Luboš Motl Pilsen
The Reference Frame
6/20/10
The European Union has adopted a regulation that will ban the construction of ordinary family houses, starting from 2020. Only the so-called passive houses will be allowed:
iDNES.CZ (autom. transl. into EN), EU Business, EU Parliament, Euractiv, Panda.ORG, The Energy Collective;
For example, page 33/71 of the PDF document above says that all new buildings have to be “nearly zero-energy buildings” by the end of 2020. It has to be true by the end of 2018 for all new buildings occupied by public authorities.
One of the first passive houses in Darmstadt, Germany. The windows are obliged to go to the South. Also, it's not a coincidence that the house is ugly: ugly and "compact" houses are more energy efficient.
A passive house is essentially an ugly cube that covers its energy needs by a perpetual motion machine or something that has the same carbon footprint. Also, it’s super perfectly isolated so that the CO2 you exhale by breathing will never get out of the house. The EU apparatchiks see another advantage in the passive houses: if you fart thrice during a harsh winter, you will either suffocate or freeze which will reduce the population growth.
At this moment, there only exist 15,000 of passive houses in the world, mostly in Germany, Austria, and Scandinavia. But they should suddenly become a majority. The construction of such an inferior passive house is 10-15 percent more expensive than the construction of a proper house. So what would you expect before 2020?…
Japanese passive houses use people and fridges - rather than perpetual motion machines - to heat themselves. Note that the aesthetic quality is similar to the German one.
This passive house looks pretty, doesn't it? Well, please accept my apologies, but it's because it's far from being passive.
Instead, it’s Al Gore’s new villa in California…
The article continues at The Reference Frame.
