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.

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.

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.

Diverse teams are more efficient, more creative and make more money. Our field is dominated by cis-white-male-led companies, and our best intentions haven’t changed that yet. This session will guide participants to identify innate biases that inhibit our ability to diversify our teams. Following a presentation of data highlighting the benefits of a diverse workforce, we will hear from distinguished presenters about their interactions with diversity in the workforce and presenting tools and ideas for how we can do better.

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.