Diversity in a natural ecosystem – plants, animals, insects, microbes – is essential for long-term systemic health. Nature’s principle of “strength through diversity” can apply to us professionally – our business practices, our colleagues and the talents they bring, and the designs we create in our work, from planning neighborhood resiliency against seawater surges all the way through to details like thermostat controls in a multifamily retrofit project.

Refrigerants used in building systems have historically been a significant source of greenhouse gas emissions. While eliminating chlorofluorocarbons (CFC’s) and moving towards refrigerants such as R-410a were steps in the right direction, there is still more work to be done. As we evaluate the full global warming potential (GWP) of a building’s life cycle, it is important to consider how different types of refrigerants can contribute to greenhouse gas emissions.

Central ventilation systems in multifamily buildings are a critical health and safety system, with significant energy and carbon ramifications.

This session will provide an overview of two groundbreaking clean energy initiatives coming out of NYSERDA: the Carbon Neutral Buildings Roadmap and the Building Electrification Roadmap. These paired documents lay out the vision, recommendations and program planning that will allow New York to (1) rapidly accelerate heat pump adoption for HVAC and hot water solutions through 2030, and (2) overcome the various technical, economic, and behavioral challenges to full decarbonization of the state’s building stock by 2050.

How do we get lenders to fund high-performance construction and developers to drive adoption? With data. While the Passive House design movement has been active in the US and Canada since 1973, it has only recently gained considerable attention in the multifamily affordable housing sector.

Let’s make the multifamily affordable housing synonymous with healthy building construction. Many of us already seek out healthy materials for our projects, and all of us can with the right information. This session will build skills and confidence in healthy material selection, improve our ability to talk about the potential health benefits of high performance construction, and distinguish the myth from the realities of healthy material cost, performance and availability.

The New York Energy Manager (NYEM) gives customers unprecedented insight into their building usage by using real-time data to improve building energy performance, reduce environmental impact, and lower energy bills. NYEM drives insights to improve building energy performance, sustainability, and savings in over 15,000 buildings with 25,000 meters and sensors all over New York State through equipment-level metering, advanced analytics software, and expert advisory services.