The Design for Freedom Initiative is raising awareness about the pervasiveness of forced and child labor in the construction supply chain. The materials that go into our buildings are heavily reliant on slave labor.  We’ll explore the risks and highlight ways you can shape your practice to address this pressing humanitarian issue as part of your social equity goals.  Learn about the tools and resources available to use in advocacy, internal operations, client conversations, and pilot projects.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Windows and glazing play a disproportionate role in a building's performance compared to other parts of the assembly.  As we strive to meet our 2030 and 2050 climate goals the design strategies for both our new and existing buildings must be closely evaluated.

By law, the NHPUC is required to develop a program using a portion of the Renewable Energy Fund (REF) to directly benefit LMI residential customers. The Low-Income Community Solar Act of 2019 provides an additional 2.5 cents per kwh for the development of LMI community solar projects. To date, a handful of these projects have been built in NH, including Mascoma Meadows Cooperative in Lebanon and Keene Housing Authority in Keene. The Organization for Refugee and Immigrant Success is currently under development.

Residential Energy Efficiency programs are poised to see a shift in scope from weatherization to decarbonization that will include deeper retrofits and strategies to eliminate fossil fuels in and outside the home.  This panel will discuss the skills and expertise needed in the workforce to decarbonize our residential building stock and contemplate how we will train and fill for these positions, looking at diversity, barriers, and feeder programs.