THE DEVELOPMENT OF PASSIVE HOUSE: AN INTERNATIONAL COMPARATIVE STUDY

Abstract

Since 1991, Passive House has experienced nearly 30 years of development. Over the past 30 years, Passive House has become a high-standard, low-energy building, and the pace of Passive House standards across the world has been comparatively slow. On the other hand, there are green building assessment tools in some countries across the world. After 30 years of development, BREEAM, as a green building assessment tool, in the UK has more than 500,000 certified buildings. The US LEED, as another green building assessment tool, has more than 100,000 certified buildings. In comparison, buildings designed according to Passive House standards have so far been less than 5,000. This remarkable difference is the motive for the present research. This dissertation will study the reasons why Passive House development is so slow.

The research objectives are: (1) To identify the trend of Passive House development across the world; (2) To establish the influence of economic and environmental factors on Passive House development across the world; (3) To elaborate on the problem of Passive House development across the world.

By collecting data from Passive House Database, World Bank Open Data, and The Heritage Foundation, using Spearman's rank correlation coefficient, the dissertation successfully identifies the trend of Passive House development across the world. Also, the result of analysis supports the positive correlation between GDP and Passive House development, and greenhouse gas emission and Passive House development.

The dissertation also elaborates on the problem of Passive House development, including political, economic, environmental, and social. By analyzing the Spearman's result, the dissertation identifies the potential problem of Passive House development, suggesting the direction of future study.