Let's Turn The White House Into A 'Passive House'

by Danielle Sacks
January 5, 2009
FastCompany

David White, an architectural energy technical consultant at Transsolar who I met while reporting environmental design stories, is a passionate advocate for the passive house movement. "German Passivhaus," which originated decades ago in Frankfurt, is the unsexy sibling of the eco-starchitecture movement. Instead of flaunting platinum-LEED certified plaques with all kinds of Jetsons-style enviro bells and whistles, "passive homes" are beloved by engineers: insulated in airtight shells that temperature-regulate themselves. Across the globe only some 15,000 passive homes exist. Most are in Germany and Scandinavia, while in the US a tiny movement is percolating in Urbana, IL. And last week The New York Times devoted a feature story to the bare bones design practice, in which homes run on roughly one-twentieth of the energy of a conventional house and only cost some 5% more to build.

On January 2nd, White submitted a proposal to the incoming Obama Administration for a new Passive House Certification that would stand as an alternative to LEED, which many critics view solely as a marketing standard (see his proposal below). To push White's call to action even further, we challenge president-elect Obama to convert The White House into a passive home to set the ultimate example for a country that is now reeling from the environmental and economic backlash of decades-worth of unsustainable McMansion fetish. We realize this is ambitious, and that it wouldn't be the first time a President has attempted to green The White House. In 1979, Jimmy Carter installed a $28,000 solar water heater on the roof of the West Wing (which lasted seven years). Then in 1993 Bill Clinton assembled a team of 100 green architects, engineers, and scientists--including William McDonough and Bob Berkebile--and commissioned a comprehensive "Greening the White House" report by The Rocky Mountain Institute.


Obama's already on the right track: just last week he told Barbara Walters that he plans on auditing the environmental efficiency of his new digs. But as a model for the rest of the country, we need larger scale change. Energy consultant White told me that "deep energy retrofits are estimated at roughly $50 a square foot." This would be a hefty investment for the new administration, costing over $3 million to overhaul the 55,000 square foot white house. But, as Environmental Building News editor Alex Wilson recently said: "For what we are spending on the war in Iraq, we could be investing in a politically stable, environmentally safe, and economically strong future built upon such energy sources as wind, solar, biomass, geothermal, and efficiency." Let's start renovating...