Five years ago, the capital city of Montpelier, Vermont, set a bold and audacious goal: for the city’s municipal buildings and operations to be Net Zero by 2030. What can a small city (under 7,000 people) with a volunteer energy committee do at the municipal scale? Come learn from Montpelier’s progress, challenges, and future plans.

What will the push to “electrify everything” mean for the future of our cities and communities? This panel explores developing trends in the electrification of transportation and buildings with a focus on the public realm and the non-residential built environment. As commercial buildings and campuses electrify heating loads, provide vehicle charging, and integrate renewables and storage, facility managers face new challenges maintaining resiliency, efficiency, and balancing loads.

We need to win! We are faced with the mortal challenge of saving ourselves and our planet in a short handful of years. To address such a complex problem as human-driven climate change, we need complex thinking that integrates people and the planet. Climate justice is a framework that foregrounds the intersectionality of our movements for an ecological response like green building, with our movements towards more just social relationships and institutions.

Jurisdictions throughout the NESEA region and beyond are actively pursuing the decarbonization of new and existing buildings. Through legislation, executive action, and performance goals in the building code, the Northeast is leading the building industry toward zero carbon and zero energy buildings. In this session, particular focus will be on building a retrofit economy through technology deployment, zero energy policy development, energy benchmarking, performance reporting, and carbon reduction mandates.

Solar, energy efficiency, Passive House – these are the tools of the clean energy transition. But who are these tools for and who can afford them? Owners, developers, and residents of affordable housing in the Greater Boston region are asking these questions, identifying the barriers to accessing clean energy and the strategies for overcoming those barriers. Meanwhile, communities across the region are exploring ways to support this clean energy transition. How do we build partnerships across sectors to expand access and accelerate an equitable energy transition?

Strategic investment in renewable energy has the potential to address two of the greatest challenges of our time: climate change and growing inequality. It’s possible to source, finance, develop and maintain solar projects in the built environment that provide meaningful environmental and economic benefits in communities that have borne undue burden from pollution and high energy costs, while delivering strong and stable financial returns to solar developers and investors.

Triple-decker homes, built in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to house immigrant workers, are an important New England housing resource. However, their energy performance is typically poor: they are often leaky, under-insulated, and heated with outdated fossil fuel systems. In this session, three organizations will describe scalable, replicable models to upgrade these iconic buildings. ABCD, which retrofits triple-deckers that house low-income individuals, will present on cost and energy savings achieved and challenges encountered.

Boston’s pledge to become carbon neutral by 2050 will require deep energy reductions in 86,000 buildings. Among the challenges of reaching this goal are the feasibility of retrofitting at scale at a realistic cost, financing this work, maintaining affordable operating costs, and crafting incentives and requirements to make all this happen. This panel of experts in design, construction, operations, finance and regulation will discuss both the technical and policy sides of these issues, provide updates on current policy, and share lessons and real data on actual projects.

Urgent climate goals require state programs such as Mass Save to better target comprehensive decarbonization – applying efficiency, electrification, demand response, and solar+storage – in an equitable manner that addresses differences in local building characteristics. Meanwhile cities and towns, including low income/urban, suburban, and rural communities, are making commitments to local climate neutrality and social equity for their citizens.