Building the future: passivhausMAINE's far-reaching impact
A group tours the McGoldrick Center on the University of Southern Maine campus in Portland. The Portland Commons Residence Hall shown in the distance is a Passive House–certified building. PHOTO: NAOMI BEAL
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”
—Margaret Mead
By June Donenfeld
Naomi Beal, founding member and director of passivhausMAINE, has been a leader in high-performance building advocacy and education in Maine for more than 15 years. PHOTO: SALTY LENS
SOMETIMES THE BEST WAY into a house is through the back door. In this case, the house would be Passive House, and Naomi Beal, executive director and founding member of the nonprofit passivhausMAINE, entered it in an unconventional way.
Passive House is widely considered the world’s most rigorous energy-efficient building design and construction standard, creating buildings that consume up to 90% less heating and cooling energy than conventional ones and 75% less overall energy. The science-based concept was developed in the 1990s in Germany, where it’s called Passivhaus, and is now used around the globe.
Beal saw the potential for this construction approach in Maine nearly two decades ago and has worked indefatigably since then to foster its growth. Longtime friend Jesse Thompson would know. Co-founder and principal of Kaplan Thompson Architects and BrightBuilt Home in Portland, and a national leader in green design, building science and affordable housing, he witnessed the organization’s birth and growth into the small-but-mighty powerhouse it is today.
“Naomi Beal is a force,” Thompson says. “She has been able to see a vision of a better world for all the decades I have known her and has worked tirelessly to bring that world into reality. And she has! Passive House has gone from a mysterious European building energy standard only a few people knew about into the definition of what is the highestquality building possible in Maine and beyond. And that is primarily due to Naomi in our state.”
Beal first stepped through the Passive House door in 2009 by way of a sabbatical year in Heidelberg, Germany with her family. At the time, she was a photographer specializing in portfolio work for architects in Maine and knew little about the then new-to-the-U.S. building standard. But everything changed when she got a crash course in the Passive House approach at the 13th International Passive House Conference in Frankfurt, which covered everything from urban planning to ventilation systems to historic building preservation. During her time in Germany, Beal also continued her work as an architectural photographer and happened to live in an area where an entire neighborhood of Passive House homes was in the works, deepening her interest in this building approach even more. These experiences planted the seeds for a major shift in Beal’s career—and the thriving organization she leads today, with impact far beyond Maine’s borders.
On her return to the United States, Beal was excited by the potential she saw for the Passive House approach in Maine. “I felt that Maine, with its really smart builders, architects and designers, had a wonderful opportunity,” she says, one that would help Mainers live more comfortably and at lower financial and environmental cost.
At the time, Beal was also deeply involved in plans for a new, net-zero carbon building at the Friends School of Portland. As chair of the board and building committee, she introduced the school to Passive House principles, and after much research into cost and energy usage, the project moved forward, giving Beal invaluable experience in Passive House as a client, too.
By this time, Beal was eager to take concrete steps to foster the growth of Passive House in Maine, feeling “ready to move and to help others do that, too.” So, she reached out to her connections to identify likeminded professionals who wanted to explore Passive House design principles together and “learn from each other as we went along.” In spring 2011, a handful of these Passive House pioneers gathered in a cozy coffee shop for the first time. The first iteration of what is now passivhausMAINE was born at that wooden table, midwifed by lively discussions and site visits to some of the first Passive Houses in Maine.
Chris Briley, principal of BRIBURN Architecture in Portland, was one of those early participants and a founding board member. Like others, he was struck by Beal’s unassuming demeanor and immense strength of will. “Naomi has a quiet but fierce determination to help foster a better understanding of building science,” he says. “Like many of us, she had seen the math, researched the concepts, and discovered that we all should be designing and building this way, if not for ourselves than for our next generation. With the looming climate crisis upon us, she saw where she could make an impact.”
Another founding board member, Michael Maines, principal of Maines Design in Palermo, also witnessed the fledging group develop. “Over time, those get-togethers grew into more formal meetings, where we not only discussed what we were doing, but how we could contribute to the larger world. Naomi gently steered these conversations … and to help achieve larger things than our informal conversations could produce, she pushed (gently, as always) to form a proper not-for-profit organization, the lever, I believe, that allowed passivhausMAINE to really start to do bigger things.”
In the beginning, it was a challenge to get a formal organization off the ground, but Beal never wavered. Engineer Sonia Barrantes, CEO of Ripcord Engineering in Portland, says, “When I and others got tired, distracted by children and work and life, and didn’t see how passivhausMAINE would ever grow beyond a small group of believers and practitioners, we drifted away. Naomi never lost the drive and dedication to make the vision real.”
Audrey Rolio, a discussion group member and now an architectural designer and project coordinator with BrightBuilt Home in Portland, recalls when she first met Beal in 2011 and then collaborated closely with her to organize the first Passive House Forum, a relatively small gathering held in a library basement. “It was a joy to work with Naomi,” Rolio says. “Her enthusiasm for high performance building and design was infectious, was in fact high performance in itself!”
Thanks to activities like these, passivhausMAINE started to make a name for itself in the world of high-performance building. Other organizations took note, and in 2014, passivhausMAINE was asked to co-host a North American Passive House Conference, which took place in Portland and drew attendees from all over the country, as well as China, the U.K. and Germany, including Wolfgang Feist and Witta Ebel, co-founders of the Passivhaus Institut in Darnstadt, Germany. PassivhausMAINE hosted its 12th Annual Forum in February, drawing participants from Maine and well beyond.
