Zero Energy Modular Community

Pioneers

Over thirty-five years ago, Housing Initiative Partnership, Inc. (HIP) made the commitment to creating affordable housing for low and moderate-income residents of Prince George’s County, MD. They continually set the standard for the County and the State and so over the past ten years they have increasingly focused their efforts on developing housing that is measurably more healthy, energy efficient, and grid resilient than the common stock. This is not by chance; it is critical to their mission. 

Some very real scenarios: An asthmatic child staying home sick from the effects of poor indoor air quality easily equates to a lost day of work for a single parent.  A recurrent pattern of severe summer weather with intense thunderstorms causes an electrical utility outage and puts at-risk elderly residents in jeopardy of a traumatic health event due to the lack of air conditioning. A heavy snowfall or sustained deep-freeze event wreaks havoc with our overhead electrical utility, cuts off power for days, and forces residents to revert to back-up heat from fossil fuel-burning heaters and triggers spikes their heating bills – so much that it breaks the family’s budget.

It is for these reasons such as these that HIP developed the first Passive House in Prince George’s County, that we affectionately call “Addison Road Passive House”, located in the community of Fairmount Heights. The success of that pilot project inspired HIP to apply for, and win a MEA competitive offering. This award provides a demonstration of how to scale-up our concept and create a Department of Energy Zero Energy Ready-certified community of six homes.

The history is that Zero Energy Buildings are rare and expensive. In our opinion, one of the main causes is that they were historically designed with bleeding edge technologies or hard-to-get equipment or materials. Many were designed with extreme energy reduction as the main design criterion, rather than livability, comfort, or constructability. These latter criteria are the bedrock of fundamentals of HIP homes. And so, we used our Passive Building design and construction principles to tackle this challenge.

An Equation

This project presents an equation for a logical way to build healthy and resilient zero energy communities:

super-efficient building envelope + minimal solar renewables +future energy storage
= an affordable zero energy home

The envelope part of the equation is accomplished by using an integrated design approach based upon low-tech and economical solutions achievable by any careful builder. The result of this equation produces homes with heating and cooling demands which are 50% lower than Code-built homes. Ones that require much smaller (physically and capacity-wise) heating and cooling equipment, and much less electricity.  We know this approach works because we achieved it in the Passive House on Addison Road. For that house, it achieves a total energy bill of under $60/month without renewables.

Current Status

The 60th Place Zero Energy Modular Community will have roof-top solar. In fact. those systems are being installed imminently.

Further, we are happy to report that these six homes are complete and are currently going on the market. We anticipate they will go fast. Please watch this space for announcements of our ribbon-cutting event in the coming weeks.