Passive House is sometimes criticized for limiting itself to Energy and IAQ, and not being a more comprehensive green rating system, such as LEED, or Built Green, or the Living Building Challenge. In fact that’s one of the things I like most about it, that it focuses on one thing, and does it very well. When it comes to creating energy-efficient, healthy, comfortable buildings, it’s clearcut, definitive, and unambiguous.

After doing green building for years, and dealing with the often ambiguous choices that have to be made, when I learned of Passive House it was an epiphany and, well, REFRESHING. There are many aspects of Green Building that can be equivocal, if not  downright fuzzy. For example, I remember when fly-ash in concrete was everyone’s green strategy du jour (a by-product of coal combustion, fly ash can be substituted for cement in concrete, significantly decreasing its embodied energy). But when many began specifying it in projects here, and the fly ash had to be imported from areas of the country that actually had coal-fired power plants, the environmental benefit flew out the window. Insulation has got to be the best example of a material or strategy that no one can agree on. There often seems to be an inverse relationship between effectiveness (i.e. R-value per inch) and Global Warming Potential, or GWP (GWP compares a product’s contribution to global warming to carbon dioxide – some rigid foams had a GWP of 1600 – yep, 1600 times that of CO2!). Nothing is sacred, not even Photovoltaics. Sure, renewable energy is a good thing, but what’s the embodied energy in PV panels – how much energy was used to refine the silicon, to produce the aluminum frames, to transport it to the distributor, etc? I could go on and on…

Back to my main point, I respect that Passive House doesn’t try to be all things to all people, but just focuses on how to create energy-efficient buildings, and does it better than anyone else. That being said, Passive House can form a strong component in all of the Green Building rating systems – LEED, Built Green, the Living Building Challenge – in fact it’s the best method for achieving a good part of their Energy and IAQ goals. Don’t think of Passive House as competing with them, but as complementing them.