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.

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.

This session will provide concrete tools and answers on how to draw down carbon in our buildings starting today. We’ll focus on low-rise buildings, where most new construction and renovations happen and which are currently under-represented in embodied-carbon design and analysis. We will present critical construction details such as band joist insulation selections and sloped ceiling retrofits, as well as whole-building design strategies.

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.