Adapting Passive House to Toronto’s Existing Housing Stock Through Deep Energy Retrofits

This study researches the development of a multi-objective optimization environment to continue the investigation of the potential for housing in Toronto to meet Passive House certification. BEopt was utilized to develop various deep energy retrofits for century detached, century-semi, and wartime archetype homes in Toronto, ON. The optimization environment utilized various design retrofits to develop configurations of variables which minimize energy use and life cycle cost. The developed solutions were input into WUFI Passive to determine which combination of variables can achieve Passive House certification for the lowest cost. The optimization results demonstrated that for a life cycle cost of $65,053-$92,950 depending on geometry and housing type, an archetype home in Toronto can reduce energy use by 69-72% percent and can meet standards for Passive House. Although these numbers include average pricing data, assumptions, and generalizations, the findings of this research demonstrate the applicability of high performance building standards to be retrofit to existing homes to allow sustainability in the built environment to be achieved.