for preparing for peak oil and with respect to global climate change and covered these four areas: Food, Housing, Energy and Transportation.

In the Housing stream, I was introduced to the German Passive House standard through a presentation by Katrin Klingenberg.  This is the strictest, most efficient house design that mandates a very low energy use per square meter of living space.  One achieves this by using thick double-wall construction with no thermal bridging, solar south facing windows and thermal mass to absorb energy.  They employ an efficient heat recovery ventilator and no furnace or air conditioner.