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Passive House and BuildingEnergy 13

January 30, 2013 By 2 Comments

Passive House and Building Energy 13

One person has single-handedly transformed the conversation about high-performance building in the US, and it only took her a couple of years to do it. Katrin Klingenberg of PHIUS deserves enormous credit for the speed and passion with which the Passive House standard has gained traction in the US.

I first heard Katrin speak in the spring of 2008 and was so taken by her Passive House message that a few weeks later I found myself in Urbana IL participating in the very first North American-based Passive House Consultants training. There were maybe 25 of us in that class. It was hard. I was hanging on by my fingernails. But it seemed important—really important.

I wasn’t alone in thinking so. The Passive House message spread rapidly beyond that first training session, to the point where Passive House content has been central to the past several Building Energy conferences, as well as to similar conferences around the country.

Just what is it about the Passive House standard that enabled it to gain traction in the green building movement in the US so quickly?

I think there are three interrelated reasons: First, fertile ground for the message; second, the message itself; and third, the audience for that message.

Fertile ground. Two things were happening in 2008 that made Katrin’s timing particularly fortuitous:
One was a growing awareness that the green building movement in general had done a much better job of fostering awareness of the need for change than of fostering change itself.
The second was the mounting realization that twenty years of apparent economic boom had in fact been a bubble, largely inflated by a steady supply of cheap, disposable housing. As a nation, we had spent endless sums on real estate and had precious little of lasting value to show for that investment. Something seemed profoundly wrong with the way we were thinking about our housing stock—at every level.

The message. Katrin’s message was itself simple, quantifiable, and useful.
Simple, in that there were just three criteria, and they were pass-fail: either you met the criteria, or you didn’t. Passive House distills a whole range of objectives and priorities into those three criteria, and for those of us who are better with black-and-white than with nuance, this was really intriguing.
Quantifiable, in that the criteria were expressed as just three numbers: 15, 120, and 0.6. This is as objective as it comes: No backsliding or wiggle room or “yes, buts” or credit for bike racks in this world.
Useful, in that you could be pretty sure that if your building met those three criteria, there was a good chance it was going to be part of the long-term solution to the energy and environmental issues we face rather than the ongoing part of the problem that so much new construction seemed to be.

The audience. I think that those who heard Katrin’s message had two kinds of response:
One response was a kind of relief, if that’s not an odd way to put it. The same sort of relief that you feel when the doctor finally is able to diagnose the ailment you’ve been suffering from: Once you’re able to give it a name, you start to know what the treatment should be. Many builders and architects sensed that “green building” was less and less a meaningful or useful term, but didn’t have a clear idea of what to do about, or where to go next. Passive House provided a possible answer, and it was a particularly compelling one for the reasons noted above.
The second response is what I call “green macho.” The sorts of builders and architects who go to Building Energy conferences love the hard stuff. I’ve never seen a group of small business owners get so gleeful about how hard they can make things for themselves. Since Passive House seemed much harder than what we had been doing before, it went without saying that it also had to be much better than what we had been doing before. Only among the NESEA crowd is “It’s really hard” a winning marketing strategy.

As a result of the message and its receptive audience, there are now conversations taking place in the NESEA community on a scale that could not have occurred without Katrin’s introducing us to Passive House—conversations about topics like energy intensity, primary energy versus site energy, thermal bridging, solar heat gain coefficient, extreme air tightness. Yes, these are all topics in which several NESEA practitioners are national experts, but pre-Passive House these were terms and ideas that had not penetrated our language nearly to the extent that they have since. Some things just sound more convincing when said with a German accent, I guess. (This, of course, would be the place to plug Eberhard Pauls’ talk on heat recovery ventilation, which will be presented with a distinct German accent at 2PM on Thursday of BE13, with Andy Shapiro moderating.)

Our annual Building Energy conference is, of course, just around the corner, and BE has always been as much—if not more—about asking good questions as about getting good answers. Although Passive House has provided us with some really interesting answers, it’s time to consider the even more interesting questions that it poses.

