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Report from our traveling quartet from Saxony and Upper Austria

February 28, 2011 By 2 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Q & A with Kate Goldstein, NESEA member and Emerging Professional

February 3, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Kate Goldstein, NESEA member, BE11 Planning Committee Member and current PhD candidate in engineering at MIT

Today we’re talking to Kate Goldstein, a young NESEA member from Providence, RI, and a PhD candidate at MIT, about how she came to be involved with the organization and what NESEA has meant to her professionally and personally. This is part one of a two part conversation with Kate (pictured, right). In part two, she’ll talk about her efforts on behalf of Emerging Professionals at the BuildingEnergy Conference.

As always, we hope these Q & As will provide you with some insights about what you can expect from this year’s conference and the people who are making it happen.

Q: What are you studying at MIT, Kate?
A: Very broadly I study energy in buildings. I am in the Building Technology graduate program which is housed in the architecture department but is essentially a cross between a traditional mechanical engineering and architectural engineering department. Most of my class-work, and the core of my research, is in heat transfer and fluid mechanics.

Q: How did you first come to know about/hear about NESEA?
A: My earliest email concerning NESEA is dated early March of 2008, which was right before the BuildingEnergy Conference during my junior year of college at Brown University. Kurt Teichert introduced me to NESEA, and the NESEA community.

Kurt is a professor at Brown in the Environmental Studies department, and he was the first person to get me passionate about energy in buildings. I am actually quite indebted to him, since when I entered his classroom I wasn’t quite sure where I was going or where I belonged. Kurt always stresses to his students the importance of developing relationships within the field. He strongly encourages networking and grounding oneself in the community around what you do. In my couple of semesters with him at Brown I attended two BuildingEnergy conferences and one Greenbuild conference and met a wide network of local community members in Providence who were really implementing what we talked about it the classroom.

Q: What are you gaining from your association with NESEA?
A: That’s a pretty loaded question and the simplest answer is that NESEA makes me really happy. I am on the planning committee for the BuildingEnergy Conference and I can honestly say that I have not regretted one moment of time I have spent there. I have had the opportunity to meet the best and brightest and funniest and warmest in the field from all over the Northeast. I have been given the great gift of feeling appreciated; whatever I do for NESEA, large or small, I am thanked by a network from NESEA staff to architects, engineers, builders, business people, and so many more. This is one of the most gratifying feelings as my everyday life is fairly stressful, and research is a long road that requires a lot of patience and a lot of tolerance for confusion. I get whatever I give at NESEA. I can’t say that about any other organization for which I’ve worked.

Q: You wrote an article for Northeast Sun recently. What made you decide to write it, and what was it about?
A: I wrote the article because of what I saw personally in the field, and what I heard talked about time and again at NESEA: the great barrier in communication between architects and engineers. At the time, I was living with and dating an architect, and we were thus living the “crossing of the streams”. I thought I could offer an interesting perspective about the importance of giving all you had to making things work. From learning to listen, to learning to be patient, to learning to be able to see the world through someone else’s eyes.

I think the Sun is a great magazine, but I would really love to see more personal essays and articles within it so that the rest of NESEA can be exposed to the amazing people I have the opportunity to work with and talk to every day.

(In part two next Wednesday, Kate talks about Emerging Professionals at the BuildingEnergy Conference.)

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

Review of Green Building Product Certifications: Getting What You Need

February 2, 2011 By 1 Comment

REVIEW OF:

Green Building Product Certifications: GETTING WHAT YOU NEED
Published by BUILDINGGREEN, 2011
Principal Author: Jennifer Atlee
Contributors: Nadav Malin and Tristan Roberts
Cost: $79

BY JOE HASKETT

Like the main protagonist in the movie “Six Degrees of Separation” – where making connections is key in order to advance oneself – many product manufacturers today are making claims of greater connectedness to being green than is warranted.  The definition of ‘green’ is constantly changing, and when worded in just the right way, can translate into greater profits for business and big problems for consumers.  Are we to settle for a confusing variety of certifications that subtly offer false shades of green at the expense of our environment?

