I know a guy who builds high performance homes. He preaches completely dumping the green terminology in favor of high performance.
He makes a great case for super insulation levels, and low energy consumption products.
I’m as far away from envirowackosim as you can get. My city issued recycle bin resides unused behind my shed. However, if you can make a legitimate case for saving money by saving energy, with a reasonable payoff equilibrium, I’m all for it.
He built one house where he made an all glass exterior wall that faces south. There is a short s]hallway behind it that is nothing but a warming room. Heat from the sun warms the room and the hot air gets pumped into the house to take some pressure off the furnace. In a weird way, it makes some sense.
Passivehaus stuff is just pure nonsense though. The lunatics take it way too far.
Passive solar homes have been around for hundreds if not thousands of years(think of the south facing cave) They make sense in climates where you are worried about heating your home in the winter or cooling your home in the summer. I live in a Salt box style house. The windows on the front face south west. The big shed roof faces north east.
Super insulating your home makes much more sense than worrying about if the products used to build it are “green”.
The hallway in in the house your friend built is called a “heat sink”. Typically a heat sink will have a masonry floor and wall to absorb the heat from the sun during the day and radiate in out when the sun goes down. The best heat sink is soapstone. Which is why they have been building soapstone fireplaces in Finland for centuries.
I have seen two story green houses built on the south side of a houses with masonry floors, walls and even barrels filled with water all used to absorb the heat from the sun. Then the doors and windows that can be opened and closed to let the heat radiate into adjacent rooms into the house at night. You can even add fans to help circulate the air instead of using natural convection(heat rises).
The thing all super insulated houses must have is an air to air heat exchanger. If not the air in the house can become toxic because the CO2 can not escape. Also, moisture can accumulate.
One of my uncles built an envelope home. Its a big house, not some hovel, and it has a greenhouse all around it. Makes sense up here. Its an unnecessarily large barn of a place in Northern WI and he still pays almost nothing to heat it.
As long as the technology makes sense economically then there is no reason not to do it.