Can We Build in a Brighter Shade of Green?

NORWICH, Vt.

WHEN Barbara Landau, an environmental and land-use lawyer in suburban Boston, was shopping for insurance on the energy-efficient home she and her husband were building in the woods just outside of town here, she was routinely asked what sort of furnace the home would have.

“None,” she replied.

Several insurers declined coverage.

“They just didn’t understand what we were trying to do,” Mrs. Landau recalls. “They said the pipes would freeze.”

They won’t. A so-called passive home like the one the Landaus are now building is so purposefully designed and built — from its orientation toward the sun and superthick insulation to its algorithmic design and virtually unbroken air envelope — that it requires minimal heating, even in chilly New England. Contrary to some naysayers’ concerns, the Landaus’ timber-frame home will be neither stuffy nor, at 2,000 square feet, oppressively small.

It has been a good deal more expensive to build, however, than the average home. That might partly explain why the passive-building standard is only now getting off the ground in the United States — despite years of data suggesting that America’s drafty building methods account for as much as 40 percent of its primary energy use, 70 percent of its electricity consumption and nearly 40 percent of its carbon-dioxide emissions.

Proponents of the standard, who note that passive homes often use up to 90 percent less heating and cooling energy than similar homes built to local code, say the Landaus embody the willingness of more homeowners to embrace passive building in the United States. Even Habitat for Humanity, the affordable-housing philanthropy, is now experimenting with the standard.

Yet the market remains minuscule, and the materials and expertise needed to build passive homes are often hard to find. While some 25,000 certified passive structures — from schools and commercial buildings to homes and apartment houses — have already been built in Europe, there are just 13 in the United States, with a few dozen more in the pipeline.

“Even though the passive house standard is tried and true, and is used all throughout Europe — we know it works, we know there’s some simplicity to it,” says Mrs. Landau, “here in the United States, we were reinventing the wheel.”

STEVEN LANDAU, a partner at a factory design firm in Burlington, Mass., was already an efficiency geek before the words “passive house” entered his vernacular. He’d long ago outfitted the family’s current home near Boston with a full complement of efficient gizmos and upgrades, including a high-efficiency German boiler and solar collection tubes designed to pull daylight into dark corners and hallways.

Arrays of futuristic-looking LED tubes illuminate the Landaus’ current basement, and a wattage meter keeps tabs on how much juice the home is consuming at any given time.

Mr. Landau was also well acquainted with the growing number of “green” building certifications and rating systems in the United States, including popular ones like the federal government’s Energy Star for Homes program and the LEED rating system, for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, from the United States Green Building Council.

The goals of these various systems vary widely. Some, like LEED, award points for a variety of environmentally friendly features, like using sustainable construction materials, in addition to energy efficiency. Others, like Energy Star, focus squarely on energy use.

But the most common green building standards, Mr. Landau said, fell short of his ambitions — which included avoiding any on-site use of fossil fuels. “I remember reading a book about someone in England in the 1980s who built a superinsulated house that was only heated by the body heat of the occupants and maybe a tea kettle,” Mr. Landau recalls. “I thought to myself, ‘Why can’t we build our houses that way?’ ”

Energy Star and LEED aim for efficiency improvements of at least 15 percent over conventional construction — and both programs can earn a variety of tax credits and other incentives. The passive-home standard, perhaps because it’s unfamiliar to many officials who create efficiency stimulus programs, is eligible for few direct government subsidies, despite the fact that homes using it can be up to 80 percent more energy-efficient, over all, than standard new houses and consume just 10 percent of the heating and cooling energy.

Add photovoltaic solar panels or other energy harvesting systems, and passive homes can quickly become zero-energy-use homes — or even power generators that can feed electricity back to the grid, according to Katrin Klingenberg, the director of the Passive House Institute-U.S. in Urbana, Ill.