In the United States, our buildings are responsible for over 40% of carbon emissions.
People aren’t aware of this.
You know we think about our cars and other things as the things that are producing carbon
emissions, but silently around us, all of our buildings, our homes, office buildings,
schools, hospitals,
they are all burning energy, and that is a big part of the climate problem.
In the United States, local governments, businesses and individuals are working on inventive ways
to curb carbon emissions in an often-overlooked place…
Our homes.
Zack Sempke works at NK Architects, a company that specializes in a cutting-edge energy-efficient
building technology called Passive House.
I’m a very active proponent of Passive House because it’s just clear to me that it’s
a very powerful way to transform buildings into a form of climate action.
In the clean energy space, we are seeing solar panels and wind just plummeting in cost and
performance rising really rapidly.
We need to take a cue from that and harness science, essentially, to build better buildings,
and that’s what Passive House does.
In order to meet the Paris Accord targets, we need to flatten out emissions by 2020,
and then see emissions reduced by half every decade afterward.
The Paris Climate Agreement pledges to limit the rise in global temperature to well below
2 degrees Celsius.
This ambitious goal will require a lot of cooperation, determination, and innovation.
Reducing energy use in buildings will play a major part in this.
According to the United Nations Environmental Programme, buildings use about 40% of global
energy.
The moral imperative for action is clear.
All of us – governments, businesses, consumers – will have to make changes.
More than that, we will have to “be” the change.
But how does this translate into a real life?
In Seattle Washington, the Ritchie family has built a Passive House for themselves,
using advanced technology to drastically cut their energy use
I’m an environmentalist.
I was an engineer for about ten years.
I have been now in construction for about ten or eleven years.
I like to work with my hands.
I like construction a lot.
I wanted to take it to sort of another level, to really do something meaningful for the community.
Once you build a house, hopefully it’s going to last for a very long time, and you have
one opportunity to really fix the energy consumption of the house,
and you lock in that energy consumption for a hundred years.
And so for me that was a very compelling idea.
We decided to do this house in that way.
As you can see, this windowsill is probably deeper than most windowsills.
This windowsill is probably about maybe 10 or 11 inches deep, and that’s because the
entire wall is 16 inches thick, so this is a fairly deep wall assembly, much deeper than
a traditional house.
The typical house in the Untied States has exterior walls around 10 inches thick.
So it is an airtight house, and so we have continuous ventilation, so we are delivering
fresh air to the house all the time.
A Passive House uses what’s called a building envelope to heavily control the air that
gets in and out of a building.
That means a super thick layer of insulation everywhere.
Might be a little challenging to film in here.
So this is the heat recovery ventilator.
Here it’s bringing incoming fresh air from outside and it’s filtering that air and
so this is delivering fresh air to the house continually.
Having continually filtered fresh air takes the allergens out of the air,
takes toxins out of the air.
The other part of it is our house is much more comfortable.
Like in our old home, in the winter, you know you would be running the heat pretty constantly,
and you would be bundled up.
So for us, we can just have on a T-shirt and a pair of jeans and flip-flop in our house
all year round.
On average, a Passive House costs around 3-5% more than a conventional building, yet reduces
energy use by up to 90%.
In Pennsylvania, the state’s housing agency has begun to incentivize Passive House technology
by giving builders a competitive edge in their affordable housing bids if they use it.
The biggest threat that we face is climate change.
I’ve always loved our planet, I love nature, I love our world.
I see it slowly being eroded away on a whole variety of fronts and it alarms me.
Laura Nettleton, an architect in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania, has recently been focusing on
restoring old buildings to passive house standards.
We were called into McKeesport.
This particular neighborhood, because of the reduction in steel production here, this community
has kind of emptied out.
This YMCA turned into a homeless shelter.
And there were 72 residents living there, and the building wasn’t updated and in poor
condition.
The ideal way to do retrofits is to put a sweater on the outside of the building, and
that sweater is made of insulation and a new skin.
The best way to think about it is, if I was asking you to stand outside in a 15 degree
day, all day, and I offered you two pieces of clothing.
I gave you a snow suit that went over your head and it had mittens built in, and it went
over your boots.
Or if I offered you a wool coat.
And we both know which one you would take, you would take the snow suit, and the snow
suit is designed to keep the cold air out.
It’s the same principle as Passive House.
And the same protection from a cold climate, provides energy conservation in a hot one
as well, reducing the need for air conditioning when temperatures run high.
So if you wrap your building with insulation carefully, then you can really conserve a
lot of heat.
We saved 68% of the energy from the original facility.
So that was a huge reduction in energy.
The Passive House movement is really taking off across the Northeast and across the United
States.
Loic Chappoz works on conservation for multi-family buildings at NYSERDA, New York State’s energy
agency.
The first piece of the equation for me is reducing the energy we consume.
Once you reduce the energy you consume in your building by 50, 60, 70%, then it becomes
much easier and possible to meet that energy demand with renewable energy, be it solar,
be it wind farms.
What we are doing here in New York,
we are trying to create a market to do very deep retrofits of existing buildings,
learning a lot from a successful program that has been implemented in the Netherlands called
Energie Sprong.
The Energie Sprong program takes an existing building, puts a new well-insulated shell
around it and prepares the roof for solar panels.
The energy efficiency principles behind it, like a super tight building envelope and continually
circulating fresh air, are similar to Passive House.
NYSERDA is currently studying how to implement a system like Energie Sprong or Passive House
on a scale large enough to execute state-wide.
And in an effort to expand the reach of this technology, the Passive House Institute of
the United States has begun working with their counterparts in China and Japan to foster
sustainable architecture on a global level.
There is a real possibility that Passive House can scale up quick enough to create a zero
net carbon built environment by 2050, which is what we need to do.
I am sure it was the same thing when the first houses had to be plumbed and to have electricity.
“Oh, this is a stupid idea, we are never going to be able to, it’s too expensive!”
You know, right?
It’ s the same thing, it’s just we are working on how to make the energy more sensible.