You are here: Home / Archives for Green Building

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: , ,

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: , , , , , , ,

Marc Rosenbaum Article in BuildingEnergy Magazine

September 18, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Re-blogged from Marc Rosenbaum’s excellent Thriving on Low Carbon blog:

“I’ve written an article about House 5 in the latest issue of BuildingEnergy, the magazine of the Northeast Sustainable Energy Association. It’s got other excellent articles, too. You can find it here:

House 5 article BuildingEnergy

You are a NESEA member, aren’t you? There’s no better community to join if you’re passionate about great buildings. Most of my closest friends and colleagues have come from my 30+ year involvement in NESEA, and the most exciting thing these days is the influx of amazing young folks, ready to take over from the tottering geezers like me! I was the second Lifetime Member of NESEA – it was an obvious choice when the category was created – nothing has had as much effect on my professional journey as the relationships I’ve made within the NESEA community. Join here:

Join NESEA!“

Filed Under: Green Building, Industry, NESEA, NESEA Members, Sustainable Building 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: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

A Clean Slate

August 20, 2012 By Leave a Comment

This post first appeared on the blog of NESEA member Beyond Green Construction, at http://beyondgreen.biz/2012/08/a-clean-slate/. It describes a chapter in the deep energy retrofit my family is undertaking, and that challenges associated with the project. There will be more updates as the project progresses!

Well hello again!  Thanks for stopping by to check out our progress.  A few weeks ago we gave you a little intro to the Marrapese family and a beginning look at our latest retrofit project in Deerfield, MA.  I’ve been dropping by the site every so often and things are moving really fast.  It’s incredible how quickly things can turn around with an experienced, committed team and an approaching deadline.  This week we’re going to dive in a bit further and give you some visuals on the progress, so you can see first hand what goes into such a delicate and complicated retrofit.

As I mentioned in our first post, in order to do this job right, we have to stop the moisture problem at its source.  The source of trouble is coming from the constant moisture being funneled up into the house from the very high water table beneath.  The home was never given a moisture barrier between the slab and the house itself.  This got me to thinking, why was it that it was never given a proper moisture barrier?  Was the original builder cutting corners?…or was it just regular practice not to in 1977?  I probed Irene Winkelbauer, (that’s her over there on the left) a member of the BGC team and a certified LEED Green Associate & BPI Building Analyst and she said “Building practices change over time, so it’s probably not that unusual for a build that was done at that time.  Building code is the minimum expected best practice, so if the moisture barrier wasn’t a part in the original build, it may not have been part of code in 1977.”

To give you a quick mental picture, between the years of 1964 and 2002, the highest recorded water level was just 1.42 ft below the soil…seems like living on a houseboat isn’t far off!  With the more recent event of hurricane Irene, it may have been even higher since.  The home has been sucking up this moisture like a straw for 35 years, so as you can imagine, it’s caused quite a bit of damage.  To be frank, it’s all but destroyed the entire house.

Now, I’m going to press the rewind button for a minute and fill in a few important blanks in the story that lead us to getting started on the work.

As I mentioned briefly last week, the project had to be put on hold (for 6 weeks!) while the home went through what’s called a “Request for Determination” by the Deerfield Conservation Commission.  This included submitting a detailed report of the proposed work, along with diagrams of the area and measurements of how close the property is to the wetland. “The strictness with which you will have to build is determined by how close your home is to a stream or water source,” says Winkelbauer.  Luckily because the Marrapese home is a pre-existing structure which was already placed far enough away from the wetlands, the Conservation Commission allowed the BGC team to begin with their work as long as they took the appropriate precautions.  This means keeping the nearby water source free of any run-off from the work site, which has been accomplished with a silt fence and about 100 feet of hay bales.  The picture below gives you a visual map of the standards that have to be met in order to keep the wetlands protected.  The stream on the left needed to be protected by at least 25 feet of undisturbed vegetation and then the home has to be 50 feet from the edge of that vegetation.  After the determination was given by the Conservation Commission that we would not be disturbing any of the wetlands, it was a green light to get started on the work.

