October 02, 2023

A schism in building standards: promoting passive house and high performance building in the USA, with Zack Semke (Passive House Accelerator)

1 hour 12 minutes

Lloyd Alter introduced us to Passive House Accelerator earlier this year and it turns out that we're doing some quite similar work, promoting high-performance building, sharing innovation, and elevating thought leadership.

Instead of starting a blood feud, we decided to invite Zack Semke onto the podcast to talk about what they're up to and see what we can learn from them. As it turns out, they're doing some really interesting stuff and Zack had already interviewed Jeff ages ago. Seems like we should look into collaborating.

We had a chat about their stateside perspective on high-performance building, how to make sense of the place of passive house globally, and the schism between PHI vs PHIUS standards(European vs US).

It went into a bunch of other things too. All fairly familiar subject matter, substantially less Brexit than usual but more naked culture war nonsense. Whatever we think about the nuance of the standards, it's clear that US adoption of passive house has massive potential to push things forward.

Notes from the show

Passive House Accelerator
Passive House Accelerator Live
Zack Semke on LinkedIn
Wikipedia's page about the two passive house standards
The Phius website
The ASHRAE website
Passive House Accelerator's OCEC tool (beta)
Zack's interview with Jeff

Retrofit Reimagined
If you're nearby, go! More Retrofit Reimagined 2023 is happening in Bristol (6 October), Machynlleth (Centre for Alternative Technology, 21-22 October), and Glasgow (11 November).

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We don't actually earn anything from this, and it's quite a lot of work, so we have to promote the day jobs.

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By Jeff and Dan

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