Passive house will be represented stronger than ever at this year’s Ecobuild on 4 to 6 March, with a series of events throughout the exhibition focused on the world’s leading ultra low energy building standard. Passive House Plus will also be at this year’s exhibition — come find us at stand S800.

That’s the question I want to ask today. I’m talking mostly about the situation in Ireland, because it’s the one I’m more familiar with things over here — particularly with regards to building regulations. But the same might apply to the UK.

.A range of newly certified passive house components were presented in January at the Deubaukom trade fair in Essen, Germany, including windows designed for use in the arctic and northern Scandanvia.  

Check out this video below of Passive House Institute founder Prof Wolfgang Feist speaking at last year's See The Light conference in Dublin, which was organised by the Passive House Association of Ireland.

The Passive House Institute has announced the launch of a 3D model interface that allows for the graphic input of energy related design data. 

The Passive House Institute has announced the launch of a new award for window systems. 

The Universiy of Leicester Centre for Medicine will become the UK's largest non domestic passive house building when it is completed in 2015. 

The Lancaster Cohousing development of 41 certified passive homes, featured in issue four of Passive House Plus, has been announced as the winner of the UK National Self Build Association's Murray Armour Award. This comes on the back of the project picking up the social/group housing prize at the 2013 Passivhaus Trust awards.

A new online passive house tutorial video series has just been launched by Energyquarter. The series is hosted by Tomás O’ Leary from the Passive House Academy, accredited Passive House Institute trainers.

The UK's largest passive house scheme, developed by the Broadland Housing Group and designed by Ingleton Wood architects, has been approved for a brownfield site in Norwich.

The International Passive House Days, during which passive buildings around the world open their doors to the public, took place this year from November 8-10. This year marked the 10th anniversary of the event. 

See The Light, Ireland's passive house conference, takes place next Friday October 25 in Dublin. Passive House pioneer Prof Wolfgang Feist will be the keynote speaker. 

Passive house pioneer Prof Dr Wolfgang Feist has welcomed the publication of the latest IPCC climate change report, and called for urgent action to reduce emissions.

Ed Miliband has said that the UK will build 200,000 homes per year if Labour gets into government, while promising to make the UK a “world-leading green economy." If such assertions are mutually exclusive, then they must be treated as hollow rhetoric, indistinguishable from David Cameron’s husky hugging stunt and unfulfilled pledge to lead the “greenest government ever.”

This is Villa Lagenkamp, the first certified passive house ever built in Denmark, finished in 2008. 

Construction has begun on what is expected to be Ireland's first certified passive house pharmacy. The project in Clonmel, Co Tipperary, was designed by Paul McNally Architecture.

Wolfgang Feist, one of the creators of the passive house concept and a founder and director of the Passive House Institute, will speak in Dublin on 25 October at the 2013 See The Light conference.

The Passive House Institute has published a new study that looks at designing passive buildings for tropical climates. The study concludes that the key design criteria for such buildings include,"a very airtight building envelope, 10 to 15 cm of insulation, solar control glazing, fixed external shades for the windows and ventilation with both heat and energy recovery".

 The coming decades are expected to bring higher average temperatures, more extreme weather events – and possibly more cold snaps. But how are passive house buildings geared to adapt to a changing climate?

The pioneering passive house retrofit of a derelict farm building to create a visitor and education centre at Yorkshire Wildlife Trust's Stirley Community Farm, Huddersfield, is nearing completion and will be open to the public on Sunday, 1 September 2013 from 11am to 3pm.

Tall buildings tend to be among the worst offenders in terms of energy and environmental profligacy – but one new Viennese project shows that high rise doesn’t have to mean high environmental impact.

The winners of the 2013 UK Passivhaus Awards were announced last Thursday at a ceremony at the residence of the Austrian Ambassador in London.

Following on from my post on a two-week trip to Germany to study low energy building under the Phase Programme, I sent some questions to Torsten Windmueller, a timber engineer at Kompetenz Zentrum Holzbau & Ausbau, a centre of excellence for timber frame construction, to gauge his thoughts on the differences between building standards in Germany and Ireland.

Zephair have announced the launched of the Zephair Pre-Pro, an "easy to use and reliable way to perform quality control of your air tight layer by under pressurising a building".

It's not too hard to remember a time when 'passive house' was a rare, hallowed term. Of course it is still the zenith of low energy building. But there was a time only a few years ago, at our predecessor magazine Construct Ireland, when the possibility of featuring a certified passive house only came along every couple of issues.

To coincide with the publication of our third issue, we're delighted to announce the launch of an exciting new feature for subscribers to the magazine.

My blog post last week on 'passive house vs passivhaus' generated a fair bit of debate, so I thought it'd be nice to take a look at some of the reaction it provoked. The vast majority of those who responded disagreed with my stance, and this magazine's stance, expressing preference for the German 'passivhaus'.

Work is nearing completion at Stirley Farm, Green Building Store's design and build project to turn a derelict barn into an Enerphit-certified education centre for the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust. Enerphit is the Passive House Institute's slightly less onerous standard for retrofit projects.

Readers of Passive House Plus will probably have noticed that we use the English 'passive house' rather than the German 'passivhaus'. Though it might seem like a pedantic grammatical issue, we actually put a lot of thought into this before launching the mag.

Not only is this home in Sante Fe, New Mexico a certified passive house, but architects MoSA say it cost 6.5% less to build than a conventional dwelling in the area too.