A 10-year look-ahead for Passive House in the Pacific Northwest

The next ten years may be the most consequential of our careers — a time of real climate peril, but also of unprecedented opportunity for high-performance building.

This is adapted from a keynote at the Passive House Northwest (PHnw) conference in Portland in early 2019, which drew a record turnout of nearly 250 attendees for its tenth annual gathering. Zola was proud to sponsor; Evan Anderson, Zola's VP of Operations, attended alongside me.

The backdrop

In late 2018, the IPCC released its sobering report “Global Warming of 1.5°C,” finding that, at the time, only about a dozen years of “carbon budget” remained before crossing 1.5°C of warming. It also laid out the widening gap between 1.5°C and 2°C of warming — at 2°C, for instance, nearly all of the world's coral reefs are lost.

The word that anchors the report is “unprecedented.” Incremental change no longer cuts it; we need a step change. For buildings, that step change is exactly what Passive House delivers.

Exponential, not incremental

This mirrors the Exponential Climate Action Roadmap, championed by Christiana Figueres and others, and its “carbon law”: emissions peak by 2020, then halve each decade — by 2030, again by 2040, and again by 2050.

For the Northwest's Passive House community, the coming decade is about scaling that curve — turning buildings from a climate problem into a climate solution. High-performance windows are a small but essential part of that work.