The electric grid is changing rapidly - with more intermittent, renewable energy resources contributing to the power generation supply, more dispatchable baseload retiring, and more extreme weather events causing outages. Providing uninterruptible power supply is becoming increasingly more challenging. As building designers and operators, we have the opportunity to be part of the solution by optimizing the demand side of the equation. Passive building is a design methodology that utilizes passive principles to reduce loads on a peak and annual basis.

The City of Boston is on the cutting edge of emissions performance standards for existing buildings. Staff from the City’s Environment Department will present on Boston’s new Building Emissions Reduction Ordinance (BERDO 2.0). The purpose of this session will be to engage building and energy professionals on pathways that help owners comply with the new standard. The speakers will present on the requirements of the ordinance, compliance mechanisms, the ongoing regulations development process, and resources to assist owners in complying.

In recent years both Boston and New York City have officially declared racism to be a public health crisis. In this moderated panel discussion, you'll hear from a group of diverse speakers that represent various aspects of the building industry. Through the lens of building science, consulting, outdoor spaces, healthy materials, policy, and medical backgrounds, we will explore and unpack how race, geography, and economics intersect in the area of healthy housing.

As buildings become part of the climate change solution, more building professionals and their customers want to know how they can reduce carbon emissions in home retrofits. The presenters conducted a research study to answer this question by assessing the net carbon impact of insulation and air sealing upgrades when accounting for both embodied carbon emissions of materials and operational carbon reductions associated with weatherization upgrades.

Ventilation-system design and occupant behavior both significantly impact indoor air quality and consequently the health of occupants in affordable multi-family housing, that is increasingly being sited adjacent to highways and busy roadways in cities.

Buildings and deforestation together produce 50% of global carbon emissions. This session will address how climate-smart forestry and sustainable agriculture can store carbon in ecological landscapes and generate wood and plant-based building materials that reduce embodied carbon in buildings. Key topics include a proposed strategy to double carbon sequestration by global forests, and an assessment of the validity of biogenic carbon claims with an expanded Life Cycle Analysis.

Most of our existing buildings are already constructed with fossil fuels as the heat source. In this session, BEC will demonstrate the successes of retrofitting high performance electrification, through real projects in various phases from design to completion. Following that, we will focus on multifamily design considerations for all-electric hot water systems, including central air to water heat pump options, central VRF hot water plants, and distributed heat pump water heaters.

The Lloyd Center for the Environment is an environmental education building on a coastal nature preserve. This building is pursuing the most stringent environmental certification – LBC – and it is being constructed by students from Greater New Bedford Vocational Technical High School.

We learn much of what we know about how buildings really perform from doing measurements and monitoring. This session presents five case studies in which targeted data monitoring led to understanding and resolutions of apparently vexing issues.

How can the residents of “Energy Town, USA” meet their carbon emissions reduction goal in a way that lifts up their entire community? Working interactively and collaboratively in small breakout groups, participants in this workshop will develop innovative solutions to this challenge.

As facilitators, NEEP staff will guide each group with best practices and deep knowledge from their own work in various communities across the Northeast. Context points from real towns will be shared regarding building stock, homebuyer markets, economic parameters, and more.