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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: , ,

BuildingEnergy online is becoming a reality

November 14, 2012 By 1 Comment

I’m excited to share what’s happening with the BuildingEnergy Masters Series (BEMS).

Following a very successful “soft launch” in October, with almost 60 students registered in two courses, I’m convening a working group of 6-8 NESEA members to step back – to help me set policies for how we run the program and how we integrate it with the rest of what NESEA does. Our first meeting is scheduled for December 7th.

Helping us fulfill the promise of BuildingEnergy . . . online, year-round

I view this committee as a natural extension of the BE planning committee, or as a curriculum committee, of sorts. The committee will help advise me on issues such as:

  1. What criteria we should use for choosing the subject matter for BEMS offerings and for selecting instructors
  2. What criteria we should use to ensure that instructors’ content does not unduly overlap with that of other instructors
  3. Whether we should implement incentives, above and beyond a standard revenue share, for instructors who go above and beyond in marketing, and whose efforts bring a significant number of students into the course who would not otherwise have enrolled
  4. What criteria we should establish for manufacturers/vendors who wish to offer courses on the platform, and whether/how we might brand such offerings differently than BEMS courses
  5. What the course schedule should be and how to prioritize which instructors to approach to develop course content
  6. Who we might approach as potential partners and/or for cross promotional opportunities
  7. How can we best integrate this program into others NESEA offers – paying particular attention to integration with our crown jewel, the BuildingEnergy Conference.

Initially, the BuildingEnergy Masters Series was conceived as a way for NESEA to offer BuildingEnergy Conference-quality content year-round to practitioners within our community, irrespective of their locations – and to help NESEA diversify its revenues so that we are not relying exclusively on the success of our annual conference to float the rest of the organization. Based on the post-conference surveys we’ve done in recent years, we knew that many within our community crave the opportunity to learn from, and network with, each other year round. BEMS was conceived as one way to help fulfill that need.

We made a good start . . . now it’s time to incorporate what we’ve learned

When we launched our two courses this fall, we relied upon instructors who routinely draw large crowds at our BuildingEnergy Conference. We knew we could rely on them to deliver high quality content. And we knew that they were excellent teachers who would take the time commitment to develop top-notch educational content seriously. We had hoped to attract 8-10 students for each of the courses we offer in 2012 and 2013, but  Marc Rosenbaum’s Zero Net Energy Homes, and Paul Eldrenkamp and Mike Duclos’ Passive House:  The Future of Building in the US?, far exceeded our expectations. We attracted almost 60 students between the two courses – in large part thanks to Marc Rosenbaum’s extra marketing efforts!

We’re thrilled that the courses and the format seem to appeal to so many. And we’re looking forward to incorporating more opportunities for members to drive the direction of this program, just as they do the BuildingEnergy Conference and Trade Show. If you have feedback you’d like to share about this program or process, feel free to email me at jmarrapese@nesea.org or call me at 413.774.6051, ext. 23. Otherwise, I’ll keep you updated on the working group’s recommendations and the roll out of this new initiative.

Filed Under: NESEA Members, Whole Systems Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Member Content for the NESEA Blog

November 12, 2012 By Leave a Comment

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

Member-written blog posts, an open invitation

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

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

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

Get in there and write (with some guidelines)

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

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

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

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

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

Blogging is different from the communities of practice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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: , , , , , , ,

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

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: , , , ,

From Ghastly to Green – a foreclosure purchase story (or how I spent my summer vacation)

August 15, 2012 By 1 Comment

Hi all,

This blog post was written by Shannon Tate of Beyond Green Construction (a NESEA member of course) about a deep energy retrofit my family and I are undertaking. It originally appeared on Beyond Green’ blog at http://beyondgreen.biz/2012/07/from-ghastly-to-green-a-foreclosure-purchase-story-2/.  I plan to post additional updates as they are available . . . it’s clearly still a work in progress. I’m sure the practitioners among you will be shocked . . . shocked to hear that the schedule has slipped further since the post was first written. Hoping for a September 20th move-in date at this point – fingers crossed!

