Scaling Passive House: An International Perspective

By Jay Fox

Every year, the International Passive House Conference draws practitioners from dozens of countries to share projects, swap solutions, and talk shop. The 2026 edition in Essen was no exception. But one of the sessions that resonated most wasn't about modeling or engineering or a specific project. It was about communication.

Passive House Accelerator Founder and Ingui Architecture President Michael Ingui argued that the movement's biggest obstacle to scaling has nothing to do with the science. The community has spent decades perfecting the standard and proving that it works, but it has spent far less time telling the rest of the world why it matters. This is a self-imposed barrier that we need to collectively remove.

As he laid out in his presentation, From Niche to Necessary: Scaling Passive House for a Resilient Future, Passive House is struggling to spread because we don’t know how to talk about it.

To reiterate, the Passive House community has done a magnificent job in overcoming technical hurdles. We know how to build Passive House homes, towers, hospitals, dorms, hotels, and even cideries. “Passive House works. We have buildings of every type," he says. “We know that they work with the same principles at completely different scales.”

To that end, we are hoping for the community to come together and to figure out how to best communicate the advantages of Passive House. The more perspectives we have, the better we’ll be able to understand what works, what doesn't work, and how we reach more people. You can read about Passive House practitioners' experiences in Turkey, Italy, Ireland, the United Kingdom, Austria, Australia, and the United States below. You can also share your thoughts and help us keep the conversation rolling by emailing [email protected] or [email protected]. You can also check out Reimagine Buildings Collective.

The Initial Response

Michael's presentation led to a series of conversations and even podcast interviews, which readers can listen to now (see below). Specifically, Passive House Podcast cohost Ilka Cassidy asked attendees how scaling is happening in their area. She spoke with architects, nonprofit founders, manufacturers, and organizational leaders working in countries and contexts that are as different as Turkey and Massachusetts. Included in the podcast are talks with Esra Aydınoğlu, Francesco Nesi, Tomás O'Leary, Ann-Marie Fallon, Vasilis Giannopoulos, Günther Jedliczka, Anthony Burns, Ken Levenson, In Cho, and Alexander Gard-Murray.

Each was asked to respond to the same four questions:

1. How are you scaling Passive House?

2. What is working?

3. What else or who else should be part of this conversation?

4. Do you have a call to action?

Their answers, compiled and digested here, offer an international perspective on what it takes to move Passive House from a proven concept to a widespread practice. Priorities vary, and include more workforce training, the introduction of cost-optimization tools for builders, and obtaining buy-in from institutions with enormous portfolios of long-term property holdings (e.g., universities, municipal agencies, religious organizations). However, one theme surfaced again and again and it echoes one the key points that Michael hammered home: the Passive House community needs to break out of its bubble. Nearly every person interviewed said, in one form or another, that the audiences who most need to learn about Passive House are the ones who have never heard of it before.

Accelerating adoption will require regulatory changes, upskilling for designers and builders, and, most of all, effective communication about what Passive House means and the benefits it offers owners and occupants. To reiterate another point made my Michael: effective communication means not focusing on abstract concepts like decarbonization or even thermal bridging, but on tangible improvements to quality of life. The ultimate appeal of Passive House is that it assures people a quieter, healthier, and more comfortable place to live that is less expensive to operate and far more durable than a code-built home.

Turkey

We begin in Turkey with Esra Aydınoğlu, whose path to Passive House advocacy began with a personal project. Though she has been a practicing architect for more than 30 years in Istanbul and had long ago encountered Passive House while working in the glass industry, she had what might be described as a casual interest in the standard. This changed in 2023 when she decided to design and build her own Passive House and got certified as a designer.

"I recognized that it is not enough to build my house as a Passive," Aydınoğlu says. Turkey has a massive construction sector, a significant energy deficit, a building stock of nine million structures that are not energy efficient, and a construction industry still reliant on fossil fuels. One house was a drop in the bucket.

Aydınoğlu started sharing knowledge. She launched a podcast (available on SoundCloud and Spotify, now six episodes deep) featuring architects, engineers, academics, and occupants of Passive House and net-zero buildings. She began organizing multidisciplinary events called "Active People of Passive Buildings," where the entire room participates and myths get dismantled in real time.