Luckily the answer is no. Thanks to a new report published by BuildingGreen and titled,  Green Building Product Certifications: Getting What You Need, we now have a resource to evaluate the real story of green product certification. This report offers up detailed explanations of the many certifications available, how they were developed and the criteria they use to evaluate their products.

The report helps to dispel the notion of a wild-west when dealing with Green Certifications. It offers an overview of how to spot ‘green-washing’ (they define it 9 ways), why certifications are important, who to trust and underscores the need to continually focus on what really matters. Its overall objective is to “provide a no-nonsense guide to the world of green building product certifications to help designers, purchasers, manufacturers and others in the industry to focus on what is significant and relevant so that market focus can work and the industry can focus on bigger issues.” In my opinion they have succeeded.

In terms of set up, the report follows a sensible logic: Overview, Product Certifications, Certification by Building Sector (CSI) and an explanation as to what we can expect to see in the future. Most of the report, not surprisingly, is devoted to product certifications. It covers a whole host of standards pertaining to Energy Performance, Water Efficiency, Embodied Carbon, and Forestry Certification – to name a few. For a typical snapshot of the report, take the example of one of the more critical areas for environmental performance: Energy Performance. The report gives a brief synopsis of the issue(s) and delves into each of the standards and/or certifications available. Of these standards – Energy Star, Consortium for Energy Efficiency (CEE), EnerGuide and EnergyGuide, each are given summaries, important data points such as a company website, the managing organization, launch date and the type of products they certify. It is then concluded with what the report refers to as, “BuildingGreen’s Quick Take” – an unadulterated snapshot of information that only the long-standing reputation and collective knowledge of BuildingGreen could provide. It balances the reports tight professional tone with a little water cooler chat. For example, in the ‘Quick Take’ for Energy Star, it offers this: “Energy Star was embarrassed in 2010 by audits showing that it relied on questionable data, but it has been convincingly cleaning up its act. The label is a well-recognized logo and a basic certification for manufacturers seeking to promote the energy efficiency of their products. Energy Star typically aims to cover the top 25% of products in any given sector, so it’s a great start, but buyers interested in the highest-rated products may want to look to more stringent standards like CEE.”

The report goes on to look at certifications through another lens; by building product sector. It is an attempt, as the report states, “to provide an initial overview of the key issues for each building category for which more widely applicable certifications may be helpful.” In the first section, it offers no current comprehensive certifications for Concrete, Masonry and Metals (CSI divisions 03, 04 and 05 respectively). It does, however, offer up potential third-party certifications for the percentage of recycled content or whether something is pre-consumer or post-consumer. It also speaks to the fact that this section – as with many others in the report – is a work in progress and the industry, as a whole, is attempting to provide more robust certifications that move across all sectors. It is not as robust as the Certifications Applicable to Any Building Product section, but it does make an attempt to offer up another way to discern complex certifications and replace it with an already established, well-known system utilized by people in the industry; MasterFormat.

Another credit to the report is the way it weaves ‘big picture’ thinking with detailed explanations of each certification. Among the well-researched product labels, acronyms and certifications, the report reminds us of our individual and collective responsibilities to continuously think holistically and not to focus on “certified products at the expense of cohesive, high-performance building design…as the environmental impact of a building over its lifetime is far greater than the sum of products therein.” It is this type of thinking that makes the report more comprehensive and not just a reference for label chasing.

The report concludes with a prediction that the number of green certifications and green product claims will continue to grow. It calls for more clarification and alignment amongst the certification class to help consumers and stakeholders avoid label confusion – while cautioning against a system that provides too much rigidity that could render itself incapable of improvement and not allow for the environmental-bar to be raised.

