Each 90-minute track session receives 1.5 continuing education units from the following professional organizations: AIA, BPI, GBCI, InterNACHI, NAHB, and NARI. To receive your credits, you must sign in at the beginning of each session
Co-Chairs: Kristen Simmons, Kristen Simmons Architects; Laura Notman, Architect
Airtightness Performance of Whole Buildings: Design, Construction & Verifications Testing
Session 1: Wednesday, March 6, 11:00am-12:30pm
Session Chair: Caitríona Cooke, Conservation Services Group
Session Speakers: Wagdy Anis and Wei Lam, Wiss, Janney, Elstner, Associates, Inc.
Description: IECC 2012 and ASHRAE 2010, now require air barriers in building enclosures for the first time. This means that LEED will now require them in certified buildings. The US Army Corps of Engineers, the Navy and Air Force, as well as the GSA all have new requirements for airtightness performance of whole buildings. There are several ways of achieving compliance in design, construction and verification testing. Testing procedures will be briefly reviewed as well as the newly developed test protocol. The ASHRAE 1478 Research Project results, measuring the air-tightness of commercial buildings built after the year 2000, will be reviewed. These conclusions regarding modes of commercial building air leakage will be shared with the audience.
Large Zero Net Energy Projects: Successful Design & Delivery Approaches
Session 2: Wednesday, March 6, 2:00pm-3:30pm
Session Chair: Jacob Knowles, Bard, Rao + Athanas, Consulting Engineers, LLC
Session Speakers: Ellen Watts, Architerra
Description: Most Zero Net Energy projects completed to date have been houses. As the scale of ZNE projects increases, greater design challenges promise exciting new concepts for advanced high performance buildings. What makes large ZNE buildings fly? This session presents successful strategies for overcoming design and delivery challenges, including architectural integration, energy load reduction, systems selection, life cycle costing, regulatory permitting, and integrated project delivery. Participants will review conceptual ideas, energy modeling, and BIM documentation for Architerra led projects in Massachusetts, New York and New Hampshire, gaining an understanding of critical choices and key decisions.
The Portfolio Challenge – How to Scale DERs Across Multiple Buildings
Session 3: Wednesday, March 6, 4:00pm-5:30pm
Session Chair: Kristen Simmons , Kristen Simmons Architects
Session Speakers: Coreina Chan and Kendra Tupper, Rocky Mountain Institute
Description: In this panel presentation, Rocky Mountain Institute shares the results of its 2012 Portfolio Energy Retrofit Challenge. The Challenge is a coordinated effort with partners New Buildings Institute and True Market Solution to work with six office and retail portfolios and determine a portfolio-wide strategy for implementing deep energy savings. An interactive Q&A session (min. 30 minutes) will follow the panel presentation
Context: Many building portfolio owners are saving energy in their buildings by replacing individual technologies and components with more efficient products. This one-for-one replacement leaves savings on the table. Owners could achieve deeper savings, but it is daunting figure out how to do that across a portfolio. Established management practices don’t support the added consideration of energy and building owners often think of energy management as a complication. Owners don’t know what’s possible in their buildings. How low can their energy use go? What reduction goals are reasonable? What’s the best way to phase improvements across buildings? How should owners prioritize?
In this session, participants will learn how the Challenge’s portfolio approach:
• Determines what to do in a portfolio of buildings at lower cost than a building-by-building approach.
• Streamlines whole-systems energy analysis and measure selection.
• Ascertains what’s technically possible before deciding what’s implementable, and before making major capital commitments in the portfolio.
• Determines when to implement deep retrofits in a portfolio by piggybacking off of other planned building expenditures.
Bringing Net-Zero Energy from Design to Operations
Session 4: Thursday, March 7, 8:30am-10:00am
Session Chair: Laura Notman, Architect
Session Speakers: David Del Rossi; Jackie Henke, TD Bank
Description: In this session we’ll share the story of TD Bank’s first net zero energy store located in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Since it opened in May of 2011 we’ve monitored its actual performance compared to modeled performance to ensure we’re tracking at net zero energy. What makes this presentation unique is that we’ll share the lessons learned that we encountered as we looked at the monthly consumption of this store location comparing modeled versus actual performance and the modifications we made to systems from interior and exterior lighting, HVAC systems and plug load impacts. We’ll share the small items that made a large difference, but are not picked up in typical commissioning efforts, and the differences we found between our modeling assumptions and actual conditions to help shine a light on these items so the audience members leave with real take away data to bring back to their projects. Finally, we’ll include some context as to how this LEED platinum store design fits within TD Bank’s formal Enterprise Green Buildings Program which is a framework of how we approach the life-cycle of TD Bank retail and corporate projects across North America.
Case Study: The North Shore Community College Health Professions and Student Services Building: Campus Zero Net Energy
Session 5: Thursday, March 7, 10:30am-12:00pm
Session Chair: Carolyn Sarno, NEEP
Session Speakers: Peter Fourtounis, LEED AP, Elkis Manfredi Architects; Eric Friedman, DOER
Description: Case study presentation on the design and operation of the Commonwealth’s first state funded ZNEB. A 58,700 SF academic building which houses the North Shore Community College’s Allied Health Professionals Programs, it includes laboratory spaces, classrooms, offices and assembly spaces.The Health Professions building, at the time of the opening dedication in the fall of 2011, was the second largest building project in the country designed to achieve a Zero Net Energy goal. In this workshop, we will begin by discussing the policy decisions of the Commonwealth to raise the standard on high performance building design and the impact on public projects. For pre-occupancy, a critical look at the design strategies used to conserve, reduce, and generate on-site energy will reveal major challenges the Team faced during the design process. This exploration questions the effectiveness of the strategies and tools for predicting energy consumption vs. production.
Are we there yet? Although the design and construction is complete, the journey to post occupancy measurement and verification continues. For this leg of the journey, we will review how the building systems are performing and the lessons learned for future large-scale Zero Net Energy projects. In the end, all memorable journeys have moral imperatives. Join us if you are interested in learning more about this collaborative and integrated design effort.
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
Description: This presentation will cover three completed Passive House commercial Projects:
1. The Center for Energy Efficient Design: the first Passive House Public School, completed in November 2010, including 2 years monitored data.
2. The Malcolm Rosenberg Center for Jewish Life at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia: a mixed use assembly building with a complex usage pattern and significantly different zoning requirements. The final solution uses the elegant minimalism of German principles while maintaining the US comfort requirements.
3. Two 40,000 SF dormitories at Emory and Henry College in Emory, Virginia : Elm Hall, a standard construction building completed in 2010 and converted to Passive House, and Hickory Hall, now under construction on the same quad as Elm Hall.
Closing Forum: What will be the hot topics at BE25?
Session 7: Thursday March 7, 4:00pm-5:30pm
Session Chair: Paul Eldrenkamp
Session Speakers: TBA
Description: The final session of the day will wrap up everything we learned at BE13 by forcing us to think out loud about where all our new-gained knowledge is taking us. The format: Six NESEA thought leaders will work within the pecha kucha framework to offer their predictions regarding what we’ll be grappling with in the sessions and workshops at Building Energy in March, 2025. This will followed by a period of quick-paced audience discussion. The 90 minutes will then wrap with a compelling preview of NESEA, 12 years hence. This closing session will offer an engaged response to the too-rarely asked question: “Just where are we going with all of this?“
