One of the world’s most sustainable buildings stands in Bavaria: as the first of its kind, a mixed residential and commercial project in the town of Kaufbeuren has met the criteria for passive house premium certification. With a heating demand of only 8 kWh/m²yr, it is uniquely energy efficient. At the same time, a 250 sqm photovoltaic system on the roof produces renewable energy.
Saint Gobain, the global building materials supplier, has announced that it will donate €100,000 to the Peter McVerry Trust. The money will be used to refurbish six apartments in a disused building on Pim Street in Dublin 8. The project will be complete by February 2015.
The combined floor area of certified passive buildings worldwide has reached the one million metre mark with the certification of a retrofit project in Santa Cruz, California.
Hastoe Housing Association has released the findings of a two year study on its first passive house housing development, Wimbish in Essex. The study found that the development performs as designed and delivers very low heating bills for residents.
The world's first passive house hospital, by Wörner Traxler Richter Architects, is set to be built in Frankfurt. In conunction with this, the Passive House Institute has also published new research on applying the passive house standard to hospitals.
In an ecological project that wil be groundbreaking in a literal and figurative sense, a highly unusual earth mound passive house has just gained planning permission in the Cotswolds.
The Passive House Institute has announced the results of monitoring of a passive-certified swimming facility in Lünen, Germany, and says its analysis shows that the "savings in terms of energy consumption, for heating as well as for electricity, are substantial compared with other swimming pools".
A new 100kW solar photovoltaic system is helping to cut carbon emissions at the Snowmountain Enterprises cold storage warehouse in Cambridgeshire.
The Universiy of Leicester Centre for Medicine will become the UK's largest non domestic passive house building when it is completed in 2015.
The Lancaster Cohousing development of 41 certified passive homes, featured in issue four of Passive House Plus, has been announced as the winner of the UK National Self Build Association's Murray Armour Award. This comes on the back of the project picking up the social/group housing prize at the 2013 Passivhaus Trust awards.
The UK's largest passive house scheme, developed by the Broadland Housing Group and designed by Ingleton Wood architects, has been approved for a brownfield site in Norwich.
Ireland’s small businesses could save €300 million a year through
simple actions to reduce energy costs, Sustainable Energy Ireland has
announced. This follows the completion of 1,500 small business energy
assessments over the past two years, giving SEI the most comprehensive
knowledge of the energy practices and challenges facing small
businesses today.
