With Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown making passive house or equivalent energy efficiency standards mandatory for all new builds in a historic vote, the German-Irish Chamber of Industry & Commerce’s Passive House and Energy Efficiency Conference and trade mission is expected to be more relevant than ever.

There was a time when insulating an historic property meant treading lightly on its building fabric. But today, guided by building physics, passive house designers continue to push the boundaries of retrofit by bringing old homes up to modern standards of super-insulation. This project is the third such deep retrofit to an historic London property by Green Tomato Energy.

Sustainable building pioneers The Green Register will run a new half-day seminar in London on 27 June 2014 entitled ‘Achieving energy efficiency and preserving historic buildings - surely too good to be true?’

A house in south Dublin recently became the first Irish building to become EnerPHit certified. Architect Joseph Little describes the challenges of meeting the Passive House Institute’s standard for upgrading existing buildings.

The Building Life Consultancy and Fraunhofer Institute for Building Physics are providing a two-day Wufi Pro training workshop in Dublin on 14-15 December.

This is only the third English language workshop of its kind to be offered in Europe according to the Building Life Consultancy, and will train members of the construction industry to use Fraunhofer’s Wufi Pro software for hygrothermal (heat and moisture) simulations of building fabric.

With the goal of achieving zero carbon standards for new homes by as soon as 2013, environment minister John Gormley has committed to introducing 60 per cent energy and carbon reductions under changes to part L of the building regulations next year. John Hearne spoke to leading industry figures to find out how the revised regulation could raise standards for both new and existing homes.