“On March 27, 2024, at 9:00am Pacific time, the Building Decarbonization Coalition and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory is putting on a seminar series on challenges and opportunities for home decarbonization entitled: Architectural Challenges in Shaping Sustainable Residential Buildings.

So, this is my first “blog”, and it doesn’t feel natural yet. I prefer having conversations, giving a lecture to a live audience, and debating ideas about how we can all more effectively make the transition needed to a carbon-neutral society. But for the past two and a half years, OFA has taken a turn in the really challenging, exciting and slightly frightening direction of Deep Energy Retrofits (DERs). For the past 15 years, we have been focused on designing and building Passive House market-rate and affordable housing projects. Our goals were to see if we could demonstrate that PH, Net Zero Energy projects were not only feasible to build from the ground up but can be done, with the right team, with little to no premium. We succeeded and failed throughout the years but in the process, we realized that “how” you build your PH project offers the greatest opportunity for innovation, scale and with it, affordability. This led us to exploring strategies for prefabrication, building our first Passive House project in a modular factory, and later projects with high-performance prefabricated panels. This experience comes in handy if you want to crack the nut on DERs!