In a bid to increase the uptake of solar technology in Ireland as families and businesses continue to negotiate the energy and cost of living challenges, the Irish government has announced they intend to drop the VAT rate on the supply and installation of solar panels to zero.
The Association for Environment Conscious Building (AECB) has introduced a new retrofit standard catering for hard-to-treat homes and cases where homeowners want to take urgent action on climate change but are not currently able to commit to a deep retrofit.
The energy used to heat, cool and light our buildings is responsible for almost a quarter of Ireland’s national carbon emissions – with the carbon embodied in the buildings themselves representing over an eighth of the total, a new report has revealed.
The Irish Green Building Council (IGBC) today launched a new version of its Home Performance Index (HPI) sustainable home certification system at its annual residential conference, Better Homes 2022. The focus of the event was on delivering low carbon homes at scale.
Passive house expert Tomas O’Leary has been heralded for his decades of low energy building pioneering – picking up the Net Zero Champion Award at the inaugural Towards Net Zero Awards at the RDS in November.
Do thicker insulated walls, triple glazed windows, & MVHR ventilation systems tip the scales unfavourably for passive house when it comes to embodied carbon?
A new online hub aimed at upskilling the construction sector is now live.
Some one-stop-shops will not take on projects with new build extensions.
Green groups criticise lack of focus on embodied carbon.
The European Commission is proposing sweeping changes to the way in which energy ratings for buildings are allocated, in a bid to stimulate the retrofit of the worst performing buildings across Europe.
The Welsh government has issued a new standard for social housing that requires an embodied carbon assessment, favours timber-based offsite construction, and bans fossil fuel boilers.
The UK and Ireland’s oil heating industry says it has taken a “major step forward” in the use of biofuels in domestic oil boilers, with early tests concluding that hydrotreated vegetable oil (HVO) works in virtually all existing oil boilers.
In the #BuildingLife ambassador spotlight series, Passive House Plus is profiling leaders who have endorsed the Irish Green Building Council’s call to address the environmental impacts of buildings across their life-cycle..
The Passive House Institute celebrated the low energy standard’s 30th birthday at the 25th International Passive House Conference in September. Around seven hundred participants registered for the conference, which mostly took place online due to Covid.
South West College’s new Erne Campus building in Enniskillen, Co Fermanagh, is the world’s largest, and the first educational building, to be certified to the passive house premium standard, the Passive House Institute has confirmed.
A detailed analysis of the embodied carbon of six common build types has indicated that dwellings built with business-as-usual build specs of cavity wall construction and strip foundations may be able to meet the revised embodied carbon targets for dwellings in RIBA’s 2030 Climate Challenge.
