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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

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: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Profound Gratitude: Remarks by Jennifer Marrapese, Executive Director at Annual Meeting, 9/15/12

September 17, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Welcome everybody to the 2012 annual meeting of the Northeast Sustainable Energy Association.

I am really excited that we’re here in Portland. There’s a vibrant green building and sustainable energy community here – a community that has built what they need in the form of the monthly Building Science Discussion Group, Maine Association of Building Energy Professionals, Passive House Maine, USGBC’s Maine Chapter, the Pretty Good House movement and many other formal and less formal organizations and collaborations.

The Portland area has traditionally not been as well served by NESEA as many other areas in our territory. And for as long as I’ve been at NESEA, we’ve been hoping to change that. So I was delighted when NESEA board member Phil Kaplan invited me to Portland and asked us to consider hosting our annual meeting here.

Since our first meeting with Phil and the Building Science Discussion Group in June, many of you Mainers have drunk the NESEA Kool Aid. Architect Rick Renner, a longtime NESEA member, is running for the NESEA board of directors. Sam Strickland is serving on a committee to help us create and launch online communities of practice so that geography ceases to be such a challenging barrier for NESEA members who want to learn and share year round. Steve Konstantino of Maine Green Building Supply has become a business member and opened his facility up last night for an annual meeting pre-game – a Building Science Discussion Group to welcome the whole NESEA community to town.

Profound gratitude. As I prepared my remarks for tonight, that was the mindset I started from. I feel profoundly grateful to this community and appreciative of all that we are accomplishing together.

Let me explain to whom I am grateful and why.

I am grateful to the more than 200 members who are really actively engaged with NESEA far above and beyond simply writing a check and receiving their monthly newsletter and their BuildingEnergy Magazine twice a year. It is surely unprecedented within NESEA that almost a third of our members are actively engaged in planning the conference, hosting sites in our Green Buildings Open House tour, submitting content for BuildingEnergy magazine, and serving on NESEA program and board committees.

I am grateful to Jamie Wolf for recently helping us to articulate something that we’ve known intuitively for a very long time:  that the BuildingEnergy Conference is NESEA’s crown jewel, or the center of NESEA’s universe, but that it occurs only for 3 days/year in Boston. Jamie shared with me his vision for BE365, which makes the BuildingEnergy experience available to NESEA members every day of the year through various events, gatherings, online learning and other forums throughout the year.

I am grateful to lifetime NESEA member Bernice Radle, who at the ripe old age of 26 is rallying a group of NESEA member preservationists to plan a kick-ass Green Buildings Open House tour in Buffalo on October 13th, and who is trying to bring the rest of the NESEA community into the digital age with her incredible promotional savvy using twitter, facebook, blogging and Pinterest.

I am grateful to Marc Rosenbaum, one of our NESEA rock stars, who has partnered with us, and who has spent more than 100 hours to develop and help us launch a 10-week online course for the BuildingEnergy Masters Series, and who recently shared with me, “I could develop and market a course like this on my own. Yet what appeals to me about this arrangement is that I get to advance my personal mission of expanding our collective capabilities, while creating an income stream, and also give back to this organization that has been such a key factor in my success. However, it’s a business partnership, not a charity -  NESEA has skin in the game just as I do.”

I am grateful to NESEA board member Kate Goldstein, who, although she is still a starving student, is digging deep for NESEA this year. Not only did she become a lifetime member – a great investment for somebody who’s still in her 20s – but she has also pledged a leadership gift in our annual fundraising appeal, because, in her words, “The diversity of NESEA’s membership is a gift for us who have not yet found our own path. NESEA is the shelter of our community.”

I am grateful to my staff – at least three of whom, despite being handed a salary freeze this year, have decided to invest some of their discretionary income into NESEA membership because they believe deeply in what we’re about here, and they consider themselves a part of this community.

I am grateful to Paul Eldrenkamp, who confided in me that one of the happiest days of his life was the day that he left his last NESEA board meeting in the mid-1990s. He went and sat in his car for a few minutes and let out a freedom cry that others may have heard even from inside the building. Paul shared that the board as a group (not its individual members) was so dysfunctional, and mired in the day to day operation of the organization, that he couldn’t wait to get out. Well, Paul is a testament to how things have changed for the better. This year, not only is he chairing the BuildingEnergy Conference, and bringing a ton of new talent into the organization through his vast network, but he’s also teaching a BuildingEnergy Masters Series class on Passive House online, and running for the NESEA board!

I am grateful to the 20 or so NESEA members – some long timers, some newbies – who are helping us experiment with and launch active online communities so that they can learn together how best to apply systems thinking in their practices and what are the elements of a generative economy. These communities will serve as a forum in which NESEA members can share with each other what’s working (and what’s not) in service of a more sustainable built environment. Based on what we learn from these communities of practice, we’ll launch others in the new year – including one on Deep Energy Retrofits, one on Zero Net Energy Buildings, and possibly even one on our topic tonight, the Pretty Good House.

