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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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.

This small New Hampshire town was faced with a host of issues with its 35,000 sf school. Key areas included IAQ problems, lack of temperature control, obsolete HVAC equipment, and high energy bills. A small group of volunteers proposed a radical solution: take one classroom as a prototype, disconnect it from the central plant, super-insulate it, and install a cold climate heat pump and an ERV.

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.

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.

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.

The number one obstacle to Zero Energy (ZE) buildings is the perception of increased cost. This session will debunk this myth. Utilizing readily available products, practices and technologies, Zero Energy buildings are being constructed in increasing numbers across Massachusetts. And with the help of state and utility rebates for energy efficiency and renewable energy measures, these projects are being delivered at little or no additional first costs.