Nice article on passive survivability

Jenny Way, a cluster of affordable, net-zero-energy-ready houses designed and built by South Mountain Company on Martha’s Vineyard. These houses are well enough insulated that they will will do a pretty good job at keeping families safe during extended power outages. Photo: South Mountain Co.

Charlie Wardell did a great job with this article, Refuge From the Storm, in the EEBA Newsletter.

Charlie features a number of builders around the country who have emphasized the “passive survivability” benefits of their highly energy-efficient homes, including South Mountain Company on Martha’s Vineyard. Passive survivability refers to the ability of a building to maintain habitable temperatures if it loses power or heating fuel for an extended period of time.

Along these lines, I’m interested in covering other builders and designers who have featured this performance attribute. You can e-mail me directly (alex@resilientdesign.org) with suggestions for such companies (with contact information, ideally), or reply to this blog in the comments field. Thanks much.

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Tags: Passive Survivability/power outage

One thought on “Nice article on passive survivability”

Tom Phillips, Healthy Bldg. Research says:

September 6, 2018 at 12:52 pm

Thx, Alex.
It would also be great to hear from anyone on how they are
designing to prevent overheating, e.g. modeling for current and future extreme heat & power outages, per former LEED pilot credit for resilient design, etc. For due diligence, builders should be doing this now. Such climate ready building has already been done in several commercial and residential developments, mainly in the UK.

BTW, the S. Mtn. Co. house in the picture above only has good external shading for 1/2 the front windows, and none on the left (west side). Ouch.
I have recently seen online discussions of heat and humidity problems in Vermont homes.

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David W. Orr, Ph.D

David W. Orr is Paul Sears Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies & Politics, Emeritus. He also served as “Counselor to the President” of Oberlin College for ten years. He is the author of eight books, including Dangerous Years: Climate Change and the Long Emergency (Yale, 2016) and Down to the Wire: Confronting Climate Collapse (Oxford, 2009) and co-editor of three others. He has authored over 220 articles, reviews, book chapters, and professional publications. In the past twenty-five years he has served as a board member or adviser to ten foundations and on the Boards of many organizations including the Rocky Mountain Institute, Bioneers, and the Aldo Leopold Foundation.

He is currently a Trustee of the Alliance for Sustainable Colorado, Children and Nature Network, and the WorldWatch Institute. He has been awarded nine honorary degrees and a dozen other awards including a Lyndhurst Prize, a National Achievement Award from the National Wildlife Federation, leadership awards from the U.S. Green Building Council (2014) and from Second Nature (2012), and a lifetime achievement award from Green Energy Ohio and the North American Association for Environmental Education. He has lectured at hundreds of colleges and universities throughout the U.S., Europe, Latin America, and Asia. He headed the effort to design, fund, and build the Adam Joseph Lewis Center, which was named by an AIA panel in 2010 as “the most important green building of the past thirty years,” as “one of thirty milestone buildings of the twentieth century” by the U.S. Department of Energy, and as one of “52 game-changing buildings of the past 170 years” by the editors of Building Design +Construction in January, 2016. He was instrumental in the design and funding of the Peter B. Lewis Gateway Center. He is the founder of the Oberlin Project and a founder of the journal Solutions. His current work is on the state of American democracy.