What would it take for us in the green building movement to get the owners and builders who are still building to code minimums to join us? This interactive discussion will focus on incentives, the true overall cost add to make a building more climate conscious, and avenues that can help reach those who are not “in”. Our panel will include a developer who is undoubtedly “in” as well as a mechanical designer who often works with those who are not. We often preach to the choir; this panel will challenge you to think about how we get the rest of the market.

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?

Most of our existing buildings are already constructed with fossil fuels as the heat source. In this session, BEC will demonstrate the successes of retrofitting high performance electrification, through real projects in various phases from design to completion. Following that, we will focus on multifamily design considerations for all-electric hot water systems, including central air to water heat pump options, central VRF hot water plants, and distributed heat pump water heaters.

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.

Affordable housing is key to bringing equity to disadvantaged communities. In Boston, the Department of Neighborhood Development (DND) design guidelines are pushing affordable housing with strict requirements that are equal to Passive House performance standards.

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.

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.

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?

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.