 

 

Well hello and welcome to our very first blog post!  My name is Shannon Tate,
a sustainable design and green building enthusiast and newby here at Beyond Green Construction.  (That’s me over there on the left.)  Here at BGC we are passionate about doing our part to make the world a better place and healing this planet!…we feel the best way to do this is through education.  We think the best form of education that we could share would be to give you all the nitty gritty, good, bad, ugly details of our present Deep energy Retrofit projects.  It’s not easy work for us or the homeowners, but it is incredibly rewarding and life changing in the end.  Our approach is to be 100% transparent with you.  No holding back, no sugar coating.  Our blog will be presenting the real deal.  It’s especially exciting for us because we are starting our blog love with a really HUGE project that we just began work on in Deerfield.  So here we go.  Happy reading.

Meet the Marrapese family…Jennifer, Bill, their two little girls and sweet pup.  Jennifer is the Executive Director of NESEA, the Northeast Sustainable Energy Association and Bill is a nurse in Brattleboro, VT.

(This photo was taken outside their current rental in Deerfield, where they anxiously await the completion of their new home.)

Jennifer and Bill, who moved here a year ago with their family, recently purchased a 1977 ranch in foreclosure just a few blocks from their rental property in Deerfield.  The house is a fixer upper…to put it lightly.

“Sean and the inspector were with us and everyone suspected that there was going to be major work to be done”, says Bill.

“That being said…we knew it was in rough shape but it’s turned out to be in worse shape then we thought” says Jennifer.

The homes most substantial problem stems from the fact that it’s built on a high water table and “it seems that the slab was never insulated against the water coming up from underneath.  The slab was acting like a straw to suck the water up into the foundation and the walls”, says Bill.

As the reader you may be asking yourself, “why the heck didn’t they find all this out before they bought the place?”  The answer is, when purchasing a property in foreclosure, there are many things you can’t do during a home inspection.  You can’t lift up carpets, you can’t do anything that is invasive, where you’re peeling anything open or examining something from within…you can only look at the surface and take it as your eyes perceive it.  So it wasn’t until after the purchase went through that the damage could truly be assessed.  Carpets ripped up, beams exposed, and mold in clear view, everywhere.  Mold was found in the insulation, roofing, walls, carpet, tack strips, everywhere.  ”I think the homeowners believed at the time of purchase that they could do a lot of the demo work themselves, but once they started removing carpet, they realized how dangerous that would be,” says Jeffords.

A secondary problem of the home is that it has a sunroom addition on the back which was done extremely poorly.  Bill calling it a “Ham and egg job….or I’ll give you a pizza, you give me an addition.”  That explains it pretty perfectly.  After the purchase went through, the BGC team came in and realized that adding to the already lengthy list of problems, the floor in the addition was about to cave in as well. 

Even with all of its problems, this home does have its charms.  The homeowners had their hearts set on this neighborhood and this particular street when their search began.  They were serendipitously invited to a barbecue on an earlier visit, which happened to be on the very street they purchased on.  ”We met a lot of people on the street who we ended up clicking with” says Jennifer.  ”It’s a dead end street, it’s sunny so immediately we both looked at each other and said this is the street we want to live on.  So when the house came up in foreclosure, we thought it was the perfect opportunity, especially since we knew we wanted to do energy work and we didn’t want to pay extra for a house that we were going to have to rip up anyway.”  There were also many other plus’s on Jennifer and Bill’s list.  ”We have some land, it’s perfectly suited for solar and we paid probably $45K less than if we had purchased it from an owner, ” Bill says of the house.  Jennifer adds “and there’s farmland behind the property and it’s protected”  ”It’s still a little bit of a scary investment”, she admits.

The couple says that although they wouldn’t call themselves “sustainability experts”, that for a very long time, sustainability has been a part of their daily practice and a part of their values.  ”We’re really excited to take this project as an opportunity to explore and live into that”, says Jennifer.

