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.

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.

We will present new analyses showing how commercial facilities in Massachusetts (and beyond) can maximize energy savings and resiliency by installing solar + electric storage systems. We will review and explain how to take advantage of a suite of incentives and revenue streams including the SMART solar incentive with storage adder, the new energy efficiency performance incentive, the federal investment tax credit (ITC), demand charge management, and net metering.

Transforming existing buildings is especially challenging with public-owned affordable housing buildings that rely on public funding and grants and must continue to house residents during major renovations. This session will share the successes of the Cambridge Housing Authority (CHA), which in 2014 vowed to reduce energy intensity by 20% in a decade.  CHA met that goal in only four years, and continues to improve their portfolio. Speakers will discuss incentives, strategies, priorities and certifications integrated into the design and planning process.

What have we learned about the experience of living in a deep energy renovated home? Come hear 3 pioneers in the deep energy renovation space talk about what it was like to create and now live in a zero net energy (ZNE) renovated home. We've got data, we've got lessons learned, and we'll illuminate the human experience of living in a home that creates more energy than it uses on a net annual basis. The existing housing stock is where the vast majority of residential energy and carbon savings potential exists.

Come hear the results of the “Grid of the Future” pilot program, which offered Maine homeowners a discount on smart appliances (heat pumps, water heaters, smart EV chargers, and batteries) in exchange for allowing aggregated remote control of those devices as a “Virtual Peaker” power plant. The virtual power plant was controlled to demonstrate the potential value of aggregated, controllable distributed energy resources including reducing the need for fossil-fuel peaker plants, reducing transmission costs, and enabling deeper penetration of renewable energy on the regional grid.

As electrification grows as a tool to reach greenhouse-gas reduction goals, so do the risks of using electricity at times when it is most dirty and costly. To ensure that the benefits of long-term electrificaton of residential buildings are balanced with the short-term impacts on the grid, Massachusetts has begun testing consumer value propositions through tools like the 2017 Peak Demand Management Grant Program, Mass Save Connected Solutions, and the Clean Peak Standard.

District Energy has proven to be a resilient energy source able to lower carbon emissions in major cities and worthy of expansion. In this session, you’ll learn about strategies to govern district energy systems in the Boston region; how district steam, hot water, and chilled water solutions are rolling out on a national scale; how a major city uses waste water to meet thermal energy needs; and how geothermal heating and cooling can be expanded to supply district heating in a suburban application.

Energiesprong and practitioners selected by RetrofitNY are developing standardized and scalable methods to achieve whole-building near-zero energy retrofits while maintaining multifamily tenants in place. Energiesprong, based in Europe, has successfully transformed 4,500 affordable units and RetrofitNY is currently in proof-of-concept phase.  The session will provide an introduction to standardized retrofits for multifamily housing, an overview of the best practices in Europe, and the practical implementation in the US market.