Paper short abstract:

Seen from the outside passive houses in Norway are a remarkable success. When we look at individual passive houses and their performance another picture emerges.

Paper long abstract:

This article consists of two parts:

First we describe the critical factors leading to this success. Subsidies, a national passive house standard adapted to Norwegian calculation methods and climatic conditions, extensive training programmes for professionals and a clear path to stricter regulation of energy requirements in new buildings has created a perfect storm raising the number of passive houses built in Norway from almost zero in 2010 to 10 percent of all new buildings in summer 2013.

In the second part of this article, we move from the nominal success of "passive houses as built" to their "passive house performance" in daily use. The latter is based on an evaluation of the first and the second passive house school in Norway where we encountered significant differences in how the building managers made sure that their buildings actually worked as intended.

The article concludes by contrasting the two sets of success factors, the ones leading to passive houses becoming an important part of the building stock and the ones actually producing passive house performance, identifying commonalities and differences.