Even with all of the lists of “green building experts” at her disposal through NESEA, Jennifer says that they really “didn’t do a lot of interviews for the job” and that she chose the BGC team “largely on reputation within the community” and that Jeffords was very familiar with how to go about finding monetary incentives through the energy companies, theirs being Western Mass Electric…which the couple will be receiving $19K in incentive money from.  (If you’re interested in looking into incentives for your green project, go to www.masssave.com to learn more.)

The couple closed on the house in April with hopes to acquire a building permit quickly and start work with the BGC team.  But, like many projects, things didn’t move along as quickly as hoped.  The couple, along with the BGC team lost 6 weeks of time after the building inspector thought they needed to bring the project plans to the conservation committee for additional approval.  He came to this conclusion because the home has an intermittent stream on the property and they needed to be sure wasn’t a part of the wetlands.  They eventually were given a negative determination and could move forward without any additional approvals, but that was 6 weeks lost.  The Marrapese’s found this difficult as they were already paying the mortgage and had to add on two additional months in their rental…not to mention that Jeffords had his team ready to go.  It was a set back, but they put that time to good use, making sure all their plans were in place and were sure of exactly how they would proceed with the project.

The plans are a pretty huge undertaking in and of themselves.  After determining how extensive the moisture problems were and that the source was the foundation, BGC’s engineer, Chris Vreeland from Precision Decisions Inc. devised a plan to actually lift the house off of the foundation with a series of jacks that will be attached to the foundation wall and a piece of “4x”6 angle iron bolted into each and every wall stud.  The house will be lifted 8 inches off the slab and then a moisture and thermal barrier will be created with high-density foam topped with 4 inches of concrete that has radiant floor tubing imbedded into it.  This will stop the mold and moisture problems at their source, so that when they re-insulate the house and tighten it all up, the indoor air quality will be healthy for the family.  Also included in the plans are the installation of a Solar Thermal System with electric back-up and a wood stove for an alternative heat source on the off chance that they would lose electricity because of a storm or power outage.

As you can imagine, this is not a cheap project.  We have a budget to work with of $100 per square foot (brand new builds on average are $150 + per square foot) and with the home at nearly two thousand square-feet, we’re nearing $200K.  That being said the couple says they’re just “makin’ it happen”, doing what they have to do with  their own saved money, a line of credit, borrowing from family…they are determined to make it happen within their budget.

Their budget is being helped greatly with the resource of the Eco Building Bargains in Springfield, where they bought used solid oak kitchen cabinets and laminate countertops for only $1400.  They plan on getting their bathroom fixtures from there as well and found a great deal on flooring through Hampton Carpet.

In the end the Marrapese’s will have a super energy efficient, healthy house for their family.

With the August 31st move in date quickly approaching the BGC team needs to work smart and fast.  We’ll give you more of the details next week!  Until then, have a good one.

 

 

 

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

Building an Infrastructure for Collaboration – How are we doing?

June 21, 2012 By Leave a Comment

How do NESEA members propose new programs they’d like to be involved in launching?
How does NESEA engage members in projects that align both with their passions and their skill sets?
How do we build the capacity of our members to be effective leaders and collaborators for the projects we take on?
Who decides which NESEA programs get launched and which ones don’t?
How do we reinvent legacy programs so that they align with NESEA’s mission and its brand?
What’s the mechanism for welcoming new members into our community?

These are just a few of the questions we’re attempting to answer in our “Infrastructure for Collaboration” (IFC) working group. The IFC group launched in May 2012, after NESEA held two charrettes during which the members present requested that we develop better processes for engaging current and new members and for deciding which programs and initiatives to undertake.

The underlying premise of these two charrettes was that NESEA is at its best when its programs are primarily member-driven and staff supported. (The BuildingEnergy Planning Committee’s process, although by no means perfect, is the best current example of this.) Thus, the IFC group has been attempting to take what’s good about the BE planning process and adapt it for re-use in other areas.

We’ve made some progress, and IFC group chair Jamie Wolf and I thought it would be a great time to bring you all up to date.