Sharing knowledge is vital, but Aydınoğlu stresses that the audience shouldn’t just be colleagues who already have a deep familiarity with Passive House. Rather, they should be people who care deeply about sustainability or health or efficiency but don’t know about Passive House. For example, Aydınoğlu was invited to speak at a major Turkish sustainability conference of 500 industry leaders. She opened with a question: "Who has heard of Passive House before?" Five hands went up.

For Aydınoğlu, the remaining 495 people are the target audience. To borrow from the Northeast Sustainable Energy Association’s theme from 2025, the goal needs to be: Build the Movement, rather than preach to the choir.

Italy

Francesco Nesi is the director of ZEPHIR (Zero Energy Passivhaus Institute for Research), PHI’s Italian affiliate. Nesi is also a building physicist, certifier, and trainer with nearly 20 years in the sector, who has trained over 5,000 Passive House designers.  

Despite that enormous number, Nesi admits that  training designers doesn't guarantee they will go out and promote Passive House. Many of those designers have never pursued certification for a project or actively tried to convince a client, something reflected in the relatively small number of Passive House projects in Italy.

That gap between knowledge and action forced ZEPHIR to rethink its business model around 2017–2018. Rather than relying on trained designers to become Passive House evangelists, the organization began speaking directly to builders and potential customers. Nesi reports that the reception has so far been strong. Builders, it turns out, respond to a straightforward value proposition: ZEPHIR can implement its design process within their existing workflow, using building physics to shift costs from oversized mechanical systems to a better thermal envelope while keeping the overall project budget more or less the same. In keeping with the theme introduced by Aydınoğlu, we should be seeking out natural alliances and bringing them into the fold.

One place where Nesi would like to see more engagement is through local governments. Nesi believes that public projects could showcase what Passive House can do, demonstrating to citizens and private developers alike what's possible in terms of efficiency and comfort. Instead, most municipalities aren't even part of the conversation.

As noted in the Massachusetts section below, bringing in local municipalities has proven to be an effective means of scaling Passive House even in small and relatively conservative towns within the commonwealth. There’s no reason to think that a similar strategy would not work in Italy or other countries with a nascent Passive House movement.

Ireland

MosArt Managing Director Tomás O’Leary has personally seen a shift in adoption. O’Leary has been building to Passive House standards for around 20 years and most of that time has been dedicated to constructing single-family homes. Within the last five years, he’s begun working with large-scale developers, specifically Cairn Homes (Ireland's largest house builder) and Graham Construction (a tier one contractor in Northern Ireland).

Cumulatively, MosArt is now delivering thousands of Passive House units each year, and scaling at this level has required not just knowhow but organizational tools and standard operational procedures that keep the project on schedule and on budget. “They don’t want Passive House to be an interruption,” O’Leary says.

Their work is not being done in isolation. At present, 7% of new construction in Ireland is now Passive House (if the United States was producing Passive House homes at that level, it would translate to approximately 100,000 units of housing nationwide). “We can tap ourselves on the back and say, 'Go team, 7%,' but we're only scratching the surface," O’Leary says. He’s quick to note that 93% of housing is not built to Passive House standards, and that it’s far too early to collectively pat ourselves on the back.

We need to get more people involved, O’Leary says. “We need to get out of our own little bubble.”

Rather than preaching to the choir, MosArt has taken to spreading the good news far and wide. They’ve trained roughly 5,000 Passive House designers and over 1,200 Passive House tradespeople. While not all of these individuals are based in Ireland (or even Europe for that matter), the spread of Passive House education is central to not only responding to demand but creating it. After all, if the design team has never heard of Passive House and the builder has never heard of Passive House and the client has never heard of Passive House, then the project isn’t going to be built to Passive House standards. If it’s not part of the universe of discourse, then it may as well not exist.

United Kingdom

Ann-Marie Fallon is an Associate Director, Architect, and Certified Passivhaus Designer with Architype. She is also one of the co-directors of the Passivhaus Trust, the Passive House Institute’s affiliate in the UK. The organization has set some extremely ambitious targets when it comes to scaling Passive House. By 2035, they hope to have 10% of all new builds be Passive House certified and 1% of all retrofits be EnerPHit certified. To ensure this is possible, they are planning to rapidly expand training industrywide, and to have 50% of all people working in the UK’s construction industry at least familiar with Passive House standards within the next nine years.

