020: Katrin Klingenberg on high-performance passive building

“Find Your Sustain Ability” host Laura England, associate director of App State’s Quality Enhancement Plan (“Pathways to Resilience”) and practitioner-in-residence in the Department of Sustainable Development, talks with 2024 Appalachian Energy Summit keynote speaker Katrin Klingenberg, co-founder and executive director of the nonprofit Phius (Passive House Institute U.S.). Klingenberg shares her journey from working for a corporate architecture firm to developing a passion for passive building — which led her to build the nation’s first passive house. Passive building uses core building principles to create net-zero structures that utilize clean, renewable energy sources to generate as much or more energy than they consume annually. Phius aims to decarbonize the built environment by making high-performance passive building the mainstream market standard.

 

 

Transcript:

 

Laura England

Welcome back to the Find Your Sustainability podcast. I'm Laura England from the Department of Sustainable Development, and I'm serving as associate director for the Pathways to Resilience Quality Enhancement Plan. And today, I have the pleasure of getting to talk with the keynote speaker for App State's 2024 Appalachian Energy Summit. Architect Katrin Klingberg, or Kat as well call her today is co-founder and executive director of the nonprofit organization Phius, which stands for passive house institute US, and is dedicated to decarbonizing the built environment by making high performance, passive building the mainstream market standard. Over the past 20 years, Kat's visionary leadership in this field has driven the development and adoption of passive building and zero energy standards. Passive building methodology originated in the US and Canada in the 1970s, and was enhanced in Germany in the 1990s. Kat reinvigorated it in 2003, when she designed and completed the first home to meet passive house standards in the United States. The interest that followed ultimately led her to found Phius, the organization she continues to lead today. Kat's work with Phius includes developing and delivering building science based training in how to design and build the energy efficient zero energy buildings. She has collaborated with federal and state government agencies to tailor passive building standards for various climate zones, and has consulted on projects nationally and internationally. She has also contributed to the field of sustainable building through articles, book contributions and presentations in the U.S. and abroad, and has been recognized for her leadership with numerous awards. Kat, we're thrilled to have you visit APS state and I thoroughly enjoyed your keynote talk last night at this year's Energy Summit. So for those who weren't there, can you start by telling us in layperson terms what is passive building and what is zero energy building? And why are these approaches so important in the context of climate change?

 

Kat Klingenberg

Well, first of all, let me thank you for having me. This is like, super exciting. I'm really glad I can be here and talk to you about my passion and kind of like life's work that I kind of have been dedicating my career to passive building and passive house. So passive house initially started, as you might imagine, as a house, as a single family design where people tried to create a building shell out of materials that would be very well insulating. It's almost like you're putting on a big jacket and then it traditionally came out of the colder climates, and by putting on a jacket and by making the building less drafty, they actually created a home that could be heated just by the internal heat gains in the building that I already present, like you dog or like your water heater or so. Very cool. Right? So that was the ideal in the 70s that you could create this equilibrium in a building where the internal gains are, the same as the losses. And