The European Green Deal defined by the European Commission on December 2019 presents an ambitious set of measures for the European Union and its citizens to accomplish the challenge of climate change, making Europe until 2050 the first neutral continent, where there are no net emissions of greenhouse gases. The Passive House (PH) concept has the same ambitious goal, targeting the reduction of the carbon footprint while promoting a construction design that gives primacy to the optimum energy balance, assuring comfort and quality with a minimum impact on the final building cost and operation. However, the PH concept is still not an easy process to implement in the traditional construction sector, especially in South European territory, as is the case of Portugal. Contextually, the present study through the discussion of a case study research method applied to European PH successful experience, has defined guidelines for the implementation of this concept within sustainable development principles. The methodology strategy starts with the information collection from Hanover, Brussels, and Tyrol case studies. Then, a statement regarding the current situation of Portugal in respect of the PH numbers and policies was performed. Moreover, the information gathered, as well as the experience of learnt lessons, were compared to the Portuguese reality. As a final procedure, barriers and obstacles for the Portuguese case have been identified through the analysis and understanding of the country’s social dynamics, and also with the crossing of sustainable development principles. Thus, the present research enables us to propose guidelines to increase the PH implementation in Portugal.

This paper discusses the thermal and energy performance of a detached lightweight building. The building was monitored with hygrothermal sensors to collect data for building energy model calibration. The calibration was performed using a dynamic simulation through EnergyPlus^® (EP) (Version 8.5, United States Department of Energy (DOE), Washington, DC, USA) with a hybrid evolutionary algorithm to minimise the root mean square error of the differences between the predicted and real recorded data. The results attained reveal a good agreement between predicted and real data with a goodness of fit below the limits imposed by the guidelines. Then, the evolutionary algorithm was used to meet the compliance criteria defined by the Passive House standard for different regions in Portugal’s mainland using different approaches in the overheating evaluation. The multi-objective optimisation was developed to study the interaction between annual heating demand and overheating rate objectives to assess their trade-offs, tracing the Pareto front solution for different climate regions throughout the whole of Portugal. However, the overheating issue is present, and numerous best solutions from multi-objective optimisation were determined, hindering the selection of a single best option. Hence, the life cycle cost of the Pareto solutions was determined, using the life cycle cost as the final criterion to single out the optimal solution or a combination of parameters.