SPONSORED BY MASS CEC - Massachusetts will need an “all hands on deck” approach to achieve net zero emissions by 2050. For its 2+ million existing buildings, this will require significant efficiency improvements and full electrification.  However, the current rate of building transitions is a fraction of what is needed due in part to low consumer awareness, system design/integration challenges, and inherently complicated consumer decisions.

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.

This is a tale of two companies on a quest to account for the embodied carbon impacts of energy retrofits, and to incorporate these impacts into the project planning process. How do we decide when embodied emissions are worth longer-term emission reductions? What are the pros and cons of choosing lower embodied carbon materials compared to higher emission ones?

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.

Join the growing community of radically responsible industry stewards using Hempcrete, a bio-composite material created from the woody core of the hemp plant combined with a lime-based binder. Trusted around the world as a robust, high-performance sustainable building system, HempLime entered the US market a decade ago and is poised to take the industry by storm. Delve into design and construction details and review the specifics of costs, source material supply, and obtaining building approval from officials.

Back in 2016, our team started a multiyear experiment, sponsored by Building America, on unvented roofs without spray foam or exterior rigid insulation, using an instrumented test hut with multiple test bays. The experiment examined cellulose vs. fiberglass insulation, interior vapor control membranes, diffusion vents at the ridge, interior humidification, inward vapor drive issues, and the effect of air barrier imperfections. Some preliminary results were presented at BuildingEnergy Boston in early 2018. After three winters of experimentation, this is the rest of the story.

States across the region are setting ambitious heat pump targets to support their climate goals. But what will it look like to retrofit millions of homes with heat pumps as the primary heat source? This session explores efforts in Massachusetts to answer that question with applicable lessons for the entire region. In 2019, Mass Save launched a first-in-the-nation incentive for integrated controls that automatically transition between heat pumps and traditional heating systems.

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.

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.