While this may seem aggressive, Fallon notes that the UK is starting from a grim position, as the nation has the oldest housing in Europe and some of the continent’s worst-performing building stock. To no one’s surprise, the combination of poor buildings with a humid, coastal climate has led to problems with indoor air quality and mold that are widespread enough that it has become a public concern and an issue that legislators are willing to do something about.

That legislation, Fallon suggests, is actually an opportunity. Yes, Passive House is a rigorous building standard that cuts energy use while improving IAQ and preventing mold problems, but it’s also a framework for delivering quality control on site, mitigating risk, improving building durability, and shoring up asset value. These benefits resonate with audiences well beyond the building science community, which is why the Passivhaus Trust’s messaging has expanded to reach insurance markets, legal professionals, climate risk analysts, and the finance sector.

"Passive House being recognized as a framework to deliver more than just carbon and energy savings is really important," Fallon says. Pockets of the finance and insurance worlds are beginning to understand that Passive House can improve resilience and durability, which matters to long-term investors.

The public sector is also showing interest. Certain local authorities have latched onto Passive House not for its energy credentials but for its quality assurance — a way to guarantee that buildings are actually constructed properly, which is not something the UK construction industry has always been able to claim.

"In this current volatile world, Passive House is a very reliable anchoring framework," Fallon says. "And Passive House is your ally. Why would we do anything else?"

From the Manufacturer's Perspective

Vasilis Giannopoulos is a specifications manager at Internorm, an Austrian firm that is one of Europe’s leading windows brands. Giannopoulos is based in the UK, though he also serves clients in North America, and his perspective is slightly different from Fallon’s as he sees scaling from the supply side, where the challenge is getting the right products specified on the right projects.

According to Giannopoulos, Internorm's approach is twofold. First, make Passive House-suitable windows as competitively priced as possible by optimizing the ratio between cost and performance. If the price gap between a standard window and a Passive House window is narrow enough, the conversation shifts from "Can we afford it?" to "Why wouldn't we?" Second, train the architects and consultants who make specification decisions, emphasizing the role that windows play in overall building performance.

"Training people provides all the essential technical skills," Giannopoulos says, but he notes that the less obvious benefit is confidence. When professionals feel comfortable, they are more willing to propose Passive House as an option to clients and to talk about the benefits of certification.

Giannopoulos believes the process would accelerate considerably if politicians were more involved. Right now, adopting Passive House performance criteria is voluntary. If policy made those criteria something professionals need to comply with rather than opt into, the conversation would change overnight.

His call to action is refreshingly simple: talk about Passive House differently. Not in technical terms, not with numbers. "Talk about the experience that the occupants most likely will feel," Giannopoulos says. "Try to make it more personal."

Austria

Günther Jedliczka, CEO of OeAD Student Housing in Vienna, has been building student residences to Passive House standards since 2005. OeAD now operates nine Passive House student dormitories across Austrian university cities: six in Vienna, plus facilities in Graz, Leoben, and Innsbruck. A tenth is on the way in Dornbirn. Collectively, these buildings house approximately 3,500 students each year, meaning roughly 60,000 young people have lived in some of the most energy-efficient residential buildings in the country.

The ripple effect is significant. Every year, thousands of future architects, engineers, policymakers, and business leaders spend their formative years in a Passive House. They may not become Passive House advocates, but they will know what a well-performing building feels like, since each student receives an information leaflet at move-in explaining what makes their building different. Combining knowledge of the Passive House standard with lived experience sets a baseline expectation that follows them into the workforce and into the housing market.

It is, in its quiet way, one of the most effective awareness campaigns imaginable, as students get better architecture, better air quality, and no mold. Moreover, students pay no more than they would in a conventional dormitory.

"It's a real win-win situation," Jedliczka says. "There is no disadvantage."

