Building Energy Resilience

Energy efficiency is a tremendous opportunity that we are squandering at the federal level. While many states have adopted aggressive energy savings goals and have committed the necessary resources to advance both policy and practice toward meeting those goals, little federal action has been taken to advance building and transportation efficiency. The ACEEE’s 2014 International Energy Efficiency Score Card ranks the US near the bottom of industrialized economies in efficiency. The countries that are doing worse than we are include Russia, Brazil and Mexico.

I’ve been blogging on and off about the challenges I’ve been facing as I seek to build a high performance home. At this point we are looking at cutting back on energy performance, or giving up all together and buying a run-of-the-mill performance house.

I have the good fortune to work on leading commercial and industrial energy efficiency programs in three states in the Northeast. Two of these states undertake rigorous measurement and verification (M&V) to ensure they are delivering the savings they are claiming. In all three cases the states and their program administrators (PAs) are running programs that are pushing the boundaries of energy efficiency as they continue to advance savings in mature markets that have been served by energy efficiency programs for decades. My firm also works to implement energy efficiency projects for our select group of highly committed clients. We find energy efficiency opportunities in new construction projects that include leading international architectural and engineering firms, in retro-commissioning (RCx) projects and in energy efficiency upgrade projects.

Things have been moving slowly with my home replacement project so there hasn’t been much news. We are advancing towards spring construction (if Vermont’s winter ever ends), but are facing some unexpected challenges. The thing that we are finding most surprising about this process is that there is no roadmap. Originally we had thought that our architect and builder would guide us through the process, but they have been unable to provide much information regarding financing. Here are few of the things we are dealing with now:

I wish I had more time to work on my BIG IDEAS. I believe in supporting a strong local economy wherever possible and one place where I dream of a better model is a green energy investment fund (GEIF).

Are your lights on when you aren’t in your office? Do you have a problem with glare on screens or even direct line of sight glare? Bad lighting is a problem. Good lighting design is about more than energy efficiency, but should never be accomplished absent consideration of energy performance. In my last blog post I raised my concerns about the lack of progress in regulating lighting efficiency in Chapter 9 of ASHRAE 90.1. While the rest of the standard has made considerable strides in raising the bar driving more engineers and architects to learn and apply increasingly sophisticated solutions in their building designs, Chapter 9 effectively gives lighting designers a pass relative to efficiency. This translates to less efficient buildings overall as lighting efficiency “gains” in Chapter 9 are traded off against less efficient approaches to building envelope or HVAC design. In this post I want to talk solutions.

I’m finding that the lighting energy requirements of ASHRAE/IESNA Standard 90.1 are less efficient than standard practice in the field. Standard 90.1 is the “Energy Standard for Buildings Except Low Rise Residential Buildings” and is often used by design professionals as the de facto energy code. The 2013 edition of the Standard has just been released and amazingly, the allowed lighting power density (LPD)¹ has increased since 2004 for several common space types, such as private offices, and for multiple building types, including offices and parking garages. Yet, since 2004 the energy efficiency of lighting equipment has improved dramatically. Why is the code going the wrong way?

I’ve been working in the energy efficiency arena since I started designing buildings under California’s brand new energy code in the early 1980s. I’ve worked in most sectors of the industry from projects to programs, implementation to evaluation and policy. During my tenure financing has been a rising cry as a means to move the market. While I agree that financing is a critical tool in the belt of energy service providers, it is not a panacea and in fact, too much focus on financing as a solution without a clear understanding of the systemic barriers to energy efficiency may result in broken programs that don’t meet goals.

I have blogged before about the energy use of my home and the barriers to addressing it. I’ve begun the journey towards a home that largely reflects my core values of sustainability. After much consideration, site review by multiple builders, excavators and our architect, and standing water in the basement for over a month, we have decided to remove our existing home and build a new house with a goal of net zero energy use.