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.

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.

Building Energy Performance Standards are being introduced throughout the Northeast, including Boston’s BERDO 2.0. Commercial Property Assessed Clean Energy (C-PACE), already adopted by several states, can act as a ‘carrot’ for property owners to make the necessary capital improvements to meet these requirements. With C-PACE, property owners can access low-cost, long-term, fixed-rate financing for measures that impact the energy and water performance of their commercial or multi-family properties.

Bowdoin College is currently constructing a pair of connected campus buildings, both with mass timber structures. Located in the Pine Tree State, the project is ironically using timber sourced overseas.

While more residential customers have turned to heat pumps as an efficient alternative to electric resistance heating, to shift away from delivered fuels, or to add cooling to their home, the modest gains in heat pump penetration have largely been limited to single family homes. This session presents the findings of a barrier study for heat pump adoption in multifamily properties, which have not experienced similar growth in heat pump adoption.

While Massachusetts  and many communities have made commitments to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050, Boston and Cambridge specifically are on the leading edge of implementing requirements around existing building emission reductions. Emissions tracking has started to move building owners toward benchmarking their carbon impact and developing long-term plans for compliance, with an eye toward minimizing costs.

Transform your practice by taking responsibility for the carbon footprint of your work. This session reviews existing tools and frameworks, from planning scale to site and garden design, integrating metrics from both architecture and landscape design, including Sasaki's new Carbon Conscience: Embodied Carbon Planning Tool incorporating both architecture and landscape at the site planning level. Panelists will share their findings from translating primary research into accessible tools and best practices, with examples from planning, architecture and landscape projects.

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.

Sustainability in lighting is usually linked to energy use only, but it is time to face the real challenges of quantifying the impact of design decisions made throughout the product life cycle. While we may not have complete information on life cycle impacts, we cannot afford to wait until comprehensive information is available to inform our specification decisions. This presentation will provide a framework for weighing operational energy use, embodied carbon, and material impacts.

While project teams typically establish quantifiable performance targets for their projects, there is no magic bullet for defining the right energy consumption goal for each project. This panel of high-performance experts and architects will discuss strategies for quantitative goal setting: when, who, and how aggressive.