Vancouver and Vienna build on Passive House Standard

High spirits and optimism prevailed at the meeting of Vienna's Vice-Mayor Maria Vassilakou and Vancouver’s Mayor Gregor Robertson in Vancouver in early June, when exchanging the greenest cities on green urban planning and the implementation of the Passive House Standard.

Vienna meets with great interest in Vancouver, with its export hit Passive House. According its new slogan "the greenest city in the world", the Vancouver City Council wants to increase the amount of Passive Houses.

Vancouver and Vienna are ranked regularly worldwide on the leading positions of the greenest cities with the highest quality of life. Now Mayor Gregor Robertson and his team want to dramatically decrease the energy consumption in the building sector by 20 percent compared to 2007. This shall be a part of the "City of Vancouver Greenest City 2020 Action Plan". After the preliminary of Günter Lang with the city administration and lectures at Simon Fraser University in March 2015, there was now on the edge of the Canadian Green Building Conference a summit of Vienna's Vice-Mayor Maria Vassilakou with Vancouver City boss Gregor Robertson.

Discussions took place on the experiences and potentials of the main urban form of energy - energy efficiency - in urban planning and housing policy. Like many other American cities, Vancouver focused on various unambitious building standards in the past, without thereby lowering the energy consumption. With the Passive House Standard it finally changed to a standard, based on the merits of the purely scientific building physics principles. Vancouver has the intention of this future both in social housing, as wide implement even in public buildings.

Pioneer showed solution decades ago

The Canadian buildings were in a bad quality until now, although the Canadians Harold Orr created the "Saskatchewan Conservation House" in the city of Regina, a pioneering project in the late 70s. With an excellent thermal insulation, an airtight building envelope and with one of the world's first ventilation systems with heat recovery, Orr used many of today's self-evident components of energy-efficient construction. "Thanks to the Passive House adequate building shell our house works well since 40 years and certainly the next 40 years," Orr said recently. But cheap energy costs foiled the interest in such technologies.

But now, Vancouver and other Canadian regions don’t want to hesitate any longer and will turn the extensive energy consumption off. "This is an urgent need to make Vancouver long-term sustainable, to reduce energy consumption and climate-damaging gases and to increase the comfort and quality of life," Robertson said in his speech.

Canada ready for Austrian Passive House export

Austria and Vienna enjoy an excellent reputation on Passive Houses world-wide, and so it is not surprising that "Passive House ambassador" Günter Lang, who toured to North America the fourth time within one year, joined the trip to Vancouver. He showed many best-practice examples of large-scale Passive House objects from Austria to clarify the potentials in America.

That such international preparatory work bears fruit, you can see in China, where Lang operated intensive on Passive House market preparation for two years. Now a first major project was headed by Austrian experts opened as certified Passive House and a further project just starting.

Nicole Mothes from the Canadian Embassy is pleased about the successful informal twinning. She initiated the first major appearance of Austrian Passive House pioneers with the Austria House at the 2010 Olympic Winter Games in Vancouver and Whistler. Following the establishment of Passive House single family homes, the time is ripe for large-scale project implementation of Passive Houses across Canada and North America.

Picture: Greenest Cities Summit From left to right in Vancouver: Sean Pander, City of Vancouver; Nicole Mothes, Canadian Embassy; Gregor Robertson, Mayor of Vancouver; Maria Vassilakou, Vize- Mayor of Vienna; Günter Lang, LANG consulting; Valerie Durant and Mukhtar Latif, City of Vancouver; Source: Passivhaus Austria