The Passive House standard offers a cost-efficient way of minimizing the energy demand of new buildings in accordance with the global principle of sustainability, while at the same time improving the comfort experienced by building occupants. It thus creates the basis on which it is possible to meet the remaining energy demand of new buildings completely from renewable sources – while keeping within the bounds set by the limited availability of renewables and the affordability of extra costs. The Passive House philosophy builds upon two basic principles:

Principle 1:
Optimize what is essential anyway
What makes the approach so cost-efficient is that, following the principle of simplicity, it relies on optimizing those components of a building which are necessary in any case: The building envelope, the windows and the automatic ventilation system expedient anyway for hygienic reasons. Improving the efficiency of these components to the point at which a separate heat delivery system can be dispensed with yields the savings which largely finance the extra costs of improvement.

Principle 2:
Minimize losses before maximizing gains
Passive Houses prevent available heat from escaping as rigorously as possible (i.e. give precedence to loss minimization). Both the computations carried out with theoretical models and the practical experience gathered with numerous projects show that, under Central European and comparable climatic conditions, such a strategy is fundamentally more efficient than strategies relying primarily upon passive or active solar energy use.

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Passive Houses can be built cost-efficiently
The capitalized total costs (investments in the building including planning and building services plus running costs over a period of 30 years) are not higher than for an average new building.