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Is BuildingEnergy the best for your career? I Think So.

February 5, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Four weeks from today kicks off NESEA’s Building Energy (BE) Conference in Boston, March 5-7 at the Boston Seaport World Trade Center.

For almost 40 years, NESEA has been teaching practitioners the best things in the field of sustainable building practices for residential, multifamily, institutional, and commercial  buildings, taught by people that do the work.

Every year, the NESEA building Energy Conference teaches me a barrel of new stuff from the field, taught by people who are committed to excellence.

Having been in this business for the last 30+ years, I can’t stress how important it is to be able to network with people in the field that help me “improve my game”.  The place where I do that every year is at NESEA’s Building Energy Conference in Boston, this year March 5-7.

Browse the program, and/or a powerpoint that walks you through every part of the conference.

Last call, early bird registration ends today for cheaper rates!

Be one of those dozens of people that came up to me at BE last year and said “This is great, thanks for letting me know about it!”

Filed Under: BuildingEnergy Conference & Trade Show, member post, NESEA Members

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

We’re All Frontline Public Health Workers Now

January 28, 2013 By Leave a Comment

About a month ago, a new job title was thrust upon me. It happened at a training session with Ellen Tohn. Ellen, who is a nationally recognized expert in healthy housing, informed the room that, like it or not, all of us who work in high performance residential building are also front line public health workers.

This is not simply a clever way of restating the obvious—namely, that pollutants and other health risks abound in our buildings. For when we take seriously our responsibility to provide a healthy home environment for our clients, we are challenged to reexamine many aspects of our practice, from questions we ask at initial sales meetings to post-project monitoring. At least this has been my experience.

A few years ago, I was tasked with developing healthy home guidelines for Byggmeister. We had growing concerns about the health risks associated with indoor air pollution. And while we had a good handle on how to ventilate homes properly, we were realizing that ventilation alone could not ensure good indoor air quality, and that we needed to pay at
least as much attention to source control.

The very first person I contacted for information and advice in developing our guidelines was Ellen. What is the impact of weatherization on radon levels? How does dampness affect the risk of being diagnosed with asthma? How much do kids benefit when we replace windows that have lead paint? Ellen not only helped answer these questions, she also gave very practical advice about when and how to test for indoor pollutants and how to respond when we find them. In short, she has been instrumental in helping Byggmeister align practices with the most up-to-date research and guidance on source
control.

She could help you too, if you attend her and Jonathan Wilson’s session at BE13. Ellen and Jonathan, who are both healthy housing superstars, will be speaking on “Health Opportunities and Pitfalls of Energy Upgrades—What Doesn’t Smell Can Still Hurt Us.” They will be presenting new EPA guidance for protecting occupant health during energy
upgrades as well as data on changes in occupant health after weatherization.

According to the session description “it’s a must know subject for programs and companies seeking to minimize liability issues and improve client health.” As someone who has instituted major practice changes based on the expertise that Ellen and Jonathan will share at this session, I couldn’t agree more.

Filed Under: BuildingEnergy Conference & Trade Show, Industry, Sustainable Building

Energy Matters at BuildingEnergy 13

January 18, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Well, it’s really hard to believe that we are less than 50 days away from the BuildingEnergy 2013 conference. While a whole lot of activity has already taken place, a lot more is in the works to make the rubber meet the road.

As a long time renewable energy advocate and practitioner, I have seen a good many changes in this conference, and in NESEA as an organization. Once upon a time, the BuildingEnergy conference was known as “Renew”, and until the spring of 2012, NESEA’s magazine was called the Northeast Sun (now called the BuildingEnergy Magazine). Despite these changes, assuming there’s no room for energy folks like you and I would be a mistake – NESEA has its roots as a solar energy organization, and in this community, energy absolutely matters (after all, it is 50% of the conference title).

Those original conferences were heavy on solar domestic hot water (SDHW) and some early passive solar homes that came into prominence as the government support for SDHW disappeared in the early 1980′s. Then, photovoltaics were mostly the realm of the few real pioneers like our own Steven Strong who made the cover story of the September
1981 Popular Science. We learned from him and many others and then, as now, the NESEA conferences were the place to go to learn all the latest and greatest before it went mainstream.

