In these new-build homes, no fossil fuels are allowed

A new all-electric and carbon-neutral housing development in New York State forbids the use of fossil fuels anywhere in the community to heat homes or water, cook food, or dry clothes.

Located about two hours outside of New York City in the Catskill Mountains, the Catskill Project doesn’t have any natural gas or other fossil fuel hookups. Instead, heating and appliances all run on electricity. Power is supplied by on-site solar panels or through a subscription to a community solar farm, and each home is built using passive house standards that reduce the energy needed to heat and cool it.

The requirements mean the Catskill Project has a head start in the race to reduce climate-warming pollution from existing buildings and new construction, which account for about 37% of global warming emissions, according to the U.N. Environment Programme. New York will require most new construction to be all-electric starting in 2026.

“There’s no reason to be building houses that are going to contribute further to the climate issue,” says Catskill Project co-founder – and first resident – Greg Hale.

Yale Climate Connections spoke with Hale to learn more about the project.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Yale Climate Connections: How did the environment inform the design when you were starting the Catskill Project?

Greg Hale: Living seamlessly with our environment is one of our core principles. So I would say the land itself had a major impact on what we’re doing. We chose the land because of its beauty. It’s got a lot of [steep terrain] and a lot of water, so that creates streams and waterfalls. We didn’t necessarily pick it for the easiest site to develop, but that [reinforced that] the whole ethos of this project is living in harmony with the environment, specifically in a carbon-neutral way.

Our first phase is on 90 acres. It’s got 11 lots, which we sited close to our community road and then set aside over 40 acres for conservation. The land has a recorded easement and is conserved in perpetuity. We’ve got great trails and that’s where you can sit and watch the waterfalls.

YCC: I want to get into the carbon-neutral piece, but first, could you describe a passive house and some of the design features that you’ve incorporated in these homes?

Read: The promise of passive house design

Hale: Passive house is a set of principles, and what they’re all about is reducing the energy demand it will take to heat and cool your house. So it’s about orientation so that your glazing is more south-facing [AKA more southern-facing windows] in climates where you’re more concerned about heating like we are up here in the Catskills. It’s about insulation and air sealing to create a very tight and well-protected envelope so you’re not inadvertently heating the outdoors in the wintertime or cooling it in the summertime.

Triple-pane windows are a key element so that there are no drafts at the windows. And then it’s very important [to integrate] an active ventilation system because once you’ve created this very tight seal, you could have an unhealthy indoor air environment if you didn’t actively ventilate it. So we have an energy recovery ventilator that’s on 24/7 always bringing fresh air into the house and exhausting stale air. But the magic of this machine is that it actually captures the thermal energy before the air is exhausted and pretreats the incoming air. So in the wintertime, instead of exhausting warm air out of your building, you’re capturing the warmth and pretreating the incoming air so that your heating equipment doesn’t need to work as hard to reach the same internal temperature.

YCC: Could you describe what the homes look like and if it would be obvious that they are passive homes?

Hale: You really can’t tell a passive house from looking at it from the outside. From the outside, it’s about quality construction in all of its aspects. So we have several different designs, and I live in what we like to call modern rustic, which is a modern-looking house. The exterior is a rough-cut hemlock, so it will eventually fade in the sun and look kind of like a barn. It’s trying to merge the rustic barn aesthetic with a modern design. But then we also have another design that’s much closer to a more traditional farmhouse vernacular. So we’re trying to have a couple of different designs that appeal to different aesthetics, but all of them will be designed to passive house principles.

YCC: Could you tell me a little bit about any renewable energy generation and the type of heating and cooling, for example, that’s being used?

Hale: So this gets to the carbon-neutral profile – we’re all-electric. Our HOA does not allow the combustion of fossil fuels anywhere in the community to heat your house or your hot water, cook your food, or dry your clothes. And you need your electricity to be 100% clean if you’re going to shoot for carbon neutrality, and we do that by either having on-site solar [photovoltaics] – and our purchasers so far have gone that route – or you could also elect to subscribe to a community solar program. That’s not a burdensome requirement because it’s generally 5-10% less expensive than the local utility. So we’re connected to the local utility, but we will be [generating enough] to offset our energy use – either going through community solar or generating enough solar energy on-site, hopefully with battery storage as well.

YCC: How does the passive house design and being carbon neutral impact the livability of the space?

