Passive houses and their future

As proces of fossil fuels are growing rapidly, the pressure to build energy saving houses is also mounting. This means that we can expect progress in developing more efficient and cheaper building.

Currently passive houses are usually built as single-family homes and the materials used for their construction (windows and the isolation in particular) are rather costly. However with popularization of passive building we can not only expect new, more efficient technologies and products, but also first passive public use buildings. Investors still prefer to go for cheaper, traditional buildings, that have higher maintenance costs. This is likely to change though, due to fossil energy prices constantly rising. This might encourage people to accept the idea that additional expenses involved with passive buildings will even out within a few years because of lower bills. As a result we should be seeing more and more passive buildings.

Growing interest in passive buildings will be followed by higher funding for its development, which means that the materials are going to have even better quality and will be more affordable at the same time. Additionally, more options will be available in terms of various supplementary equipment that make passive houses function as intended. This will allow for the architects to  experiment with the simple shape design, to make it resemble more traditional buildings, while keeping all the energy saving benefits of a passive house. It can also lead to a more frequent use of autonomic and renewable energy sources, such as sun collectors and heat pumps.  This will not only make passive houses independent from energy supplies, but also potentially produce their own energy surplus.

Presumably, one of the biggest obstacles for future passive building growth might be the global warming. Traditional building is susceptible to hurricanes and extreme temperatures  and the meteorologists predict that these anomalies will become more common in the future. This might provoke a lot of changes in construction engineering, especially in passive houses designs, where any damaged inflicted on one element negatively effects the whole energy mechanism.  Due to that it is possible that we see removal of winter gardens and extensively glassed southern elevation, which is particularly prone to damage. Additional solutions will have to worked out in terms of functioning of passive buildings in extreme temperatures, atypical to average temperatures of given latitude. All in all, the passive house of the future will be significantly different in terms of exterior and parameters to what we are used to at the moment