The determination was only just given on June 28th, so with a deadline of August 31st to finish the project the team is on an extremely tight schedule.

That just about brings us to the present time.

Being a green company, we are always looking to salvage as much material as possible, but with this home there is unfortunately not much to save.  After taking the house apart piece by piece, our team found that the mold not only extended through the walls, the insulation, the carpet, the tack strips, the floor boards, but even up to the roof!  And the mold on the roof is indeed from the moisture problem beneath the home, not from rain or snow on top of the roof.  See the picture to the left as Andy Jeffords first discovered the mold on the roof.

So what’s the plan of attack when a home is in such a state?  Eliminate the problem, salvage what you can and make it right…it’s as simple as that.  Well, simply written, I’d hardly categorize it as simple work.  The team has been working in 90+ degree heat with very long days to get this done on schedule.

After tackling the mold and stripping the house down to its remaining usable parts, it was onto the sun room addition.  Remember I told you in the previous post about the floor caving in?  The mold and rot were so bad the team had to take it all down and start from scratch.  After accessing the ground beneath the sun room, the team “decided on a more robust technique that we’re very confident about” said Sean Jeffords, principal of BGC, which involved bringing in 130 tons (yes TONS) of sand to fill up the previous crawl space which will be consistent with the sand filled slab on grade that the rest of home has.  (Read in the coming weeks, how we came to that conclusion) But of course, no project is without its curve balls.  On this day, that curve ball came in the form of a truck in quicksand.  Say what?  Here’s what I mean.

The truck which made 5 deliveries of 26 tons (260,000 lbs) of sand drove onto the property and quickly sunk into what they call “sugar sand,” or sand that was not properly compacted during the original build.  It’s apparently just like “sinking into quicksand,”  says Jeffords.

After towing the truck back out of the quicksand, it was back to work.  Two members of the BGC team, Gary Hutchins and Chris Russel worked on spreading and compacting the sand in the sun room, which will actually be the kitchen when the project is complete.

That’s about it for this week.  Next time, see just how we lift an entire house off the ground! Until then, stay happy, healthy & be green!

 

 

 

Filed Under: deep energy retrofit, Green Building, NESEA, NESEA Members Tagged With: , , , ,

Kim Quirk – Near Net Zero Homeowner, BuildingEnergy 12 Presenter

January 27, 2012 By Leave a Comment

This is was originally posted at EnergyEmporium by Kim Quirk

Creating a Zero Net Energy Building in a Historic Shell

“That’s the title of the talk I am going to do at the NESEA (Northeast Sustainable Energy Association) conference in Boston in March 2012. The conference, BuildingEnergy 12, will be held at the Seaport World Trade Center in Boston on March 6-8. There are 10 different tracks of workshops on “renewables and high performance buildings”. Check it out. You can get a ton of information at this conference.
NESEA BuildingEnergy12
I was very excited to have my presentation selected. All the work we’ve been doing on the renovation of my building has been well documented and I will have a years worth of real data and results by then. I applied to present at this conference last year but my project schedule slipped and my move-in date was too late to get any real feedback as to the performance of the house, so they asked me to re-apply this year.

Ok… so the good news is that I was selected for presentation. The bad news is that the house isn’t performing as well as it should at this point. There are things we are actively analyzing and debugging. So when I got the news that I was on the schedule, I called the session chair to discuss some of the issues and see if they wanted to retract their offer. “Not at all”, I was told. “We expect an audience that understands how difficult it is to achieve zero net energy and we learn more from the problems than the successes”. She assured me that presenting the results with details about issues would be a good session.

So, as I pull together data, information, pictures for this talk I will also put it out there on this blog. It would be great to get some feedback before the conference so I can be ready for the hard questions.

There were 4 goals for this renovation:

  • Zero Net Energy Building
  • LEED-H certification
  • No Combustion, no fossil fuels
  • Attention to Historic Preservation

You can get more details on these goals by clicking on 78 Main St – Renovation.

I’ll start addressing the 3rd goal in this post since it has been very easy to measure: This house has no fossil fuels. I don’t have an oil tank or oil bill, no propane tank or gas bills, no fireplace, wood stove or wood bills.

