earth sheltered passive solar designs

design northwest

Heating and cooling account for approximately half of the average home's energy consumption.

The combined energy use by commercial and residential buildings in the United States represents on the order of forty percent of the country's total energy consumption.

As rising global consumption sparks competition for increasingly scare resources, the price of all forms of energy, especially those traditionally used for heating and cooling residential and commercial buildings continue on an upward spiral.

In 2010 the world consumed approximately 16 trillion watts of energy. More than eighty-five percent of that energy came from burning non-renewable fossil fuels. The historic and continued burning of these significant amounts of fossil fuel is having deleterious consequences for the environment.

Yet earth sheltered passive solar design paradigms produce high quality buildings with dramatically reduced heating and cooling energy requirements at conventional construction costs.

Given the ever-rising cost of energy, and the potential consequences of unchecked energy consumption, it is time to reconsider our approach to designing our homes and other structures.