The recently released Emu Report on Building Systems by Enrico Bonilauri, co-founder of Emu Passive, sets out to examine the relative impacts of 12 building standards. Bonilauri compared the performance of these standards by selecting 50 single-family homes from Emu’s consulting practice and modeling all of them using the PHPP to meet the minimum requirements for each of the 12 building standards. The building standards examined include a mix of passive building standards from PHI and Phius, as well as a range of mainstream standards, such as various International Energy Conservation Code (IECC) iterations, California’s Title 24 building energy code, and U.S. DOE’s Zero Energy Ready Home. Half of the projects in the study were located in mild climate zones, while ¼ of them were in hot or warm climates, and the remaining ¼ were in cold climate zones. To simplify the modeling, Bonilauri assumed that all buildings would be all-electric, using heat pumps for heating, cooling, and domestic hot water. For more information, see the report here.
Bonilauri has also created a several YouTube videos with key insights from the report, which can be found here.