As the reader, you will walk away knowing the Who, What, When, Where and Why of Green Product Certifications. To be specific, you will learn the difference between VOC and SVOC, what ‘Thirteen-Fifty’ refers to and that Ecologo was acquired by UL and that UL will most likely be become one of the larger players within the certification world. You’ll also know the importance of understanding how first, second and third party affiliations impact the quality of certifications and how toxicity concerns are addressed by such certifications as Pharos, BASTA and ECCC. You will also learn how product certification can be a stepping stone to introducing Life-Cycle assessments (LCA) and Environmental Product Declarations (EPS’s) into your overall environmental IQ.

How would I rate this? I would give the report an 8 out 10 – with the caveat that there is always room for improvement. Not only would I recommend this report to my design colleagues, but I would – as the report suggests – recommend it to manufacturers and purchasers. I would also add business leaders and company executives to the list; they play a crucial role in the consumerist eco-system this report is trying to affect.

Any suggestions on how it could improve or what role it could play in the future? Sure. At $79 it is not cheap. For a larger company, it may be a bargain. However, for smaller companies and students it is not something easily procured. Furthermore, the graphic flow of the chapters and sub-chapters could use more distinguishing. Overall, it is well conceived and executed, but can often confuse the reader as to where they are within the document. As someone who sees this as a go-to reference guide, having something that makes it more clear to navigate through the 88 pages, would be a another point towards satisfaction. One last suggestion would be for GreenBuilding to announce that the report will be published at a standard interval – say every two years. If the future changes to the certifications world are anything like what the report offers up, it would make sense that the report’s content would need to be updated periodically allowing designers and others to keep a handle on what’s happening.

With this resource, those that are working towards continuing their knowledge base from which to make informed decisions regarding green products, this report will serve you well. We should also keep in mind that this is a passive tool that requires active understanding from the design community. The report mentions the honest confusion that design professionals have when dealing with ‘green’ certifications. It also mentions, inversely, an honest confusion on the manufacturer’s side to try and offer up products that meet our shifting definition of green. So, in the end the ball is moving for all sides and we would all be wise to work across disciplines to achieve our goals of environmental improvement.

KUDOS to BuildingGreen for once again pin-pointing an area of weakness within the environmental community and providing an answer. As we try to lessen our confusion and increase our understanding of the world of green products, we now have the first version of a Green Certifications Report that allows the degrees of separation to become closer and closer.

Filed Under: Green Building, Industry, Sustainable Building Tagged With: , , , ,

Next Steps: If You Build, Build to Net Zero

February 8, 2010 By 2 Comments

What? Builders saying that “architects know nothing about energy”? But I know some architects who definitely know A LOT about energy, especially the ones preparing the BuildingEnergy workshop, An Accessible Design Tool for Simplified Design Heat Loss and Energy Requirement Analysis for Single Family Structures. Here’s a peek into a recent email exchange about this workshop:

At 9:07 AM -0500 2/1/10, Everett Barber wrote:
Hi Bruce,
I’ve been showing our spreadsheet to various and sundry in preparation for the BE10 workshop.
All encounters with potential users have been very positive, even from one guy, a builder, who said that his clients rarely express any concern about energy. He thought this thing should be on the counter of every lumber yard in the US. Hmmm. That is so far beyond where we are now that I can’t even contemplate what that would entail on our end. The builder said that the architects he works with know ‘nothing’ about energy and really don’t seem to care. So my experience was not unique, even in this day.
Anyway, I thought I’d forward some comments that I got regarding the program from Tom Hopper. He’s an architect/teacher/industrial designer. I think that you know him. We spent about 2 hours on the phone on Sat. going over the program. He seems very positive about it and what it does. He said it is very useful as a self-teaching tool.
There is no way that I’ll be able to incorporate Tom’s suggestions by the BE10 workshop, but we’ll do our best. We are still developing our own passive solar ‘routines’ within the program so that we don’t have to go to back and forth between F-Chart to get the data that we need.
Onward.
Ev

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Thomas Hopper
Date: Mon, Feb 1, 2010 at 7:34 AM
Subject: next idea
To: Everett Barber
Good morning Everett,

You know, I’ve got to tell you how pumped up I am about what you are doing; thinking about it all the time; such a good thing.