But — This house is on the grid and I DO have an electric bill. My electric company is National Grid. Their electricity is made up of about 36% natural gas, 15% coal, 26% nuclear, 10% oil, and 13% other fuels (mostly renewable). So that is not good. My intention is to offset all the electricity we use with local solar PV panels. Right now I am measuring the electrical use so I can design the right size array. The good news is that weather data and insolation (how much sun we get here in NH) from the National Renewable Energy Labs (NREL) is pretty accurate so I will be able determine the size of the array based on my use. I didn’t want to put the array in place, though, until I have a good estimate of electrical usage. More on that in an upcoming blog.”

Read the original post WITH GREAT COMMENTS here

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

Dietz & Co. Architects Project Achieves LEED Gold Certification

January 10, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Great news from the NESEA membership! Congratulations to Dietz & Company Architects on receiving the LEED Gold Certification for their work on a project with the YWCA! This is especially exiting news because Marc Sternick, VP of Dietz & Co, is on our Board of Directors and the firm is a local, NESEA business member.

The full press release is included here:

Springfield, Mass. – Dietz & Company Architects, Inc. has received LEED for Homes Gold certification from USGBC (the U.S. Green Building Council) for the recently completed units at the YWCA’s Campus of Hope. These new units provide housing that serves to transition women from domestic violence shelters to longer-term living facilities. The 32,000 square foot project is made up of 20 apartments and eight congregate housing units within its walls. This project was part of the larger Campus of Hope initiative
that was started more than 10 years ago for which Dietz & Company Architects was the master planner. Dietz & Company Architects also
designed the first phase of this campus: a 60,000 square foot building that includes administrative offices, meeting and classrooms as well as an on-site shelter.

In the finest tradition of the YWCA, this project features cutting edge technology in Green construction, women-owned partnerships and the
overwhelming support of the community it seeks to serve. The project, originally designed to achieve LEED for Homes Silver certification level, exceeded that level by achieving Gold certification.

Several factors that supported the LEED for Homes Gold Certification include: super-insulated walls and airtight construction, efficient mechanical systems that include roof-mounted photovoltaic panels for electricity, sustainable site design and the use of green construction materials. A healthy indoor environment, pollution reduction and lower utility/maintenance costs are also key elements of this certification. This highly efficient building is expected to reduce water and energy consumption by 20 to 30 percent over typical code compliant construction.

NL Construction was the general contractor for this project and the project was supported by the LEED for Homes Provider, CET. The LEED
(Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Green Building Rating System™ is a voluntary, consensus-based national standard for
developing high-performance, sustainable buildings.

 

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

Follow-Up to the Net Zero Event at Mitsubishi

December 15, 2011 By Leave a Comment

In November, you learned about the process
to reach net zero, now it’s time to learn more about the mechanical systems that help make net zero possible!

Join us January 10th, 2012 at the Mitsubishi Training Center
in Southborough, MA.

RSVP here!

Due to overwhelming demand for a more technical session to follow-up our recent NZB meeting at the Mitsubishi facility, Susan Pickett and Rick Nortz from Mitsubishi Electric are offering a presentation to discuss the types of inverter driven heat pump products that can benefit your high performance buildings.

The presentation will include residential, light commercial, and larger commercial solutions for carbon neutral heating and cooling in all climates and they will discuss product attributes, design considerations, energy savings, LEED, and controls.

There will be dinner following the presentation. And guess what… It’s still free!

Here is the essential info:

What: Mitsubishi Technical Follow-Up (to the Net Zero Energy event in the fall)
 When: January 10th, 2012  – 3PM – 5PM, dinner to follow
Where: Mitsubishi Training Center, 150 Cordaville Rd. (RT. 85), Southborough, MA 01772
How? RSVP HERE or contact 413.774.6051 ext. 20, or rheldt@nesea.org

 

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

Maclay Architects redesign Putney General Store

December 8, 2011 By 2 Comments

This is a more personal post, but I promise it’s relevant to NESEA!

