I think you are confusing the "passive" here. It refers to heat insulation and minimizing the need for generating either heat or coolness; the house is not "pas

I think you are confusing the "passive" here. It refers to heat insulation and minimizing the need for generating either heat or coolness; the house is not "passive" in the sense that it would just sit there. So the "passive" houses are not at all passive in terms of technology (to the contrary, they are quite dependent on technical solutions enforcing airflows and exchanging heat up or down, to the point of being vulnerable; the point is just that this is not done through windows because humans intuitively don't do it so well or optimize for the whole building). Some years ago, there was an electricity outage in the area where my office was. The basement floor had our server room with plenty of blade and rackmount servers, and some 30 kW of UPS capacity - which had been unused for years because electricity outages are extremely rare here. UPS is all very well to keep servers running, but this happened in the summer and the server room cooling system was not behind the UPS like the servers were. Thus, we suddenly have a 30 kW unbalanced heat load to the basement floor... Result was some frantic running up and down. None of the windows could be opened. We could open garage doors in the basement floor, open all the doors to stairways and halls, and run the the top floor which has the usual sauna compartment with doors to a balcony - opening all these, we could create a chimney effect to get airflow through the premises and prevent our servers from melting on the spot while we were shutting them down gracefully in priority order.