The Passive House in the Electricity System of the Future

renovation versus new build

Congratulations on the webcast. Very well argued, absolutely clear, and, in my view, fully valid. The main improvement I would suggest is mention of the appliance load in a passive house. But then I would, wouldn’t I! Your points about the cost of the infrastructure are very well made.

I think two comments are worthwhile:

1. The speed with which the passive house can be rolled out. In the UK, at current rates of demolition, the expected lifetime of a house is about 1000 years. So there are very large numbers of houses (including our own) where the concept of a passive house is just unrealisable. So your arguments apply to new build. There is a dangerous zone, where houses are too efficient to justify gas delivery, but still need real space heating, so the emissions attributable to the home (from coal fired plant) go up as a result of improved insulation efficiency! Only partial improvement makes things worse. For these existing homes, the right answer seems to be to add a further infrastructure (of copper pipes?) for heat distribution. From CHP plant.
2. Bundling of the energy purchases with infrastructure costs is not appropriate. Their cost structures are quite different, and what you are actually buying are quite different purchases. So too are their market possibilities, as there is no real chance of having a choice about who serves your house. Thus the cable (and I agree wholly with you that electricity is a far more useful energy infrastructure than any other) is unavoidably a monopoly service, very highly capital intensive and very long lasting. The decisions about it are best made with some local government involvement, so it is properly an issue for local politics. The charges are also best made based on actual costs, and a very good proxy of this is street frontage, as suggested by William Vickrey (I forget which paper). It may be useful to make some adjustment for corner properties. What you are buying for a fixed cable rent is the right to play in energy markets, whether exercised or not, but the energy markets can be quite different, competitive, with trading and real competition – possibly choice even in real time.

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Is passive the way of the future?

This is an interesting topic, but I have to wonder...are passive energy houses the way of the future, like the article/webcast seem to suggest? Aside from being prohibitive by way to current costs (and let's face it, there is currently no accurate and reliable way to predict cost points in the future given the state of the economies), consumers as a whole are simply not willing to give "new" ideas a shot when it comes to something important as their home. At least that's what I have seen.

It would seem an intermediate step before passive energy houses would be energy efficient houses "to the extreme", which contains energy efficient materials, appliances, and energy saving technologies built in. Of course, the danger of this is complacency. If a normal energy consumer is put in an efficient, traditional house, they may be less likely to make the leap to the next level. I suppose we'll see how "pockets" of communities with passive houses fare. Perhaps that is the best test for global acceptance.

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