Australia

Anthony Burns runs a boutique Passive House design practice in Melbourne, which means he can only reach a few clients at a time. However, he's found two ways to multiply that reach. The first is straightforward: educate clients not on the metrics of Passive House but on the benefits and get them excited enough to talk about it in their communities. Word of mouth is a slow engine, but in a market where Passive House is still relatively unknown, every converted client becomes an ambassador.

The second approach is more unique and more scalable: software. Burns has developed PH LifeSync, a tool that connects Autodesk Revit directly to the Passive House Planning Package (PHPP). The connection runs both ways, as designers can push data from their BIM model into PHPP for analysis and pull results back into their model to inform design decisions.

For designers, the primary benefit is that they can spend more time on design and less time on data entry. For clients, the benefit is lower costs. "If I can reduce the amount of time that I'm putting into a project by streamlining the tools that I have," Burns says, "it's a better outcome for my client." And if he can share that workflow with the broader design community, Passive House becomes more accessible for everyone.

Burns says the most important thing anyone can do is advocate. The more people who understand that their current homes aren't as healthy or habitable as they should be, the greater the drive for change. And yet he’s clear-eyed about the structural challenge in Australia. Baseline building regulation is low and the gap between code minimum and Passive House is wide enough that the standard can seem like an extravagant leap rather than a natural next step even among people who care deeply about sustainability or efficiency. If policymakers closed that gap, Passive House would feel like an achievable upgrade rather than a distant aspiration.

As the Executive Director of the Passive House Network, Ken Levenson, indicates in the next section, this story should be familiar to many people in North America. Passive House often seems like a quixotic goal, especially in markets where the building codes are lax. The good news is that individual states are enacting more rigorous building codes that can serve as templates for other jurisdictions within the United States and beyond.

His call to action is disarmingly simple: engage. Have the conversations. Make people comfortable. The Passive House case is strong enough that it doesn't need hard-selling—it needs more people hearing it for the first time.

New York

In Cho is scaling Passive House through an audience that most of the industry hasn't thought to reach: children. As co-founder of Passive House for Everyone, a youth education nonprofit, Cho teaches building energy efficiency in New York City public schools—the largest public school system in the nation, with approximately 1 million students. Cho’s premise is simple and, in practice, radical: if the next generation understands how buildings work, they'll demand better ones.

The organization's most ambitious project to date is at Boys & Girls High School, a vocational school in the Bedford Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, where Cho's team has been working with the architecture and electrical teachers for over five years. The students loved learning about Passive House through hands-on, tactile methods so much that the school allocated a vacant classroom to be converted into a physical, first-of-its-kind Passive House training center. There, students will learn Passive House construction techniques, creating a direct pathway into the green building workforce under New York's decarbonization mandates.

The pedagogy matters. Cho has found that hands-on learning is "literally the most powerful" way to engage young people on building energy efficiency. Similar to how visiting a Passive House is the best way to get someone to understand its benefits, tactile experiences give students the opportunity to feel the difference between an airtight assembly and a leaky one. The approach echoes what trainers like Tomás O'Leary have found at the professional level, but Cho is applying it a generation earlier.

The vision extends beyond workforce development. Cho wants building science knowledge to become as universal as recycling. Even something as basic as knowing how to air seal a window gives an individual agency over their own comfort and energy use.

"Small individual acts multiplied by millions have the power to transform the world," Cho says, borrowing from Howard Zinn. It's an ambitious motto for what amounts to teaching kids about tape and insulation. But then again, that's the point.

Passive House Massachusetts has realized that its role extends beyond promotion and nurturing a sense of community. It also needs to provide technical support and to bring people together to solve problems when they arise. One emerging blind spot is operations. Buildings need to perform as designed, and that means bringing operations professionals into the conversation much earlier, particularly in large multifamily and commercial projects.

Gard-Murray also raises a subtle concern about buy-in. A decade ago, the people building Passive House in Massachusetts were early adopters. They were energy enthusiasts and environmentalists who needed no convincing. Now, with codes and incentives drawing newcomers into the fold for the first time, that enthusiasm can no longer be assumed. "We can't always assume that that buy-in is going to be there," Gard-Murray says, "So I think we need to work even harder than before.”

“We need to build that buy-in everywhere.”