So what’s in store for energy folks at BuildingEnergy? Plenty. Track six, on Renewable Energy, promises to uphold that tradition of providing cutting edge information. But even before that track gets underway, the associated workshops on
Tuesday also explore such topics as Building Passive House Homes,  WUFI Passive Modeling  and Commercial Passive House Design Principles.

Skills for Building Resilient Communities, in which I am a speaker, dovetails with the overall theme of “resiliency” will have a heavy dose of how renewable energy sources can provide value by maintaining livability under the most extreme conditions. I am particularly pleased to team with noted solar architect Don Watson, sustainability metrics guru Maureen Hart and Alex Wilson, former NESEA Executive Director and founder of Environmental Building News. We will offer participants the information and resources needed to understand resiliency to aid them to broaden their professional practices.

The Renewables Track, itself, is under the able guidance of Bill Stillinger who began in the field as a utility R&D manager and went on to become General Manager of a PV installers coop, PV Squared. The sessions he has brought forward will feature an array of interests some of which also reflect the resilience theme and include Maintaining a Secure and Resilient Grid and Stand-Alone vs. Grid-Connected PV Systems, which build on a 1997 conference that looked at some of these same issues from an insurance industry perspective.

The former session will examine the need for a more robust electric grid due to the many natural and man-made threats and stresses on the current system. It will look in detail at microgrids from the perspectives of developers, utilities and owners who’s stars do not always align but may have enough common goals to provide a workable business model that is profitable to all.

Many prospective PV owners, and even building professionals, are not fully aware that the vast majority of the PV systems in place at this time will not provide power for their owners during an electric grid outage. The Stand-Alone vs. Grid-Connected PV Systems session will provide information on the differences in the types of systems that can provide power and those that can’t under those conditions and some real life experiences of owners. The session will also explore the current state of battery technology and future advances in electric storage that will make operation possible under all conditions.

Other sessions in this track will explore the state of renewable energy markets in the region and beyond, the latest developments coming up in wind and solar energy and renewable energy credits markets and net metering. Understanding these will become increasingly important to architects, builders, developers and others wishing to produce zero net energy buildings.

In all, Track 6 is going to be a great part of an excellent conference. Sign up early and often.

Filed Under: BuildingEnergy Conference & Trade Show, energy policy, Industry, member post, Renewable Energy, Solar, Transition Initiatives

Guru of HRV’s coming to BE-13

December 14, 2012 By Leave a Comment

In January of 2011, I had the great privilege to travel to Upper Austria and Saxony, with an intrepid crew of NESEA stalwarts, Tom Hartman, Chris Benedict and Paul Eldrenkamp (Paul wrote about it here), to look at and report back on the state of the art high performance buildings in a region with some of the world’s most advanced buildings and government programs for support of same.  The limits to growth have been obvious for at least centuries in that part of the world and I attribute at least some of the social consensus to actually do something about it to that environment.  And some to clarity about really needing to work together in this world, as opposed to the American Cowboy mentality we work so hard to grow out of.

One of the highlights of that trip was meeting Eberhard Paul, of the Paul Company where some of the most efficient and advanced residential heat/energy recovery ventilators in the world are made.  Paul’s cores are used in at least some of the Zehnder products which the Passivhaus US folks have helped popularize in North America.  (Thanks, PHers!)

Eberhard toured us around his factory, sat us down in their conference room to answer any questions we had, and at the end put on a small feast for us, to which he had invited architects and others with whom we might have interests in common.  This level of hospitality was the rule, not the exception on the trip, and we heathens have lots to learn about how this level of effort creates community and engenders a feeling that the visitor is well respected.  (Anyone care to join me to take Eberhard out to dinner when he comes to BE13?)

The factory was amazing – an immaculate, well organized place, from machines forming thin plastic plates of the heat exchanger core, with patented patterns that achieve counter-flow performance, to assembly stations, some automated, to a showroom with an amazing array of HRV’s that we can dream of, from large units coupled with sophisticated controls, to tiny but efficient units that fit in the soffit above kitchen cabinets!