John Deans of 475 High Performance Building Supply, talking with passivehausMAINE board member Brad Richards of Juniper Build at the 2024 passivehausMAINE annual forum. PHOTO: SALTY LENS PHOTO
Attendees participate in a small group discussion at the passivehausMAINE annual Forum in 2024. PHOTO: SALTY LENS PHOTO
The organization’s outreach hasn’t stopped with the forums, and over the years Beal has worked closely with a small, dedicated staff to accomplish big things. One of their initiatives focuses on home energy retrofits, where there is much work to be done. A 2022 Cornell University research study estimated that a path to decarbonization in Maine would include retrofitting 50% of all buildings built before 2000 by 2040, which works out to roughly 125,000 buildings. Knowing that solid data was vital to scaling up retrofits, passivhausMAINE launched the retrofitMAINE initiative several years ago with a focus on data collection and dissemination. A collaborative, open-source project, it tracks, documents and analyzes high-performance Maine home energy retrofits based on Passive House principles, to help develop prototypes, strategies and best practices that can be used here and shared with regional and international partners with similar building environments. It also provides invaluable information on its website for both builders and homeowners planning to do a retrofit.
Today, retrofitMAINE has greatly expanded its activities to address the need for the widespread scaling of high-performance residential retrofits and skilled workers who can carry them out. Thanks to strong financial support from the U.S. Department of Energy, passivhausMAINE has created new programs to meet the moment. It has received funding from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Buildings Upgrade Prize (Buildings UP), a program established to build capacity for quickly and equitably retrofitting U.S. buildings. Thousands of teams applied, but passivhausMAINE was one of only 45 organizations selected; the prize also provides hundreds of hours of technical expertise to help develop the program. With this funding, retrofitMAINE will test pilot retrofitting processes, open a permanent location for events and retrofit training, and develop other training opportunities throughout the state. By 2028, passivhausMAINE reports, the retrofitMAINE initiative plans to upgrade 100 low-income homes in Freeport and Lewiston and help train local workers, with the goal of eventual expansion around Maine.
The Maine Governor’s Energy Office and Maine’s Harold Alfond Foundation have made substantial grants to passivhausMAINE to support their statewide training program, which brings building science-based skills and knowledge to people all over Maine. These day-long, expert-led sessions are offered at just $25 to enable as many people as possible to take part. Now at 26 sites (and counting), the program piloted in June 2022 with initial financial support from Hancock Lumber, and has since trained more than 500 building professionals and others in energy codes, retrofits and high-performance building components.
Svea Tullberg of Maine Blower Door Testing presents at a recent passivehausMAINE training. COURTESY PHOTO
Volunteers at a Window Dressers Build in Freeport, organized by passivhausMAINE. PHOTO: NAOMI BEAL
Other projects in the works? PassivhausMAINE has expanded its programs to include training for Maine municipalities in building codes, Maine building standards and Passive House design principles, as well as a K-12 classroom series that will teach design fundamentals, building science, and Passive House principles to Maine’s young people. PassivhausMAINE is also developing a free, statewide service of trained volunteer “home energy coaches” who will offer guidance to homeowners on energy efficiency and clean-energy upgrades.
Since Beal first laid the groundwork for passivhausMAINE, it has evolved into an organization that punches far above its weight. The ripple effect of her work has had a profound impact beyond the world of Passive House, too. Michael Maines, for instance, credits Beal with influencing his own contributions to the world of high-performance building. After his early involvement with the first iteration of passivhausMAINE, he went on to co-found BS*+Beer, a local building science discussion group, inspired in part by Beal’s original Passive House gatherings. And BS*+Beer ultimately evolved into a regular Zoom show that has spawned 40 other shows across the U.S. and Canada.
Maines also worked with high-performance builder Dan Kolbert and architects Emily Mottram and Chris Briley to develop a similar approach to building that seeks to balance high performance and homeowner affordability, the Pretty Good House, which they detail in their eponymous 2022 book. Despite initial marked differences, “Over time, both Pretty Good and Passive House approaches have evolved,” Maines says, “to the point that the authors consider Pretty Good to be in part an entree to Passive House, while the Passive House approach has become more flexible, so that many of the projects I design to meet Pretty Good standards are also very close to qualifying for Passive House.”
“The common thread between the three groups— passivhausMAINE, Pretty Good House and BS*+Beer—is a desire to share knowledge of building science,” Maines says, “and how to provide comfortable, resilient, durable, low-energy housing for people at all income levels.” Beal’s peers laud both her character and her impact. “She is what every executive director of any organization should be: caring, communicative, principled, forward-thinking and indefatigable,” Briley says. “It is safe to say that Naomi, and the work that she has fostered, is one of the major reasons that Maine is known as a national leader in sustainable design and building science.”
Beal’s peers laud both her character and her impact. “She is what every executive director of any organization should be: caring, communicative, principled, forward-thinking and indefatigable,” Briley says. “It is safe to say that Naomi, and the work that she has fostered, is one of the major reasons that Maine is known as a national leader in sustainable design and building science.”
This article appeared in the Spring 2025 edition of Green & Healthy Maine HOMES. Subscribe today!
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