In 2008, the 200 year old Putney General Store caught fire and was severely damaged. The Putney Historical Society and town rallied to purchase the property and start to rebuild. In 2009, an arsonist set fire and obliterated the store completely. The Putney Historical Society and town again set about to rebuild. Maclay Architects, Bill Maclay’s (you may remember him from our recent Net Zero Event at Mitsubishi) architectural firm is one of the companies working on the general store’s resurrection. [hide-this-part morelink="Read more..."]

The Putney General Store was so important to me in my childhood. I was in Dummerston, VT nearly every summer growing up and continue to visit every winter with my family. These visits to Dummerston always involved a trip to the Putney General Store for sandwiches, Matchbox cars, and penny candy.

I was devastated when I found out about the 2008 fire, but relieved to know that there were efforts to rebuild. When I checked in to see its progress a year later  in 2009, I was devastated again to learn that it had been incinerated in an intentional fire.

Flash forward to just a month or so ago when I was learning more about Bill Maclay’s firm in preparation for the Net Zero event at Mitsubishi. I was browsing their website to see their current projects. I knew they had done a project for the Putney School (on the cover of the Fall 2011 Northeast Sun), but I was pleasantly surprised to see that they were part of the team working to rebuild the General Store. They have designed it to be a high performance, energy efficient multi-use building (retail and business). (You can read about the project at the Maclay Architects website)

I stopped in Putney last weekend on a whim and saw the (nearly) finished product. It looks almost exactly like the store we lost. While I know the interior won’t have the old, worn labyrinthine aisles and that 200 year old musty barn smell, I take comfort in knowing that it has been improved upon and respected by all those who worked to rebuild it. When I saw the architects’ rendering, I was struck by how well they kept its historical integrity, and in person, how well the rendering translated to the real building. While it looks shiny and new, it doesn’t look out of place or out of sync.

[/hide-this-part] Its grand reopening is this weekend, Saturday Dec. 10th. (Information about the reopening is available here).

I just wanted to take a moment to congratulate Maclay Architects on reviving such an important structure and institution in Putney, while undoubtedly incorporating updates and design elements that will make it more resilient in an uncertain energy future.

NESEA members, your work has a significant impact on so many levels. I think that this is an aspect of the ‘whole system’ that we talk about. The built environment occupies more than just physical space. Beyond (or underlying) the building system, the environmental/ecological systems, there are the socio-cultural systems. This project touches on all of them – as I imagine the work all of you do does in one way or another.

Thank you for doing what you do.

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

Longtime NESEA Member Launching New Business

December 6, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Robert (Bob) Chew, founder of Alteris Renewables, is launching his own renewable energy consulting company! Here is his press release below:

Alteris Renewables founder Bob Chew starts new company
BRISTOL, RI, November 1, 2011 – Bob Chew, renewable energy entrepreneur has launched a consulting firm that provides creative strategies and solutions to clients exploring options in the ever emerging renewable energy field. R.W. Chew, LLC, DBA as R.W. Chew Consultants, based in Bristol, RI, focuses on offering expert guidance using best practice gained from 30 years in the renewable energy field, to individuals, businesses, municipalities, schools and government agencies seeking viable and cost effective energy choices.  “It is becoming increasingly difficult for the average consumer to navigate the growing number of renewable energy technologies and energy efficiency options available today,” states Chew. The design, implementation, and integration of sustainable energy solutions necessitates the need for a long range plan or ‘road map’ that incorporates variables specific to a particular project. There is no one size fits all in the renewable and energy efficiency field. By generating designs, specifications and project oversight, the company functions much the same as an architect in the building industry.

R.W. Chew Consulting is already working with Bryant U. on a grant to help public high schools in Rhode Island determine what energy retrofits and renewable energy technologies can help them get as close to net zero as possible. View the press release shared on the Bryant U. blog.

I also had the opportunity to interview Bob about his new company and his lifelong experience working with renewables. [hide-this-part morelink="Click here to hear more about Bob and his new company"]

In your press release, you mention, “there is no one size fits all in renewable and energy efficiency field.” Where do you start in determining what might work in a given location for a particular client?

