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For the purposes of determining the CO2 emissions of a Passive House a 50:50 split between the use of gas and wood pellets was assumed as a space heating energy source. By comparing these figures it was possible to establish the variation in energy consumption and CO2 emissions between national common practice and Passive House standard for one typical dwelling.
Using this data, five scenarios representing varying levels of application of the Passive House Standard were investigated. These scenarios, detailed in Table 1, represent the energy and CO2 emission saving potential of a low, medium, high, very high and as standard application of the Passive House standard.
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Although new dwelling construction figures indicate that over 80,000 dwellings were constructed in 2005 it is likely that the new build rate will decline over the next 20 years. For this reason the five scenarios investigated were applied to approximately the average new build dwelling construction of the past 20 years of 40,000 dwellings.
Using the calculation model it was found that a typical Irish dwelling, constructed to 2002 building regulations standard, consumes 9,722 kWh/year of delivered energy on space heating and as a result releases 2,855 kgCO2/year into the atmosphere. The space heating requirements for the same size of dwelling built to Passive House standards was found to be only 1,500 kWh/year of delivered energy which equates to 176 kgCO2/year. The difference in delivered energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions between the two construction types for a single building over one year was therefore 8,222 kWh/year and 2,680 kgCO2/year.
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