Some are already getting a good airing:
You can use a massive and intricate Excel spreadsheet programmed by a team of German engineers (also known as PHPP) to design a low-mass passive solar home in 2013, and it will be almost as prone to overheating as the one your ancestors designed on the back of envelope, way back when Microsoft was still based in Albuquerque. How to deal with that?
Marc Rosenbaum has written convincingly about his concerns that holding a building in northern Vermont to the same annual heating demand as a building in San Francisco, for instance, inevitably leads to a poor allocation of resources. How to correct for this, without losing any of the rigor of a standard like Passive House?
Marc has also made the case that what we really need is a per-person energy budget, not a per-square-foot budget. It’s always easier to reach a lower level of energy intensity with a larger home than with a smaller home (if you don’t know why, be sure to attend Bruce Harley’s session on “Energy Calculations for Everyone” at 8:30 AM on Thursday of BE13). Should we adjust the standard to discourage larger homes, as LEED-H has done? On the other hand, do we really want to encourage the construction of more small, detached single-family homes, with their greater energy intensity?

Others questions are proving to be non-issues:
When I took the Passive House consultants training class in 2008 the big anxieties were hitting 0.6 ACH@50, getting good windows, and finding decent HVAC equipment. Within a year of that class’s graduation, it was clear that 0.6 was a non-issue—early adopters of the standard were blowing past that (no pun intended); that the marketplace soon enough was going to take care of getting us good windows; and, finally, that the Japanese were more than happy to provide some really very good equipment that could easily handle the H and the AC in HVAC, if not the V (which the central Europeans, in turn, seemed to have a good handle on). As with learning any new language, some early stumbling in Passive House has given way to near-fluency.

Finally, though, there are some questions that are only starting to be asked:
Passive House does not, by itself, come even close to representing the radical transformation that the design and construction world needs to experience in order to do its part towards addressing the energy and environmental challenges coming our way. It is quite easy to construct a new building to the Passive House standard that, in the end, makes us all a little worse off rather than any better off—because it’s too big, because it’s too far away from low-carbon transportation, because it further develops a region where water resources are close to the breaking point, because the purpose served by the new building is superfluous, because a retrofitted or restored existing structure could have served the purpose just as capably if maybe with slightly higher up-front costs. Is there a risk that Passive House will prove to be the next effort that, like LEED, makes a lot of well-meaning people feel really good about doing things that, in the end, don’t adequately change our current trajectory—that it ends up as a noble distraction?

Taken by itself, Passive House is an idea that most assuredly and effectively slows the pace at which we are heading towards the cliff—but by itself, it does not put us into reverse, headed away from the cliff.

To do that, we need more than Excel spreadsheets, truckloads of insulation, and blower doors with D rings. To do that, we need imagination, determination, and humility borne of experience—three things you will find in abundance at Building Energy 13.

Here’s the Passive House content featured at Building Energy 13…

Workshops:

Building Passive House Homes – Details, Process, Lessons Learned
Workshop Speakers: Declan Keefe, Placetailor; Chris Corson;, EcoCor Design Build Matthew O’Malia, G O Logic, LLC: Alan Gibson, G O Logic, LLC

An Introduction to PHPP (Passive House Planning Package) Software
Workshop Speaker: David White, Right Environments

WUFI Passive Workshop: Next-Gen Modeling Tool for Passive House and Building Professionals in North America
Workshop Speaker: Katrin Klingenberg, Passive House Institute US

Commercial Passive House Design Principles
Workshop Speaker: Adam Cohen, Structures Design/Build

Getting Real About Primary Energy – What it Means for Passive House Standards in North America
Workshop Speaker: Katrin Klingenberg, Passive House Institute of US

Sessions:

Passive House Standard: Suitability for the Mainstream Market
Session 6: Thursday March 7, 2:00pm-3:30pm
Session Speakers: Alan Gibson and Matt O’Malia, GO Logic

