Courage to Discuss Concepts

How often you hear: "Passive Houses – these are limited to a special solution. It is an extreme and difficult to build. Further, there are lots of different smart, creative and interesting solutions for energy saving construction."

Well, there is a clear answer: Show it! The more different, simple and attractive solutions exist - the better for our common future. We enjoy every paper on this topic - and there is a special workshop for this discussion:

Working group 2: Disputation of the concepts: passive - activ - creative
In this session different approaches to energy saving construction will be shown. Everything is permitted: Let it be Active Houses, Zero Energy Houses or Earth Covered Houses or...

There are however, a few simple conditions:

• At least one building must have been constructed using the concept, there should be experience from at least one prototype house and this experience has to be presented.

These limitations guarantee that in this session the discussion will be focussed on demonstrated "can-work" concepts. Like in other working groups the author has to focus on how his concept functions, the boundary conditions for successful application and on the experience from building houses using this concept.

Abstracts will be consequently refused, if

• They contradict physical laws (no perpetual motion machines - sorry, there are other conferences for that).
• The focus of the paper is more a criticisms of other concepts than a presentation of the proposed concept.

Savings have to also be in terms of primary energy use (at least 50% should be saved compared to contemporary requirements given by law or norms).

This session does not aim at theoretical debates, i.e. whether it is more important - to save energy during occupancy or to use renewable resources for construction. This has already been discussed in the Passive House Conferences (see the paper of Cornelia Moosmann "Life Cycle Analysis of Passive Houses" in the Proceedings of the 9th Conference on Passive Houses). Of course these criteria can and should be used to compare the shown concepts - and of course they can be compared to Passive Houses. The central part of the contribution should be the concrete concept, demonstrated with constructed buildings.

You want to submit a paper? Find more Information here.

Time schedule of the 10th International Conference on Passive Houses in Hannover

2005 Dezember 1st: Deadline for abstracts
2006 February 1st:    Notification on acceptance of abstracts
2006 March 1st:         Registration period for reduced fee ends
2006 March 15th:       Deadline for the written contributions of the preceedings

2006 May 19th and 20th   10. Conference on Passive Houses HCC Hannover with Exhibition on Passive House Components and manufacturers session

May 21st field trip to the most interesting Passive House projects and construction sites incl. refurbishment in the region near Hannover.

(updated:2005-09-30   © Passivhouse Institute PHI; this page might be reprinted if unchanged)

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Passive House Institute, Dr. Wolfgang Feist. mail@passiv.de.