The talk we had in his conference room was a geek’s dream!  I asked about why their effectiveness numbers were higher than ours for similar equipment, and Eberhard proceeded to give us a lesson on HRV/ERV effectiveness testing, and how the boundary conditions you select influence the outcome.  For example, the heat in the home adds heat to air flows in the HRV, and this effect either adds or subtracts from effectiveness, depending on if you are testing the outgoing air stream or the incoming.

Eberhard will help us understand the ins and outs of HRV/ERV efficiency and more at his talk at BE13.  It is sure to be interesting!  I look forward to seeing him again.

Andy Shapiro, Energy Balance, Inc.

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

High Performance Multifamily Buildings: The Future of New York City

November 16, 2012 By Leave a Comment

An open invitation from Andy Padian, NESEA Board Treasurer and GreenHomeNYC Board Chair

This is an open invitation to join a unique and timely one day event for owners, managers, investors and developers on Saturday, December 1, at Hunter College in Manhattan.

The Northeast Sustainable Energy Association (NESEA) and its NYC Chapter, GreenHomeNYC, have assembled a slate of local experts and owners to help those involved with multifamily buildings in New York City get a leg up the new requirements and learn the best, most profitable path forward for their buildings.

Andy Padian, a board member of both NESEA and GreenHomeNYC and chair of the conference said, “Understanding the new benchmarking and energy auditing requirements in NYC is a first step to reducing your energy and water bills. After you navigate that, you need to hear from some of the best practitioners in the field about running your building efficiently, safely, and considering our recent brush with Hurricane Sandy, emphasizing resilience.”

Filling a very critical information gap, this one day conference combines the best technical information with first-hand experience on exactly how to save money in multifamily buildings through reduced energy and water usage. “We’ve got the people you really need to hear from — the owners who have gone through the process already, of course,” Padian explains.

NYC has enacted one of the boldest initiatives for sustainability in large buildings in the country. Known as the Greener Greater Buildings Plan, it focuses on buildings over 50,000 square feet. In New York City, many more multifamily buildings than office buildings fall into this category, so the new laws become particularly important to these multifamily owners. But this is the first conference to attempt to get owners and managers in the room together to learn exactly how to proceed. “I have invited the building experts who helped develop the framework for the new laws, LL87 and 84, to explain and demystify the process. One goal of this conference,” says Padian, “is that no one will leave with questions unanswered.”

The more typical multifamily building in the city, with 20 to 50 apartments and smaller, has its own complicated path to follow. Owners and building managers need to hear from each other about financing and real costs, and they need to share tricks they have learned that have helped them save money after finally getting an energy audit. “You have to get the owners and managers together to show the mistakes to avoid and to share the best practices to use. The value of this can’t be overstated,” says Padian.

Many organizations are collaborating with NESEA and GreenHomeNYC to get their members to this unique event. These include the CUNY Institute for Sustainable Cities, The Community Preservation Corporation, Enterprise Community Partners, The Supportive Housing Network of NY, the NYS Association for Affordable Housing, Local Initiatives Support Corporation, Con Edison, and NYSERDA.

The conference will be held at Hunter College on 68th Street and Lexington Avenue, from 9-4.  Continental breakfast and a bag lunch are included. A reception following the event provides the opportunity to meet and network with the speakers and the other attendees.  The conference fee is $150 and a reduced rate is available for CUNY students.

For more information and to register, go to http://www.nesea.org/buildingenergy/benyc/

Filed Under: BuildingEnergy NYC, Communications, Green Building, Industry, Multifamily buildings, NESEA Tagged With: , ,

Member Content for the NESEA Blog

November 12, 2012 By Leave a Comment

We’re going to be doing a little experimenting with our blog…

Member-written blog posts, an open invitation

You may have noticed in some of our communications that members have a somewhat open invitation to be contributors to the blog. We haven’t been very loud in extending this invitation, in part because we have not yet figured out all the rules. What we do know is that we want our blog to be as member-driven as any of our other programs.

We have thought about treating the blog in a similar way to how we treat the magazine – the same caliber of articles, but delivered in a more interactive and informal way. What we lack right now is an editorial committee, and we as staff did not feel as though it would be an adequate expression of the membership if we tried to play that role. But we’d like something to happen here in the interim, beyond the NESEA HQ updates and news (which will continue indefinitely, but we don’t want our logistical/programmatic/promotional content to dominate, by any means). If you look back to the earliest posts on the blog (I think they started around 2009) – the posts were coming from NESEA members, so this isn’t a new idea, but we do have more staff support (me) now to help coordinate it.

So, we decided we would keep the open invitation. Already, some of you have said yes to the invitation, so we already have a few posts in the pipeline, waiting patiently for us to work out some logistics. Other upcoming posts will be articles we couldn’t run in BuildingEnergy magazine (we had a TON of excellent proposals for the spring issue, for example, so we thought why not bring them to the unlimited virtual space on our blog).

Get in there and write (with some guidelines)

If you are a current member of NESEA, you can ask us for posting rights and post as you like (after you review our guidelines for posting, including the logistics and what we’re looking for in terms of content).

A quick summary of the content guidelines: The subject matter should be related to our mission of promoting the adoption of sustainable energy practices in the built environment.

Because we are also an organization that values whole systems thinking, the posts might approach the subject through nuts and bolts building techniques, policy, research and development, economics, design philosophy, or even marketing.

For example, the first post will be coming from a new NESEA member, Doug Hanvey. His focus is not in the typical vein of NESEA conversation – he’ll be discussing how to optimize your website. We thought the blog would be a great place to share his advice, since we have heard from some of you in the past that you were interested in getting marketing advice. And, he offers his services specifically to renewable energy companies – so while much of his advice is broadly applicable – his experience is with businesses that are much like the businesses in the bulk of the NESEA membership.

We realize that there are already a number of really excellent energy and buildings blogs out there – many of you already contribute to them! So, we don’t expect that we’ll be the new GreenBuildingAdvisor.com, Environmental Building News, or Renewable Energy World anytime soon, nor do we want to duplicate efforts. We have always been a bit different from other organizations in this niche, and we don’t doubt that our blog will reflect this. Being a little bit different has always been our strength, so it’s something to look forward to.

Blogging is different from the communities of practice

It occurred to me as I wrote this that writing for the blog and hoping for ‘audience participation’ with comments, etc. is similar to what we’re building for the online communities of practice…

The difference is lecture versus seminar style. The communities of practice will be an open discussion, with no one authority standing at the lectern, while the blog is more of a first-person narrative with questions from the audience.

Anyway, the communities of practice will be awesome once they get underway, and I imagine that by necessity the blog will change, and maybe that’s when we get the expertise of an editorial committee to invite, curate and vet content, while the back and forth conversation lives in the communities of practice.

Help us curate content, even if you don’t want to write it

We are hoping that you, the membership, will collectively create the blog you would most like to read. Members can submit their own posts and anyone can comment directly on posts. We do ask that you be polite, but no holds barred as far as critique of the content is concerned. Do keep in mind that you are not just critiquing some random person on the internet – the author of the post is a fellow member. The NESEA community has never been shy about sharing their opinions and what we hope will happen is that member-writers will learn from their audience (their fellow members and greater NESEA community), and the audience will participate in shaping the conversation.

We’re at a very nebulous stage in developing the guidelines for a member-driven blog – which means your opinions and participation will shape what it becomes.

We’re learning as we go, so we hope you’ll bear with us, and more than that, help us figure out how to make the online NESEA community as exciting and engaging as the one that comes together once a year at the conference. If you are interested helping us develop this new(old) resource and member benefit, let us know! To borrow from a BE13 session’s description, “Doing something new often does not go perfectly the first time. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it.”

So, keep an eye out for some new content coming from your fellow members. And be sure to voice your opinion (as if we can stop you) so we can learn as we go.

Filed Under: Communications, Member Announcements, NESEA, NESEA Members Tagged With: , ,

Just add water and stir . . .

November 8, 2012 By Leave a Comment

And voila — instant one-day NESEA conference in the Big Apple.

Those of you who are NESEA members have probably already seen the announcement for BuildingEnergy NYC, a multifamily conference we’re hosting at CUNY – Hunter College on December 1, 2012. The conference will focus on the regulatory arena – the things that building owners and operators need to know to comply with increasingly stringent energy efficiency requirements, on technical know-how, with examples and case studies from hundreds of multifamily buildings that illustrate best practices and lessons learned, and on financing multifamily projects.

