SPONSORED BY BR+A CONSULTING ENGINEERS: Communities, campuses and cities are striving to build a carbon neutral future.  Zero Net Energy buildings will play a key role in achieving this goal. Many people are familiar with small ZNE buildings, but we need to rapidly scale up to Medium, Large, and XL. Join us as we demonstrate examples of this ZNE scale-shift, including detailed examples from 4,000 to 400,000 square feet.

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This session will discuss the process of transforming an old masonry building in Newton MA into a PHIUS-certified net-zero office space and educational center for high-performance design and construction. The construction process will be discussed and Passive House features of the building will be described as will challenges and lessons learned from the process.

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.

The purpose of this session is three-fold: To educate attendees about what embodied carbon is and how it's different from operational carbon. To discuss why reducing it is significant for global warming mitigation. And third, to describe the programs and policies local governments are considering to spur embodied carbon reduction. You will hear from experts about best practices to measure and reduce embodied carbon in common construction materials. You will learn how municipalities like Seattle and others are using these resources to implement internal and city-wide initiatives.

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.

As architects, designers, builders, and community advocates, we value the adaptive reuse of buildings, but lack data to verify our design choices. We often operate on intuition to choose what to reuse and what to upgrade, attempting to balance life cycle impacts of new construction materials while lowering operational energy use. Over the last decade, Boston firms Bruner/Cott and Goody Clancy have evolved their practices in high-performance and transformative reuse to think more deeply about the embodied and operational impacts of reuse projects.

Today’s climate crisis requires us to bring innovation to every part of the construction process, including our use of existing building stock. Where older buildings can be retrofitted rather than replaced, we can reinvest embodied energy and drastically reduce first costs in building energy and carbon.

We're over ten years into the LED revolution, but mythology still motivates decision-making. Energy professionals need to know that "let's just go LED” leads to sub-optimal results. LED efficiency varies greatly, even within EnergyStar or DesignLights Consortium listings. As we’ll discuss, variance is at least 40% and up to 80%. Amazing federal programs that helped modulate the LED industry and track it are suddenly gone, so how do we judge? Smarter controls (and/or technicians) offer huge potential for commercial/industrial, but are still a challenge in residential.

In today's climate crisis, it's imperative to change the way we design and build in order to reduce or eliminate carbon emissions. However, some of these changes to building design can introduce unanticipated side effects. We can minimize these side effects on future projects by learning from each other - we all have insights that we've gleaned from our own projects. This presentation is a collection of lessons learned on the path to better performing buildings. Let’s share! Topics include wood vs.