Hale: I think the livability is fabulous. You don’t have drafts inside. When you shut all the windows, it’s extremely quiet, but all the windows are also operational with screens, so you can live indoor-outdoor as well. And it’s a very low-maintenance [home] – you need to change your air filters a couple of times a year – but it’s a delightful place to live.

YCC: Could you talk a bit about some health benefits to being in a passive home?

Hale: It’s generally healthier to live in a less drafty place. And it’s also about the filtration that you put on your ventilation system. You’re getting 24/7 fresh air, which is really important, and we use a Merv 13 filter so that when you have all of your windows sealed, it’s a great filtering system. For example, last year when we had the Canadian wildfires and the entire Northeast smelled like a campfire, inside, we had very little detectable smoke. And then when you would step outside, you’d be in that weird orange haze that we all experienced last year.

YCC: Speaking of that, what are some of the benefits of this whole approach as the climate changes, both in terms of mitigation and adaptation?

Hale: The whole approach is about reducing emissions from the built environment. There’s no reason to be building houses that are going to contribute further to the climate issue. So we look at it both operationally and in our materials.

We’re very careful to select materials that have a lower embodied carbon profile. So we limit concrete, we don’t use spray foam, we use plant-based insulation, and our countertops are compressed paper – fabulous performance of those! So a lot of interesting choices you can make to address the carbon that’s emitted in making the materials and building your building.

The idea of regenerative development is very important to us. A lot of the wood in the house is from our site – our cherry ceilings, our ash floors. As we’re clearing trees for houses or infrastructure – when we have the right trees that have millable portions of them – we buck those up and send them to a local sawmill, which then creates tongue and groove paneling for us, or flooring, or baseboards. Essentially, we put materials back in the house that we took from the site.

YCC: You mentioned that there’s no reason for people to not be building in a way that prevents harm to the climate. How replicable is this project? And can you speak to the expense piece a bit for people who want to use this technique in other new homes?

Hale: The passive house standard can be for any building – it’s not just for single-family residential houses. [For] smaller [single-family homes] like this, there is a modest premium. It costs more to use triple-pane windows than double-pane windows. You’re adding a few [extra] inches of insulation in the walls, so you have a bit of a larger materials cost.

We use an off-site panelized construction system, so our envelope is built in a factory in Keene, New Hampshire, by a company called Bensonwood. So they build the panels, they include the windows and doors, and then they truck them to our site. And it’s amazing to watch them assemble [the home] with a crane and a crew of four people, and they bolt it all together and they’re done in three or four days. And you have a weatherproof shell that meets the air barrier test for a passive house. So it’s definitely replicable, but you need commitment on the part of developers to build this way. And you need to design for this outcome from the beginning to minimize the incremental costs.

YCC: Can you tell me a little bit about the number of homes right now and a bit about what’s drawing people to the community?

Hale: Right now, we have three homes constructed. I live in one of them, and we have two other families that have moved in and seem to be happy owners. And we have two more under contract that we will be building this year (2024). Our first phase is 11 houses, and then we have land that is already subdivided that will expand the community to 25.

And what brings people here? Well, we work a lot on trying to find people who care about their environmental responsibility. And so it’s a feeling – as if people understand what we’re trying to do and they want to live in a community where we’re doing that and where they’ll be around other people who share those same values.

YCC: You’ve been working on these issues for a long time. What makes you personally passionate about building net zero?

Hale: I’ve considered myself an environmentalist since I was about 10 years old and went to camp in the Adirondacks. And then that got into more and more of my mainstream work life. I’ve been in the real estate world for my entire professional career but have been able to merge that with my commitment to fight climate change.

And then I had a dream of actually doing our own development and leading the way. We don’t know of any other single-family residential community that is like ours – that requires passive house building and is all electric and targeting carbon neutrality – at least in the Northeast. So we think we’re the vanguard. We also understand that 25 houses aren’t going to solve the climate problem, so we try to get out there and promote our way of doing business. It’s not exactly your standard business school strategy where you’re trying to create a moat and prevent other people from following you – the climate doesn’t have the time for that. So we’re out there in conferences, and we have open houses for the International Passive House open house days, and we’re always looking to share what we’re doing here and help others follow the same path. I think that climate change is the preeminent issue of our time. If we don’t fix this one, a lot of the other issues aren’t really going to matter.

This article was originally published by Yale Climate Centre. Republished here under under Creative Commons. Read the original version here.