Solar energy has sex appeal. If you want to show the world you're doing something to reduce pollution, you put photovoltaic (PV) panels on your roof to generate clean electricity. Even better, you drive a plug-in hybrid or an all-electric…
I've been working on my presentation for the 10th anniversary of the North American Passive House Conference. It's on the global warming impact of insulation, a followup to my latest article about Alex Wilson's work on that subject. One of…
There's this thing called passive house. It's a terrible name. Almost everyone agrees on that. Look at how its adherents are driven to a frenzy and you'll see that the name doesn't really fit. The houses themselves aren't passive either,…
Passive house has a reputation for requiring ungodly amounts of insulation. It grew out of the superinsulation movement after all. If you're familiar with any passive house projects, you may be thinking about double-stud walls that are a foot thick…
Every day, I get updates on various energy data from the US Energy Information Administration (EIA). Earlier this week I got one showing the graph below, indicating that energy intensity for the whole world is going down. That's a good…
In 2002, Katrin Klingenberg introduced the passivhaus program to North America when she built the Smith House in Urbana, Illinois. She had come to the US from Germany, where she studied architecture and got involved with passivhaus. But is this…
The Green Builder Coalition has been working hard on their Water Efficiency Rating Score — the WERS — for homes. The inaugural WERS training happened in Santa Fe, New Mexico in March. I was in that class, and I learned a…
Well, I really stirred things up with my last article on insulation and global warming. My intention was to explain why Alex Wilson's results could be doing a disservice to the green building community. In the end, I was rightly…
I've been reading a lot of BS lately. No, I'm not talking about blood sugar. It's brain science that's captured my attention. Understanding how the human brain works, why we do the things we do, and what common illusions often…
A zero energy building is one that produces on-site at least as much energy as it uses. As I've written here before, the US Department of Energy has been mulling over the various ways to define and calculate zero energy…