Irish news - passivehouseplus.ie

The passive house standard is celebrating its 30th birthday this year. The world’s first passive houses were built in Darmstadt, Germany in 1991.

On June 8, 2021 Passive House Plus, in association with Farrat, chaired a hugely informative roundtable on thermal breaks. If you missed it, the video can now be viewed online.

Passive House Plus is excited to announce that we are hosting our first ever online event, 'Thermal breaks: freedom of architectural expression vs building physics', next Tuesday 8 June at 11am (UK/Ireland time). The webinar is free to attend, and boasts an amazing lineup of speakers.

Munster Joinery has published the first environmental product declaration (EPD) for a window under the Irish EPD system.

Irish low carbon cement company Ecocem has announced €22.5 million in equity investment from Breakthrough Energy Ventures (BEV) and Breakthrough Energy Ventures-Europe (BEV-E), venture capital funds that are part Bill Gates’s Breakthrough Energy coalition, which seeks to accelerate the global drive towards net zero carbon emissions. 

Engineers Ireland has announced the launch of a new Women in Engineering group.

In the first of our new #BuildingLife ambassador spotlight series, Passive House Plus is profiling leaders who have endorsed the Irish Green Building Council’s call to address the environmental impacts of buildings across their life cycle, starting with Francis-Noel Duffy TD for Dublin South West and Green Party’s spokesperson on housing.

Home Building Finance Ireland (HBFI) has launched a new green loan product offering a discount of up to 0.5 per cent on loans to home builders for developments certified with the Irish Green Building Council's Home Performance Index.

The government has announced a new €45 million programme of investment in the retrofifit of local authority housing. This includes an initial investment of €35m for the retrofitting of 1,293 homes, plus an additional €10m to be allocated to local authorities who demonstrate an ability to complete additional works this year.

Technological University Dublin has announced the launch of a new four-year degree programme in sustainable timber technology.

Residential retrofits must ensure ventilation is carefully considered in order to avoid an increase in radon gas levels, researchers at NUI Galway in Ireland have found.

Heat pumps rise, PV falls and fabric stands still.

Nine out of ten readers of Passive House Plus have made decisions on building or upgrading projects in response to articles in the magazine, according to the results of a survey of readers of the magazine’s Irish edition.

Industry-leading mechanical ventilation company BEAM Vacuum & Ventilation has launched a new mobile phone app for their award-winning, next generation HERU heat recovery ventilation range.

The second edition of the book Understanding Passivhaus by Emma Walshaw of First In Architecture is out now. The book is designed to provide a brief, clear and complete guide to building a passive home.

NI still plans to tighten energy rules for new build

On the five-year anniversary of the adoption of the Paris Agreement, the Irish Green Building Council (IGBC) launched a campaign to decarbonise Ireland’s built environment across its whole life cycle. The campaign is backed by Passive House Plus.

Embodied carbon is the next great challenge for the building sector. For the group’s latest update, Marion Jammet of the Irish Green Building Council discusses initiatives underway at both Irish and European level to further cut the carbon footprint of the built environment.

Results of a new five-year study of recycled concrete show that it performs as well, and in several cases even better, than conventional concrete.

Heat pumps dominate & mechanical ventilation grows, but compliance risks emerge

Before it was halted until January 2021, the Grenfell Tower inquiry heard a series of damning testimonies on the culture towards fire safety within leading building material manufacturers and certification bodies in the years leading up to the fire.

The need for decisive movement on deep retrofit has never been more pronounced, given the twin needs for urgent, radical action to tackle the climate crisis and jobs-intensive stimulus at a time of great uncertainty caused by the pandemic. In the following statement, the Department of Communications, Climate Action and Environment sheds light on its progress in delivering on the government’s deep retrofit pledges.

Simon Bell of the Passive House Association of Ireland outlines how the organisation can help clients, professionals and suppliers to deliver the passive house standard.

Diageo has chosen developer Ballymore as its partner to deliver the transformation of 12.6 acres of its iconic St James’s Gate site into the first “zero carbon” district in Dublin.

The Cosgrave Group, ESB and SSE Airtricity Energy Services, are among the finalists in the SEAI Energy Awards 2020.

A landmark legal case may give tenants the chance to discover if their building poses a lung cancer risk, Passive House Plus can exclusively reveal.

The government is building cross-party retrofit commitments to ensure a long-term and continuous programme of retrofit work, Passive House Plus has learned.

ABK Architects has received planning permission for 597 homes at Shanganagh, Co Dublin, the overwhelming majority of which will be passive houses. The project has been developed in partnership with Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council and the Land Development Agency.

'Mannok' has been unveiled as the new identity for Quinn Industrial Holdings, a name which the company’s familiar brands Quinn Building Products and Quinn Packaging will transition to in the coming weeks.

CO² levels in rooms and other enclosed spaces should be used as a proxy for Covid transmission risk, a number of leading experts have said, as the evidence increasingly points towards airborne transmission being a major factor in the spread of the virus.