The line-up of speakers and topics for this event is really impressive — you can check it out at http://www.nesea.org/buildingenergy/benyc/.

The conference came together at warp speed. Less than five months from concept to implementation, and less than a week to plan the content. Here’s the back story . . . .

In May 2012, the board directed me to focus on launching an event in NYC to help expand NESEA’s reach into underserved parts of our territory, and to help fulfill the promise of our purported service territory – the 10 Northeastern states. NESEA board treasurer and well-known curmudgeon Andy Padian took up the charge and found us a location that we could use, free of charge, thanks to our friends at CUNY-Hunter’s Institute for Sustainable Cities.

On October 19th, Andy confirmed that CUNY-Hunter had space available on Saturday, December 1st, just six weeks away. Warp speed conference planning began!

On October 26th, Andy invited a group of multifamily building superstars from organizations like The Community Preservation Corporation, Steven Winter Associates, GreenHomeNYC, Jonathan Rose, NYSERDA, NYSAFAH, Enterprise Community Partners, Related Companies and elsewhere to a three-hour meeting to plan the conference. They left the meeting with a grid of nine almost fully-fleshed-out sessions. Within the next two weeks, speakers were confirmed, we set up a registration page, and . . . voila . . . instant conference.

Of course we all know that this isn’t really the way it happened. This seemingly “instant conference” didn’t happen instantly. What made it happen “instantly” was Andy Padian’s passion for NESEA, his expansive network of devoted GreenHomeNYC volunteers, and high-powered energy geeks in New York, and his strong powers of persuasion. Now only if we could find a way to clone Andy. . . .

Seriously, BE NYC is going to rock. If it’s as great as we think it will be, we’ll sell out all 300 seats, and NESEA members from other parts of our territory will be lining up to host the next one-day conference. I hope you’ll join us.

Filed Under: NESEA Tagged With: , , , , , ,

And the survey says . . . NESEA’s Green Buildings Open House has REAL IMPACT!

November 7, 2012 By Leave a Comment

For the past 16 years, NESEA has run the Green Buildings Open House tour each year in October in conjunction with the American Solar Energy Society’s National Solar Tour. We have helped to organize homeowners and business owners to open their buildings so that visitors can learn, firsthand, about the sustainable energy improvements the owners have made to their properties.

For most of these 16 years we have taken it on faith that the tours help change behavior – that they help move the market. We have known intuitively that the peer-to-peer conversations that happen as a part of this program influence people to take action. We have heard, anecdotally, from NESEA members who have told us that Green Buildings Open House (GBOH) was their introduction to NESEA and to our community, and that the program inspired them to undertake big energy efficiency projects. But we’ve never had real hard data, from our visitors, to show how widespread the impact of the program is.

Now we do!

In July, NESEA received a grant from the National Grid Foundation that allowed us to develop an online survey to learn more from GBOH visitors about how the program affected them. The survey is being administered in three rounds – the first round occurred before this year’s Green Buildings Open House tour, and the second round was sent out two weeks after the October 13th tour, and the third will be sent within the next two weeks.

Survey results are still being collected, but we’ve learned a lot already. The things we’ve learned so far include:

Of the first-time GBOH visitors who responded to the most recent version of the survey, 17% have already undertaken energy efficiency improvements to their home or business in the month or so since the GBOH tour. The types of improvements they’ve made include:

  • getting an energy audit
  • air sealing their walls, windows, basement or attic
  • replacing their incandescent lightbulbs with compact fluorescent bulbs

Three people even installed high performance systems including photovoltaics, ground source heat pumps, or high efficiency HVAC equipment.

Of the people who made energy efficiency improvements to their home or building, 50% said that GBOH helped influence them to do so.

There are lots more compelling findings to share – and we’ll be doing so much more extensively in the coming weeks and months. But in the meantime, we’re really excited that the results validate that this program is helping to move the market toward more widespread adoption of sustainable energy solutions.

p.s. – Many thanks to UMass student Kelsey Hobson, our Green Buildings Open House program coordinator and survey writer, for all her work to ensure that we have a comprehensive, statistically valid survey.

Filed Under: Communications, Green Building, Industry, NESEA, NESEA Members, Solar, Sustainable Building Tagged With: , , , , , , ,
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