Building Carbon Zero CA Symposium

Is Passive House a bright spot solution that society should scale quickly to achieve large reductions in energy use from the built environment while simultaneously improving interior building environments? Apparently, it is and it's already happening.

Passive House California held their symposium today with policy-makers, industry leaders, architects, and builders to to give that birght spot a nudge. The symposium's purpose was to begin charting a course to net zero energy building performance for California. It focused on large-scale commercial, institutional and educational projects and how cities and regions can implement Net Zero strategies and explored the impediments and incentives for doing so now.

Reaching net zero by 2030 is required for compliance with new California legislated goals. The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) and stakeholders prepared the state’s Zero Net Energy (ZNE) Action Plan for Buildings (2010). The roadmap provides an action plan to shift the state’s 5 billion square feet of commercial property space from the biggest energy consumers in the state to “net zero” energy users, through greater energy efficiency and on-site clean energy generation by 2030 (see article). It builds on the Architecture 2030 initiative and it's 2030 Challenge to Architects and to Planning.

More importantly, reaching net zero building goals would also be a crucial step in addressing the climate crisis' challenge of discontinuous change that Alex Steffen described so well in his Keynote address.Passive House performance standards and approaches were featured as an elegant and simple way of reducing building energy use by a wopping 80%. Alex pointed out that end use energy savings are magnified through the system because of related production, manufacturing, and delivery energy use and huge transmission inefficiencies. The Passive House standards also dramatically reduce peak energy use, which is one of the central problems of energy production. Dramatic energy reductions, not simply the transition to renewables, is key to meeting energy needs in a sustainable future.

Alex went on to illustrate many implications of new trends, technologies, and capacities for creating what he called "responsive" cities that transform demand and meet needs in the new ways of a materials cycling, renewable energy, natural-capital-enhancing, product and service-sharing, and socially just ecological economy (see also his 10 minute TEDTalk: The shareable future of cities - 2011). Joke Dockx shared the remarkable experience of the Brussels region, beginning with the worst building insulation report card in the EU in 2007 to become a world leader in net zero building performance by 2012, a lot of it based on Passive House performance. She described the key elements, including demand stimulation (education and incentives), supply development (professional training and support), and legal requirements.

Together, the speakers set up a new paradigm and promising process for exploring, understanding, and planning new cities comprised of new buildings connected in new ways for new people in new relationships. Alex characterized this change as a shift from wanting the American dream house to dream neighborhood. See the symposium website for speaker bios, the complete schedule, and presentation content. See the Passive House California website for details.

A promising change theory also emerged in a side conversation--Bright Spot Theory. This theory notes that in times of large-scale change, our default "problem-solving" mode can trip us into lots of analysis that generates true but useless information. The alternative is looking "for 'bright spots' -- the first signs that things are working. We need to ask ourselves a question that sounds simple but is, in fact, deeply unnatural: What's working and how can we do more of it?"In times of change, our rational brain has a problem focus when it needs a solution focus. If you are a manager, ask yourself, What is the ratio of the time you spend solving problems versus scaling successes? We need to switch from archaeological problem solving to bright-spot evangelizing.These flashes of success, these bright spots, can provide our road map for action -- and the hope that change is possible." (See article and book: Switch-Don't Solve Problems, Copy Success.)

With this symposium, Passive House California challenges us to raise the bar on Bay Area and California sustainability by focusing on the end-game, and then using that gap between it and existing conditions to motivate the innovation required to bridge the gap and reap the rewards. Passive House and other bright spot solutions are part of that innovation. Next steps will be engaging and important to watch and support.