These examples barely scratch the surface of all we’ve accomplished together over the past year. And all of this is happening in the worst building environment in 20 years.

In many ways, last year represented the “perfect storm.” Almost everything that could have gone wrong financially, did. NESEA’s membership numbers and Sustainable Green Pages listings continued their steady decline since the housing market crash in 2009. BuildingEnergy registration and exhibitor numbers declined, despite a whopping 97% of our attendees saying that they would recommend the conference to a colleague. We lost substantial donations from two longtime donors whose funding focus shifted and whose portfolios suffered at the hands of a lackluster economy.

We knew before the year even started that we were going to run a deficit in Fiscal Year 2012. We even budgeted for it. We invested heavily in staff, hiring a membership coordinator and a communications coordinator. We also invested in our infrastructure, launching a new website, supported by a new, more nimble database. We knew it would take time for these investments to pay off. Unfortunately, the deficit we ran was larger than anticipated.

NESEA’s reason for being is to advance the adoption of sustainable energy practices in the built environment. The rest of the industry is finally catching on as well.

Last year’s bottom line fails to tell the whole story. It doesn’t tell the story of the momentum we’re building, one practitioner at a time. It doesn’t tell the story of the quality of engagement within our membership, within the BuildingEnergy planning process, and at BE itself.

I truly believe that we’re planting the right seeds, and that if we continue to provide quality engagement experiences, the numbers will follow. I also know that we’ll continue to learn and adjust the plan as we go!

So I’m grateful. I’m invested in this organization and in this community, not just professionally, but also personally, as I complete my own deep energy retrofit and prepare to showcase my home on NESEA’s Green Building Open House tour, which will be held on October 13th throughout NESEA’s 10 states, from Maine all the way down to Delaware.

Now’s the time for you to invest as well. Invest in NESEA and in our future in a way that makes sense for you. If you’re not a member, join. If you are a member, consider donating or sponsoring above and beyond your membership contribution. Or give the gift of NESEA membership to a colleague to help grow our community.

If you’re a newcomer to our community, invest in your own professional development as you get to know us better. Enroll in one of our BuildingEnergy Masters Series courses and partake in  high quality interactive educational content from the comfort of your home or office. Learn about zero net energy homes from Marc Rosenbaum, the man who’s probably engineered more of them than anybody else in the Northeast. Learn about Passive House from Mike Duclos and Paul Eldrenkamp, a member of the inaugural group of Passive House certified consultants in the U.S. Then connect with others in your class to share what you’re learning and create a community of practice that can meet in person at next year’s BuildingEnergy Conference.

Attend the Building Energy Conference, exhibit there, sponsor. Even better, help shape our content by joining the planning committee for the BuildingEnergy Conference. Register your most recent project for our Green Buildings Open House tour in October. Enter your best work in NESEA’s Zero Net Energy Building Award to compete for our annual $10,000 prize. Submit an article for publication in BuildingEnergy Magazine, our peer-reviewed journal by and for sustainable energy professionals in the Northeast.

Invest in the community that is building your knowledge base, your practice, your career, and a more sustainable built environment.

Before I close, I’d like to thank a few people without whom this meeting would not have happened. First, thank you to our committee of locals who advised us on all of the nuts and bolts decisions we needed to make – from the beautiful location we are in to the buildings we should include on the tours earlier today to the Pretty Good House speaking program tonight. Those committee members include Matt Holden, Steve Konstantino, Dan Kolbert, and Rick Renner, among many others.

Next, I’d like to thank our sponsors for tonight – Sparhawk Group, Maine Association of Building Energy Professionals, and Thorton Tomasetti Fore Solutions. And a special thanks to sponsors Kaplan Thompson Architects and Pinnacle Windows, who are hosting a party after tonight’s meeting at Grace, a beautifully restored church and restaurant with an awesome looking menu!

Huge thanks also to Phil Kaplan of Kaplan Thompson Architects for advocating in favor of holding the meeting here in Portland and for connecting us with all the folks here who could help make it happen.

And finally, thank you to Kelsey Hobson, our summer intern from the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center. Kelsey came in at the beginning of the summer and flat out handled all the logistics for this meeting, with almost no guidance. She herded a group of benevolent but busy cats to score us this great location, and planned all of the building tours. She did such a great job that we decided to hire her permanently – or at least as permanently as she’ll have us. This is one NESEA emerging professional with a very bright future.

And now, I’d like to welcome to the stage NESEA board chair, James Petersen. James has been a huge champion of our work to “expand the choir,” and has supported these efforts personally by being a NESEA evangelist within his own professional network. James will share with you an update on where the board would like to see NESEA head, and on what your role might be in helping to create our future success.

Filed Under: BuildingEnergy Conference & Trade Show, Communications, deep energy retrofit, Events, Green Building, Industry, NESEA, NESEA Members, Renewable Energy, Sustainable Building, Whole Systems Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

BuildingEnergy 12 – What did you think?