If I can encourage you, here is what I wish:

If you have recently visited my web site then I think that you can see that I’m getting ever more serious about approaching net zero for homes; like all the recently uploaded cabins, even the mini 12×12; I’m really trying to do this because the world needs to do this faster than we think.

So what if your Design Heat Loss program was subtitled “How to take serious steps toward net zero energy”?

Like my 24×28 solar cabin designed for two folks that I used in my trial run in your spread sheet; it is designed for high thermal capacitance, well valued and placed insulation for the entire envelope including doors and windows, substantial high R-5 glazing to the south and R-5.5 on all others, low glazing areas on all other orientations with only one tiny window on the north that facilitates natural convection cooling for summer along with the operable skylight on the north roof, it has good shading of glazing in summer with its stepped garrison style profile on the south. It has a 4.6kW array and three 3×7 thermal panels for DHW. These things are not trivial, once an intelligent orientation and envelope is done, they are absolutely needed steps to get to net zero.

I want to enter that data in your spread sheet model Home A, play with it, i.e. try different ideas in model Homes B & C and see trends, and I want to see how close I can get to zero energy usage; truly that is where I am permanently in all my design efforts for the rest of my life. Truly this is the tool we designers really need, the world needs, and I personally would use it a great deal. To me it is not enough to just conserve energy anymore; of course we must do it and your tool can educate along the way but this is not really enough.

Look I’m living what I say right now. Active solar really does work. We new this instinctively 35+ years ago. Now you have lots of raw data with 10,000 jobs to prove things.

I think this tool must allow these inputs.
If you can’t do it before NESEA, and I certainly understand that, then promise it in the next upgrade and tell the audience where your going with this.
This tool needs to embrace net zero energy goals right from the getgo/beginning or first introduction; this is your hook to the world of architects and designers. This is where it must go. Indicate that this is where you are going. I strongly encourage you to not drop this objective for this super fine effort you are doing. Feel okay now that it is incomplete; you’ve got a great start. Let the audience taste the possibilities and potential, is what you’re doing at this NESEA BuildingEnergy10 Conference, but tell em where its going.

Go Ev Go!!! Wow! I am so excited by this possibility.

I will help you any way I can, to accomplish this greater goal. Perhaps we can use Adam’s skills along the way?

All the very best,

-Tom

PS – This am, tank at 103F at bottom and 107.5F at top, no wood burning. We have used 414kWh since start up of net meter. If it were Fran and I only here, we would be net zero on electric pretty sure. Got to do window insulation. I know somebody who did something ……

Filed Under: Green Building, Sustainable Building Tagged With:

Green Building Materials Market to Jump to $571B by 2013

June 9, 2009 By 5 Comments


Hi Everyone:

A recent earth2tech blog post discussed a report published this week by NextGen Research entitled, “Green Building Materials: Cement, Insulation and Wood Products Help Engineer a Greener World.”

According to earth2tech, the report estimates that, “the global green building materials market will grow about 5 percent per year to reach $571 billion by 2013, up from about $455 billion last year.  The sweet spots in this growth are cement, engineered wood and insulation products.”  According to the blog post, the report defines greener building products, “as those having less of an environmental impact than standard building materials.”  Pretty vague.

At $3000 a pop, I’m not sure how many of us will be buying this report, but feel free to check out the earth2tech post.  Do you think these growth estimates sound realistic?  Have you seen other reports (perhaps more affordably priced) that present similar estimations for growth?  What are your predictions?

Thanks! Jo

Filed Under: Green Building, Industry, Sustainable Building
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