Three Completed Commercial Passive House Projects: Center for Energy Efficient Design, Malcolm Rosenberg Center for Jewish Life and Hickory Hall
Session 6: Thursday, March 7, 2:00pm-3:30pm
Session Speaker: Adam Cohen, Structures Design/Build, LLC

Heat Recovery Devices: Evaluation Criteria for Equipment Efficiency and Heating in a Passive House
Session 6: Thursday, March 7, 2:00pm-3:30pm
Session Speakers: Eberhard Paul

Floor show demos:

Stage 2, 4:30 Wednesday: Katrin Klingenberg on “Cool Passive House Gadgets”

Filed Under: BuildingEnergy Conference & Trade Show, Green Building, Industry, member post, NESEA, Sustainable Building

Addressing Water Woes at BuildingEnergy 13

December 6, 2012 By Leave a Comment

In 1987—exactly twenty-five years ago—I took a two-day building science workshop led by Joe Lstiburek. I remember being so riveted by the information he was presenting that I was afraid to go to the men’s room because I thought I’d miss something. I spent two days jiggling on the edge of my seat, literally and figuratively.

The revelation of those two days with Joe was that “quality construction” needed to be defined in four dimensions. It was not just about level, plumb, and square—it was about level, plumb, and square over time. It didn’t matter if it all looked and felt great right after I had completed the work; it only mattered if it continued to look and feel great year after year after year. It sounds obvious now, but I’d only been a carpenter for about 6 years at the time, and to me the long view extended about as far as the next afternoon.

The early NESEA conferences understood that time component of quality, even back then. It’s no wonder that Joe’s talks were always the big draw at those conferences; it’s also no wonder that we called those annual gatherings “Quality Building Conferences.”

Fast-forward 25 years. Our definition of quality has been getting more and more demanding when it comes to energy performance. This is a good thing. And we’re pretty sure that these Zero Net, Passive House, and Deep Energy Retrofit projects will prove to be quality projects over time. Pretty sure—but not completely confident. There’s a big, big difference.

What single factor gives us the most pause when it comes to feeling rock-solid certain that our high-performance projects will stand the test of time?

Water, of course. If any of your projects has experienced a rot or mold problem, an air quality issue, a failed finish, a sticking door, a cracked caulk joint, a stained ceiling, or a summertime comfort complaint, the root cause was inevitably a failure to manage moisture properly. Almost all our warranty callbacks, in fact, result from not adequately anticipating how water will interact with our buildings. Water is essential to life, but it’s the single biggest enemy of quality construction. What an interesting dilemma to be faced with as designers and builders.

But there’s hope for us all: BE13 is blessed to have the dream team of Lew Harriman and Bill Rose offering what is likely to be your best and most entertaining route to enlightenment on this fraught topic of water in buildings.

In fact, Bill wrote the book (literally) on water in buildings, titled, succinctly enough, “Water in Buildings.” Lew, for his part, was lead author for the “ASHRAE Humidity Control Design Guide.” Here’s the session description, from the conference website:

“The cost of moisture-related problems in buildings has exceeded billions of dollars in the last ten years. According to credible research, dampness-related health effects has cost the public tens of millions of dollars in financial terms, not to mention the emotional cost of financial pressures and building disruption. On the other hand, was any of this necessary? What do we really know about the effects of moisture in buildings? How can we be sure they are as bad as we think? …And if they really cause such expensive and disruptive problems, shouldn’t we prevent them through building codes? What code requirements would prevent the observed problems? This presentation will explore the issues and suggest ways to proceed with respect to managing humidity and moisture in buildings.”

My bet is that’s a description that many of you will find dauntingly dry (pun intended). Lurking behind that description, though, is possibly the most important and valuable 90 minutes you’ll spend in 2013.

See you there.

Filed Under: BuildingEnergy Conference & Trade Show, Green Building, Industry, NESEA

BE13 Keynote Speaker

October 25, 2012 By 1 Comment

The keynote speaker for BuildingEnergy13 will be Alex Blumberg of NPR’s Planet Money and PRI’s This American Life. He will be speaking on “economics for environmentalists”.

As anyone knows who listens to his pieces on All Things Considered, Morning Edition, the Planet Money podcast , or any of the economics episodes that This American Life has broadcast (“The Giant Pool of Money” in particular), Alex presents and explains complex economics ideas with real wit and clarity.

I’m really excited about this. In my opinion, economics is a weak point within the NESEA community.

Some questions that I have mulled for some time that might make their way into Alex’s talk include these:

Carbon tax versus cap & trade. “Cap & trade” garnered much attention a couple years ago but has completely disappeared from the debate this election year. I realize in the current political climate, hoping for either cap & trade or a carbon tax is a delusional pipe dream. But the political climate might change as the global climate does, and the NESEA community should be prepared to advocate for good policy, which means we need to understand this issue closely.

The discount rate question. This boils down to trying to calculate how much it’s worth spending now to benefit ourselves—or our descendants—in the future. This question applies to a broad range of scales, from individual projects and buildings all the way to regional and national policy. Here’s a quick example of what “discount rate” is about, not to explain the concept but to communicate the consequences: Nicholas Stern (lead author of “The Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change”) has advocated for a discount rate of 1.4%. Using this rate means that it’s worth investing $247 billion today to head off $1 trillion in damage 100 years from now. On the other hand, William Nordhaus, the Yale economist, has argued for a discount rate of 6%. Using this rate means that it’s only worth investing $2.5 billion today to head off $1 trillion in damage 100 years from now. Big difference, no? The discount rate question is huge, and we need to try to get a handle on it.

“The tragedy of the commons.” Garret Hardin introduced this concept to a wide audience in 1968, and it’s more relevant now than ever. The basic idea is that individuals, acting completely sensibly and in their own self-interest, can do serious damage to the common good and ultimately can sabotage their own well being through a series of otherwise completely rational acts. Nobel Prize-winning economist Elinor Ostrom has done some really interesting work on how to evaluate and manage the problem, work that’s more than germane to NESEA practitioners, and it would be interesting to get an accessible explanation of her theories.

Accounting for energy replacement costs. The Carbon Age has allowed people to benefit from cheap energy. That cheap energy will not last forever. Should the inevitable depletion and ultimate disappearance of fossil fuels have any impact on the price we pay for that energy now? Or can we just maintain the status quo and continue to ignore the issue?

The Jevons paradox. Mid-19th-century economist William Stanley Jevons observed that as England got more efficient at burning coal, England burned more coal rather than less. Odd, no? If we get more productivity from a unit of coal, shouldn’t we need to use less coal? Apparently, it doesn’t work that way. This is a potentially inconvenient idea for an organization of practitioners who advocate ever and ever more efficient use of energy, and we would benefit from understanding the concept and its applications and misapplications.

Can a growth economy be reconciled with lowered resource usage? Despite the hopeful thinking of many NESEA practitioners, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that we face a choice between either achieving dramatic reductions in carbon output or maintaining historic levels of economic growth—we can’t have both. Or can’t we? I personally have a hard time imagining how we can move to more expensive, less portable and storable energy sources such as solar and wind and still maintain the same levels of economic growth we’ve enjoyed the last couple of centuries. But that may be a result of my own limitations.

On this, and my other questions, perhaps Alex Blumberg can shed some light and show me the error of my ways. I invite you to come to the keynote address next March 6th and find out.

Filed Under: BuildingEnergy Conference & Trade Show, NESEA Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

From the Conference Chair: Informing the content of BuildingEnergy13

May 16, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Recently Fred Unger shared links to a couple of TED talks with NESEA’s BuildingEnergy13 Planning Committee. Here they are:

Peter Diamandis – Abundance Is Our Future
Paul Gilding – The Earth is Full

While the debate these two talks represents is a critical and fascinating one, I kept wondering “How do we really bring it home to the NESEA community at BE13 to make sure the questions Gilding and Diamandis are asking inform the way we think about our day-to-day work?”

We are certainly more than capable of being the clever and creative community that Peter Diamandis describes. It’s also true, on the other hand, that the Big Problems that Paul Gilding describes seem very real to a lot of us in the NESEA community. But the bottom line is that even the NESEA practitioners who are most pessimistic about resource depletion seem pretty eager to get up and get to work in the morning to solve problems for their clients, as far as I can tell. Maybe that’s because active engagement is a great antidote for despair—I certainly didn’t see any evidence of despair at BE12 this past March, only of active engagement.

Here’s what I think is the best way to have the Gilding-Diamandis debate at BE13: Make sure our content is accurate and reality-based; avoid confirmation bias in our selection of topics and speakers; focus on the areas where theory meets practice so that our theory stays grounded in marketplace realities and our practice is informed by a larger context that keeps it in the category of “solution” rather than “problem”. —Paul

Filed Under: Events, NESEA, Sustainable Building Tagged With: , , , ,

Report from our traveling quartet from Saxony and Upper Austria

February 28, 2011 By 2 Comments

Tom Hartman, Chris Benedict, Andy Shapiro, and I are in the midst of a 2-week tour of high performance buildings in Saxony and Upper Austria. We’ll be presenting our findings during three sessions at Building Energy. Here’s a very quick taste of some of the things we’ve seen.

Andy, Chris, and Tom talking with architect Gunter Lassy at the offices of Lassy Architects in Linz, Austria. Gunter represents the 4th generation in his family to work at the 18-person firm. Gunter’s not sold on Passive House, having tried it. But, based on weather trends over the last 10 summers or so in Linz, he’s getting really worried about the region’s ability to handle increased cooling loads.

Sunset view of part of Solar Village, a 5-year-old development on the outskirts of Linz; Lassy Architects designed some of the apartment blocks in this development. Built to Passive House standards (as defined by the Austrians, anyway — there’s an interesting conversation in and of itself), actual performance data shows a very broad range of energy usage, with some units consuming as much as five times the energy as other, similar units. Bottom line: If you leave the windows open all winter in a high-performance building, it becomes a low-performance building. Who’d have thought?

A view of a delightful Kindergarten in the tiny Austrian village of Schneegattern. One of the first schools in Austria inspired by Passive House strategies, it uses wood pellets for heating. Our host Herbert Nagl told me, “We believe in investing heavily in our children here.”

Here Chris, Tom, and Andy admire the underground wood pellet storage in the school’s backyard. To get a view of just what they’re looking at in there, you’ll have to come to our March 9th sessions.

Herbert also showed us the community music school. Here’s where the village’s two volunteer wind ensembles practice (the town has two bands, five fire brigades, and 4800 citizens). This is a photo of a music stand — note the beer glass holder. Herbert said the typical practice regimen for the bands consists of 2 hours of rehearsing and 6 hours of drinking beer, with considerable overlap between the two activities, apparently. Nonetheless, the local bands fare very well in regional competitions.

Filed Under: Green Building, Solar, Sustainable Building, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Conquerors of the Biosphere

March 23, 2009 By 5 Comments

I think the green building movement has generated so much enthusiasm because of its comforting message that we’ll be able to change just a few relatively small things, avoid any real sacrifices, and everything will be just fine. In this way, “green building” gives us a framework for doing trivial stuff and thinking it’s a big deal. This, to me, is a dangerously misleading message, even if promulgated by some very fine, well-intentioned people.

If we want to stand any reasonable chance of meeting the energy and environmental challenges that are coming our way, we don’t need a few feel-good changes, but a radical transformation of how we think about buildings.

As I touched on in my previous post, the first step towards creating profound change is to acknowledge to ourselves what a building really is. Only then will we be able to figure out how to transform the way we “cultivate” buildings to the degree that we need to (the agricultural simile is intentional, and I’ll come back to it).

So, to set the stage, here is what I hope is an honest description of a building:

In general, we humans find that what our biosphere has to offer on a day-to-day basis is not all that comfortable. So when we build a building, our goal is to capture some of the biosphere and create a volume in which we can impose much more comfortable conditions than what nature provides. In these isolated volumes, we can enforce a very narrow range of temperature and humidity and severely limit access to all but an extremely small range of plants and animals. Often, we create something of a “moat” (in the form of lawns or paving) around these buildings as a first line of defense against intrusion into the volume by other species.

Additionally, not only do we do our best to keep almost everything that nature has to provide out of these volumes, we typically prevent these volumes from giving anything back in any useful way. For instance, we generally suppress the refueling mechanism of biodegradation, certainly within the volume itself but also in its close vicinity (compost bins being the only common exception I can think of, off hand—the relative triviality of which sort of makes my point for me).

To maintain a volume in such splendid isolation from the natural world—so aggressively out of balance with the surrounding biosphere—requires significant energy flows and correspondingly complex systems. These complex systems tend to be inefficient, so the energy flows need to be very large—much larger than we have even tried to produce on site, at least in the past century or so. All that additional energy has to come from somewhere else (first law of thermodynamics) and a lot of energy is wasted in the transfer from source to end use (second law of thermodynamics).

This, I believe, is an honest assessment of what a building is—that is to say, about as inefficient and unnatural an act as our species does on any similar scale. This may sound like an anti-building sentiment, and it can certainly be taken that way, but I don’t necessarily intend it as such.

Many “green building” practitioners these days don’t really like to think of a building the way I have described above—it makes too many things too inconvenient. Any description of a building that even hints that it might be better to have fewer rather than more of them can feel pretty threatening—especially these days, when a lot of stuff feels threatening in our industry.

Even in light of the above, I think there is a way to transform how we think about buildings in a radical enough fashion that it just might get us where we need to go—without threatening jobs in the design and construction industry (not to mention all the jobs in other industries that depend on a vibrant design and construction industry). It has to do with the idea of cultivation that I mentioned at the beginning. As Copeland Casati anticipated in her response to my first post, I think we need to start treating our building stock (both existing and new) as analogous to a natural resource—and start viewing those of us in the building industry as stewards of a vast, invaluable treasure. In sum, we builders, remodelers, architects, and engineers need to be less and less like “conquerors of the biosphere” and more and more like gardeners, farmers, and arborists.

We can start to figure out just what this really means in my next post.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Green building is dead—its time has passed

March 14, 2009 By 20 Comments

Green building is dead. Its time has passed. We lie to ourselves when we think we can build any number of new buildings in a green, environmentally sustainable way. We need to acknowledge that every building is an unnatural act. We want a building to be warm when it’s cold outside, cool when it’s warm outside, dry when it’s wet outside, and light when it’s dark outside. Although rot and decay is the essential refueling mechanism in nature, in a building, rot and decay is the surest sign that something has gone seriously wrong. Looked at this way, every building is an environmental mugging.

Don’t get me wrong. I live in a building, I work in a building, and my whole livelihood depends on there being buildings. I’m generally in favor of buildings. I just don’t think we should delude ourselves into thinking that they can possibly be “green” in any meaningful way. The best we can do is to make the mugging that each building represents as gentle as possible. The USGBC should re-name itself the US Gentle Mugging Council, in my opinion.

Why do such semantics matter? They matter because if you understand that each building is an act of environmental violence (gentle or not), then you look at our building needs very differently. “Green building” becomes the belief that our buildings should be as few, as small, and as efficient as possible. This in turn means that any new construction becomes an absolute last resort. The 4000-square-foot seasonal vacation home becomes an impossibility. An addition becomes necessary only if absolutely everything else has failed. The first choice always will be making the best use of what we already have—and making what we already have as efficient and adaptable as possible becomes the most important endeavor we can undertake.

Deep energy reductions to existing structures pose serious challenges—both technical and economic. As one who tries to sell and implement such retrofits at market rates, I am more keenly aware than anyone of both the short- and the long-term challenges. In future posts I will outlines these challenges, as well as possible ways to confont them successfully.

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