March 12, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Thursday, March 8th saw the conclusion of BuildingEnergy 2012, and what a ride it was. We were extremely fortunate to have, in addition to an outstanding cast of speakers, volunteers and international collaborators, balmy weather for the conference.  Speaking personally, this was my first BuildingEnergy, and it was simply an incredible experience.  If you haven’t already read them, Jennifer, in her blog post, talks about post-BuildingEnergy “re-entry” and gives a shout-out to all the people who made this event so wonderful.

But that’s our take on it. What have other people been saying? Here’s a brief sample of some BuildingEnergy 12 feedback:

“I think this may have been the best NESEA BE conference ever.” John Abrams, South Mountain Company

“What an energetic, dedicated, amazing community! Thanks for all the hard work, organization and passion. This year’s conference again highlighted the remarkable fusion of idealism and informed practice that makes NESEA, and its members, exceptional and effective.”
David Foley

“Thanks to Robert and Paul, their dedicated Track and Session Chairs and special thanks to all the hard working staff and incredible legion of volunteers who pick up the pieces for us mere mortals.”
Joel Gordes

“It never stops! Thanks to all of you (all of us) for this perennial reminder of who we are. Jennifer, Mary, all of the staff and the un-thanked volunteers deserve great praise. They make us happy to ask ‘I am, are you?’”
Bill Stillinger, PV2

“Many thanks to Robert, Paul, Jennifer, Mary & the entire NESEA staff for pulling off another great NESEA experience & for making each one better than the last. The community building pieces as well as several other recent improvements will be studied & replicated (in some way) for future conferences. Thanks for doing so much of the work that will be used to build on for our future.
Thanks especially for making this a tribe that I am most proud to be a member of.  I am, Are You?”
Marc Sternick, Dietz & Co. Architects

“May I join Marc in saying a huge thank you to Robert, Paul, Mary, Jennifer and all the staff. You made it look easy!”
Caitriona Cooke

“I have to add my thanks to Robert, Paul, the staff and the whole NESEA Community for a fabulous conference It was a true embarrassment of riches in the best way possible. “
Laura Notman

“For me, the conference as a whole was very much about beginning conversations and connections that will carry on well past the three-day event. I’m reinvigorated, full of new ideas, friends, colleagues, clients, and connections as a result of my time at the conference. I’m excited by the new opportunities that have grown out of this year’s experience.

This is my experience this year… as it has been for many years… Information, yes,… but even more so… a renewal of a sense of mindful, meaning-filled connection to others involved in the excitement and the challenges of sustaining the people and the planet.

A privilege and honor to share this journey with each of you…”
Bart Bales

“To create an elixir like BE, it takes a unique community of dedicated and passionate visionaries.  As an attendee, I’m personally grateful to all of you for creating such an inspiring, thought provoking and enlightening conference.”
Jo Lee, Green Machine PR

“Congrats and thx to @NESEAed and the whole team for another exceptional Building Energy event #be12″ @EnergyCircle

“(BuildingEnergy) was amazing. Truly the center of cutting edge building efficiency. Looking forward to engaging everyone further about efficiency.” @475sam

What did you think of BuildingEnergy 12? Let us know in the comments below, or later in in the soon-to-be-released BuildingEnergy 12 survey.

In the meantime, let’s keep the energy going for BuildingEnergy 13 (no, it’s never too early to start planning for the next event.)

Filed Under: BuildingEnergy Conference & Trade Show, Events, NESEA, Sustainable Building

Thinking About Systems Thinking

February 25, 2012 By Leave a Comment

A few days from now, clean energy and building science professionals are gathering in Boston, at the NESEA Building Energy 2012 conference. For some it is an annual pilgrimage; for others it may be their first contact with this multi-disciplinary group.
This time around there is an extraordinary offering that I want you to know about: a one day workshop on the importance of thinking in systems.
The Secret Is In The System! The workshop of this name is scheduled for Tuesday March 6. It will be presented by two colleagues with deep experience in this area; Sara Schley and Linda Booth Sweeney.
Irrespective of your professional field, attending the workshop will expose you to a profound way to understand and approach complex problems. It’s a fitting lead-in to the Whole Systems In Action track of conference sessions to follow over the next two days, but it can provide insight into anyone’s circumstances; problems facing organizations, energy efficiency, building science, policy, security, finance, clean energy resource deployment, etc.
The workshop material can be useful to anyone who wants to get beneath the immediate, surface issues they face; to identify the leverage points that will effect the greatest positive change. By thinking in systems we’re able to analyze break-downs in small organizations such as design or construction firms just as effectively as problems on the macro scale, such as those that, like the BP oil spill, invoke “the tragedy of the commons.”
The Building Energy 2012 conference will have an array of important offerings from which to choose. I recommend this one.

Filed Under: BuildingEnergy Conference & Trade Show, Events, Green Building, NESEA, NESEA Members Tagged With: