Quality assurance for passive houses

For newly built houses national ambitions prescribe increasing levels of energy performances, even including achieving net zero energy or carbon neutral houses. This is in large contrast with the lack of quality in many building processes. The building regulations, processes and control will have to be reshaped to support these ambitions, taking into account a development of performance guarantees in the building sector. Passive houses have to reach a target energy demand for heating less than 15 kWh/m2a and a total primary energy demand less than 120 kWh/m2a. Quite some examples of houses (and other buildings) in various countries show that it is technically feasible to reach this performance. In most of these countries also some form of quality assurance and certificates for these houses exist. In this paper we describe the possible changes of building processes due to the introduction of the passive house concept, and the urgency of reliable quality assurance to adequately reaching the energy ambitions and to assure quality issues at the same time. We illustrate this with passive house certification schemes from some European countries. This leads to some conclusions about the role and content of passive house certificates in the coming years.