For wind turbines, it is wind speed, interconnection challenges and site conditions that include shadow flicker, noise, safety and view shed issues.  For photovoltaics on roofs, it is finding unshaded areas on flat or south facing roofs and confirming if the roof is in good condition and if the roof can handle the additional weight.  For hot water systems, we need to size the system to the amount of hot water used and if there are any seasonal issues such as a school where they don’t use hot water during the summer.  For wood chip boilers on commercial buildings, we need to make sure that there is room for the new boiler and that there aren’t any issues with tying this system into the existing heating system.  For methane digesters and geothermal systems, we have the same issues.  A common challenge is to determine which technology is cost effective due to many factors including the cost of the installation, O&M costs, incentives and grants.

NESEA advocates whole systems thinking in approaching renewable or energy efficiency issues. What does the whole systems thinking mean to you? Does this inform how you proceed in your work?

I received a degree in Environmental Science from New England College in 1973 and learned about whole systems and ecology.  As a consultant, I understand how the design of a new building has the opportunity to either have a minimum impact on the environment or have a very large impact is determined at the design stage and I look forward to consulting with clients and their architects or builders to make sure that the latest technologies and design strategies are incorporated.

In the 34 years you have been doing this work, what have been your great epiphanies? Have there been some mistakes, breakthroughs, events or conversations that have changed your practice? What were they?

I spend a lot of time looking ahead and have prided myself in foreseeing trends before the competition becomes aware of them. I have seen the solar energy industry grow rapidly under President Jimmy Carter and seen it disappear under President Reagan. Obviously, as I look back, this was a huge mistake and allowed our country to lose its monopoly in the solar industry.  I have also been involved in the rapid growth of the solar and wind industry, and wish that Washington would remove incentives to the fossil fuel and nuclear power industry and require that pollution from these technologies is properly accounted for.  What had bothered me is the focus on photovoltaics while other solar technologies such as passive solar design and solar hot air systems and solar thermal systems have been neglected by many of the larger solar companies in the country.  I’m also bothered by the many LEED certified projects that don’t take advantage of photovoltaics, solar hot water, solar hot air and passive solar design including isolated passive solar sunspaces. In my new business, I hope to revive and popularize some of these technologies such as solar hot air systems and isolated passive solar sunspaces.

Who do you look to continue learning in this field? Where do the new ideas come from? 

I have had the good fortune to know many of the experts in the renewable energy field and seek out their expertise as needed in my new company.  Currently, I have brought in Everett Barber as a consultant on a concentrating solar thermal project I am involved in.  Everett has extensive knowledge in solar thermal and his recent book titled “Converting Your Home to Solar Energy” is in my opinion the best book on solar energy that I have read.  I still read newsletter, books and magazines and attend as many trade shows as I can to keep abreast of the changes in the renewable energy and energy efficiency industries.

What advice do you have for emerging professionals in this field? 

I am asked by many students and people looking to get into the renewable energy industry what they should do.  First, I encourage them to enter into the field since it not only has a great future but it is such an important industry.  It also provides a great deal of satisfaction knowing that you are making a positive impact on the environment and helping our country move towards energy independence.  I strongly believe that you should do what you enjoy.  For many years, I was out in the field and loved the hard work and being outdoors and strongly encourage those who like working outdoors to become a green builder, solar installer or a plumber or electrician who specializes in the renewable energy field.  Some people love selling, designing or the engineering of renewable energy systems.  They need to find a niche where they can do what they love.  I have been lucky to have been able to spend over thirty years doing something that I love.

What is most exciting to you about your new consulting firm? What do you love about what you do and what do you hope to accomplish?

First, I loved running a solar business, but now that I’m sixty, I wanted to have more flexibility to do some of the things that I have always wanted to do.  Beth and I were able to spend five weeks in New Zealand last winter and are planning another exciting trip this winter.  To have the flexibility to do these things was very hard when I was running SolarWrights or Alteris.  I also love being able to get involved in some of the different renewable energy technologies that I was unable to do in the past. [/hide-this-part]

We wish Bob the very best with his new company, and our sincerest thanks for his thoughts.

Filed Under: Green Building, NESEA Members, Renewable Energy Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
« Older Posts