What lessons can you learn from completed new construction passive and net zero affordable projects? How can we bring costs down with further experience and tools? Learn from a design build firm experienced in passive and net zero affordable projects.  Hear best practices, what works, and what hasn’t been working. Hear about typical bottlenecks in delivery of affordable high performance housing and how open-source tools can bring down cost, design and analysis barriers.  Learn what incremental costs have been seen on eight Passive House multifamily affordable projects in Massachusetts.

Throughout our experience in the K12 Practice Area, we have seen and measured how daylight can positively affect students’ performance and general wellbeing, but how can we keep good daylight levels under the pressure of a tight schedule and the aggressive performance goals of a Net Zero Energy project?

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.

Even the most successful Retro-Commissioning projects encounter some level of conflict. Fostering a culture of collaboration, trust, and engagement with the building’s operating staff can help overcome these challenges and prove to be valuable to the entire project team. Using project examples, this session provides guidance on how to engage the operations team, drive innovative training, and elevate workforce development for a successful, sustainable Retro-Cx program.

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.

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.

We will present the IAQ monitoring program at the Finch Cambridge passive house development, first year results, and lessons learned at Finch and in attempting an IAQ monitoring program at another site.  IAQ monitoring in all common spaces and some apartments includes CO2 and radon, and in all apartments and common spaces total VOCs, temperature and humidity.  We will share the first 18 months of IAQ data for Finch and findings relative to temperature, CO2, humidity, and total VOCs.

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.

A large number of effective multifamily energy programs have supported retrofits at thousands of properties in the last decade. The next generation of multifamily programs, however, must catalyze the decarbonization of almost all existing buildings over the next 2-3 decades. With the increasing urgency of the climate crisis, and new Building Performance Standard policies creating strong local imperatives, how will energy programs go both deeper and broader than those of the past?