In our days, energy issues belong to the most important problems facing the Earth and the solution may be expected partly from decreasing the amount of the energy used and partly from the increased utilisation of renewable energy resources. A substantial part of energy consumption is related to buildings and includes, inter alia, the use for cooling/heating, lighting and cooking purposes. In the view of the above, special attention has been paid to minimising the energy consumption of buildings since the late 1980s. Within the framework of that, the passive house was created, a building in which the thermal comfort can be achieved solely by postheating or postcooling of the fresh air mass without a need for recirculated air.The aim of the paper is to study the changes in the construction of passive houses over time. In addition, the differences between the geographical locations and the observable peculiarities with regard to the individual building types are also presented.

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The growing significance of renewable energy resources has been one of the most important processes in the field of energy management for the past two decades. This is due to phenomena related to environmental protection, security of supply, economic and rural development, as well as to the abundance of financial incentives (EU grants, constructive national off-take regime). As a consequence of this, the paper concentrates on the general and territorial characteristics of the EU financial instruments for Hungary in the 2007–2013 budgetary period with the objective to enhance the dissemination of renewable energy resources. As an outcome of our research, three very important conclusions were drawn. First of all, less developed regions were more active in submitting proposals though the more developed regions reached higher success rates. Secondly, it was noticed that the “identity” of the successful tenderers influenced the average volume of proposals to a considerable extent. Thirdly, in the case of the successful proposals, the development level and size (of settlements) of the territorial units (districts) had a direct impact on the identity of the applicants and on the average size of proposals.

Az Európai Unió belső és külső határainak hossza jelentős mértékben megnőtt. 2004-ben az Európai Unió eddigi történetének a legnagyobb területi bővülését a legnagyobb arányú és minőségileg legjelentősebb határváltozás kísérte: az EU belső és külső határainak arányai felcserélődtek. Az európai uniós csatlakozás következményeinek értékelésénél az a három határszakasz különül el a leginkább egymástól, amely Magyarország határait és határ menti régióit megosztja az EU csatlakozás után.

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