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.

Fr Collins Park in Donaghmede, north Dublin - billed as Ireland's "first wholly sustainable park" by Dublin City Council - was opened yesterday by Lord Mayor Eibhlin Byrne.

The redeveloped low-energy social housing at York Street in Dublin's south inner city will be officially opened next Monday, May 25.

Duncan Stewart launched the build phase of Ireland's first ecovillage, the Village project in Cloughjordan, Co Tipperary, last Saturday, 21 March.