“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 we do that by applying passive building principles. And there again, nothing, no rocket science. It’s pretty intuitive. You put on a big down jacket in a cold climate. You put on a little less thick down jacket in a warmer climate, like, the San Francisco down jacket, you know, so you have the 006 North Face coat, and then you have the lighter one that you take on, like maybe chillier summer travel nights. Same idea. So yeah, that's pretty intuitive, actually. super comfortable. I'm so glad that I got to live an experience that, as you mentioned, I built my own house in 2002. That started off this interest in the whole thing, like proof of concept, really. It was the first passive home in the United States. And I've, I've lived through many winters in Urbana, Illinois. When the blizzard hits, it gets really, really cold in the Midwest and then the temperatures after the blizzard are like -20 F. Laura England Oh, wow. Kat Klingenberg So super, super cold when I'm in the house. and look out and it's sunny in the morning. Like, I have no idea. I'm walking around in a t- shirt because some solar, passive solar is part of the whole design process. So great, great, great resilient healthy homes. Laura England Well, that must have been really satisfying to have, you know, built the home and then to have it really demonstrate to you those passive principles in action. Kat Klingenberg You have no idea what kind of a smile I had on my face, like, yeah, this is working. And then you open the door and you poke your nose out and like, nope. Stay inside today. Laura England Stay in my toasty home. Yeah. Well. And then what is a zero energy building then? Kat Klingenberg So yeah. So what I just talked about is essentially like, the passive elements that, that you can use, like super insulation, like you make the home less drafty, you take windows that are very high performing and that let, based on climate, the right amount of solar. And because like in the warm climates, again, it works too. But at that point you want to keep the solar out, right? Like otherwise you get really hot in your building. So once you do all that and you optimize the envelope to reach this equilibrium where the internal heat gains and the losses of the envelope, or they almost balance out and you can get away with a very, very tiny mechanical system, which makes everything cheaper and easier, then you switch over to renewables and the system that you now need to get to zero energy for operation is super tiny. So, my house is pretty modest, right? Like, it's a 1500 square foot home, not giant. But that doesn't mean that you cannot do the same thing in a bigger home. But what I'm saying is, like so my footprint, it's a two story home, like my footprint is about 600ft². and maybe a little bigger. And, the PV system that covers all the energy that is still left after I did all these efficiency measures, after I put those in place, is about half the size of the roof. It’s really, really small. And it over produces 10,000 electric car miles. So, I'm completely independent. I'm overproducing. My bill is just the connection to the grid because I'm still interconnected. I'm not my own microgrid or anything. I don't have any storage. I stayed away from this 20 years ago because I felt that was too complicated. I'm thinking about it now just as backup. Like, I still haven't made my choice in terms of, like, electric car, but there are some really, really cool, like small home energy management systems now that are inverters that are like home management systems that decide when to keep energy like in the battery, when to send it back to the grid. Unfortunately, in Illinois we don't have that. But like in states like California where they actually pay you based on like peak consumption, the utility actually loves that when you're a micro producer and they get in a into a pinch, and too many people are drawing energy from the grid, at that point, they pay you big bucks to send like another kilowatt hour their way. Yeah. And so we talked about this last night. So once you have these like super energy efficient building shells, then you add a very small now affordable renewable system to it, which easily gets you to now overproduce. And then you can start trading with the utility if the the utility recognizes the value to them to shave off peak demand, then they don't have to build as many peaker plants and the peaker plants only run 2% of the year because like those peak moments don't last very long and they are super expensive to the utility. So once we put all these pieces together, and that was my main point yesterday, that actually buildings are really the cornerstone of this redesign of our energy supply as part of a renewable grid. And back to your second part of the question: Like, why is this all so important, in the context of climate change and resilience? Because, well, hey, 20, 30, 40 years ago, maybe we could have been talking about only mitigation, but now, we are a little late in the game. And we also need to talk about adaptation. And that's the great thing. Like these buildings, even if the grid goes down, they still have a small backup battery. We have a great story from some of you might remember the cold spell in Texas when a lot of people, like, actually died because it was too cold and the grid went down and… Laura England They weren't prepared. Kat Klingenberg They weren't prepared. They started burning furniture and like, things that you really shouldn't be doing, like, and then endangering themselves. Laura England Right… fumes, I imagine. Kat Klingenberg Right. So, a home that was retrofitted to our Phius standards in Austin, Texas, had no problem. They stayed in the home the entire week. They could have stayed there. They had not forethought enough. It was a fairly new home. They hadn't installed a small backup system yet, like a small battery. So they had a small baby. And so the
