Building Energy Resilience

As Eveline discussed in her last blog post on green banks, there are significant hurdles to gaining the trust and investment dollars of building owners to support energy efficiency investments. Because as efficiency providers we see these investments as certain, we expect owners to share our view and jump at the opportunity to invest in their property and get a great return. As Eveline mentioned, energy efficiency providers have a significant role in getting owners to adopt efficient practices. Here are five rules that can increase the success of energy efficiency programs and providers:

Energy efficiency programs and program evaluators are working in a market that is changing at an increasingly rapid rate. As governments and professional and green building organizations increase their focus on how buildings impact climate change and the need to drive the market to adopt efficiency at a higher level, they are fostering market change. Rate-payer funded efficiency programs often align well with these initiatives by providing incentives and technical assistance to support customers who have been motivated through these government and market-based initiatives. But the attribution of savings associated with these projects is complex. One example of this is the new energy benchmarking requirements that are rapidly gaining ground nationwide.

Today ratepayers in many states are making large investments in energy efficiency. I am a passionate advocate for the need to invest in cost effective improvements to our building infrastructure. However, I am concerned that many efficiency programs are taking short cuts to attain near-term goals that will undermine the market’s ability to generate deeper and more lasting efficiency improvements over time.

I was cleaning my desk today and came across a napkin on which I’d scrawled some notes about why Building Performance Monitoring and Metrics (BPMM) are important and what the end game in developing building efficiency projects should be.

I had the good fortune to return to my building engineering design roots in San Francisco to attend Greenbuild 2012. The conference is an amazing confluence of thought leaders, product suppliers and building design and construction professionals gathered around the theme of making the built environment more sustainable. What a cohesive and wonderful concept, right?

Last week's post introduced the concept of building for a future of extreme weather events, or why energy performance equals building resilience. I described two buildings – "The Base" typifies common design and construction practices and is slightly better than code* and – "The Ace" which is designed well beyond code in response to issues facing building owners as well as the larger community such as the need to control building operating costs through minimizing the need for energy inputs, the desire to limit greenhouse gas emissions and providing optimum comfort to building occupants.

Energy performance equals building resilience, or so we firmly believe here at Cx Associates. When we named this blog “Building Energy Resilience” Vermont had recently experienced the devastating effects of Tropical Storm Irene. Now, a year later, we continue to seek ways to ensure buildings can survive severe storms with the least possible disruption. According to Environment America, 4 out of 5 Americans live in areas that have been federally designated as having weather related natural disasters in the last six years! Since the vast majority of us continue to emit more carbon dioxide than can be absorbed by natural systems on the planet, we need to begin to look at the tools available that will allow us to survive the impacts of an increasingly dynamic and unpredictable climate.

Benchmarking is on my mind. I've been reviewing the project submissions for the Vermont’s Greenest Buildings Awards and am so impressed by what some teams are achieving in designing and operating energy efficient buildings that use far less than “typical” buildings. The only way we can know how good (or bad) our buildings are is to benchmark them. Benchmarking is a process where we calculate the annual energy intensity (kbtu/sf/yr) – adjusted to reflect weather variations from “normal” which is known as “normalizing” the data for weather. This number is like the building’s miles per gallon and can be used to find out whether the building is an energy sipping hybrid, a typical mid-sized sedan or a guzzling SUV.

The Vermont Green Building Network (VGBN), the Vermont Chapter of the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), recently decided to offer an award to recognize sustainable buildings in Vermont. As a VGBN Board Member, I reached out to peers during the award development process and heard a common theme – we need to recognize buildings that have proven energy performance. People stressed this approach because the owners who are hiring architects, engineers and other consultants often can’t tell which ones have the unique expertise and skills that will result in truly high performance buildings. Many owners perceive all professionals who submit proposals as qualified and they use price as the means for selection.

It’s hard to miss statistics about carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions these days. News stories about CO₂ emissions have grown in frequency as scientists increasingly sound the alarm that anthropogenic global warming is indeed happening at an accelerated rate, largely due to increased CO₂ emissions. For example, a New York Times article in March 2012, “For New Generation of Power Plants, a New Emission Rule From the E.P.A.,” describes new draft standards from the E.P.A. for coal power plant emissions. “The draft rule would limit carbon dioxide emissions from new power plants to 1,000 pounds per megawatt-hour,” writes the author. One thousand pounds of carbon dioxide. But what does that look like? Even for engineers, it’s difficult to visualize.