A new 100kW solar photovoltaic system is helping to cut carbon emissions at the Snowmountain Enterprises cold storage warehouse in Cambridgeshire. 

The Universiy of Leicester Centre for Medicine will become the UK's largest non domestic passive house building when it is completed in 2015. 

RainWater Harvesting Ltd has announce that both its direct feed and award winning gravity-fed Rain Director system have achieved Water Regulation Advisory Scheme approval, ensuring that they comply to all UK regulations.

Two leading building product companies, Saint-Gobain and Fakro Roof Windows, have announced partnerships with cancer charities in Ireland and the UK.

A virtual, online green building trade fair will take place across Europe on 18 and 19 February 2014. 

The Lancaster Cohousing development of 41 certified passive homes, featured in issue four of Passive House Plus, has been announced as the winner of the UK National Self Build Association's Murray Armour Award. This comes on the back of the project picking up the social/group housing prize at the 2013 Passivhaus Trust awards.

A new online passive house tutorial video series has just been launched by Energyquarter. The series is hosted by Tomás O’ Leary from the Passive House Academy, accredited Passive House Institute trainers.

The UK's largest passive house scheme, developed by the Broadland Housing Group and designed by Ingleton Wood architects, has been approved for a brownfield site in Norwich.

SEAI last week announced that Better Energy Homes, its home energy upgrade grant programme, would continue through 2014.

See The Light, Ireland's passive house conference, takes place next Friday October 25 in Dublin. Passive House pioneer Prof Wolfgang Feist will be the keynote speaker. 

Passive house pioneer Prof Dr Wolfgang Feist has welcomed the publication of the latest IPCC climate change report, and called for urgent action to reduce emissions.

The Passive House Institute has certified two new windows and a new skylight as suitable for use in passive house buildings in cold climates. 

Wolfgang Feist, one of the creators of the passive house concept and a founder and director of the Passive House Institute, will speak in Dublin on 25 October at the 2013 See The Light conference.

The new version of the passive house planning software is now available.

The pioneering passive house retrofit of a derelict farm building to create a visitor and education centre at Yorkshire Wildlife Trust's Stirley Community Farm, Huddersfield, is nearing completion and will be open to the public on Sunday, 1 September 2013 from 11am to 3pm.

The winners of the 2013 UK Passivhaus Awards were announced last Thursday at a ceremony at the residence of the Austrian Ambassador in London.

Zephair have announced the launched of the Zephair Pre-Pro, an "easy to use and reliable way to perform quality control of your air tight layer by under pressurising a building".

To coincide with the publication of our third issue, we're delighted to announce the launch of an exciting new feature for subscribers to the magazine.

My blog post last week on 'passive house vs passivhaus' generated a fair bit of debate, so I thought it'd be nice to take a look at some of the reaction it provoked. The vast majority of those who responded disagreed with my stance, and this magazine's stance, expressing preference for the German 'passivhaus'.

Straw bale construction expert Bee Rowan will run a series of straw bale building workshops at Rock Farm on the Slane Castle Estate in Co Meath, starting from Saturday, 18 June.