What we’ve done so far

So far, the IFC group has developed a workgroup template. This template is intended to walk a NESEA member, step-by-step, through the process of proposing a new program/initiative. In the template, the member is asked to:

  • Give a brief description of the project/program/initiative
  • Articulate the purpose of the program (and how it fits in with NESEA’s mission)
  • Specify the objectives of the program
  • Articulate the process by which the group/program will accomplish these objectives
  • Propose a timeline for the program
  • Specify what type of support is needed to launch the program (including staffing resources, equipment, money, etc.) and what plans are in place to secure that support
  • Address how the group will communicate, both internally and externally
  • Specify who will lead the group and who will be members (or how members will be selected, what their roles will be and how they will be held accountable
  • Articulate what the end product will be, if any, from the project/program (how will success be measured)

Once this template is completed, the appropriate NESEA staff representative (typically me in my role as executive director) completes a companion template to provide feedback/a reality check on the proposal. In this template, staff answers questions about:

  • Whether we support the proposed initiative
  • Whether we believe the project can be accomplished with the resources projected, and what other resources might be available
  • Whether/how the project will likely fit in with other, potentially competing priorities, and the conditions that must be met in order for staff to support the project optimally
  • Who on staff will be the primary staff person on the project
  • What authority the group will have to act on its own

We’ve also developed a member survey that will help us start to catalog our members’ skill sets and their interests, so we can do a better job of filling the gaps in various NESEA projects and committees.

What we’re learning

Developing these templates felt a bit abstract to many of us in the IFC group. So we decided to try them out – first to apply the process to the Communities of Practice that Robert Leaver is heading up, and then to our own work within the IFC group.

What we’re learning is that it takes discipline to remember to follow the process. As a staff person who focuses primarily on member support, my inclination is often to jump into projects when they are proposed – and especially when they are proposed by members I have worked with, and those I know have the horsepower and the follow through to get the projects done. But I’m recognizing that this process may have value in encouraging those who are new to the community or inclined to be less vocal to propose ideas that otherwise might never reach the surface.

We’re also learning that it’s hard to foresee every possible variable that we should ask for in a proposal. We want the bar to be set sufficiently high so that we’re not getting new requests for new, big, resource-intensive programs every day. But we don’t want to set the bar so high that somebody with a fantastic idea can’t figure out how to get it to us, or gives up trying.

What’s next?

We’ll continue to experiment with these templates just a bit longer, and try to vet them sufficiently so they’re ready for you to use. We’ll keep you updated on our progress!

– Jennifer Marrapese, Executive Director, NESEA, and Jamie Wolf, IFC group chair

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

Green Buildings Open House in the Digital Age

June 20, 2012 By Leave a Comment

We’re pleased to announce a partnership with our member company EnergySageTM to host the new virtual component of the  Green Buildings Open House (GBOH) program. The virtual tour supports NESEA’s Green Buildings Open House program which allows participants to visit host sites to see firsthand the renewable energy and energy efficiency improvements implemented in their communities. In 2011, more than 10,000 people toured 504 GBOH host sites throughout the Northeast, including homes, businesses, and public buildings.

“In partnering with EnergySage, we hope to provide participants with a deeper, more robust experience as they tour this year’s projects,” says Jennifer Marrapese, Executive Director of NESEA. “Our mission to drive broader adoption of energy efficiency and sustainability is directly aligned with that of EnergySage. As consumers learn from their peers who have successfully implemented renewable solutions, and become more familiar with these technologies, they are more likely to start using them themselves.”

The virtual complement to NESEA’s GBOH tour hosted on EnergySage.com provides visitors and hosts with new, enhanced features and additional opportunities to discover and be discovered. The property profiles featured on EnergySage.com give each host the opportunity to share detailed information, advice and experience online with potential visitors as well as those unable to physically visit the sites. Online visitors and tour participants learn what motivated the host to invest in energy efficiency and clean energy systems such as solar, wind, geothermal, what advice he or she might have for others considering similar energy investments, as well as the costs and results achieved both in energy savings and financial returns. Because the tour is fully integrated with the comprehensive suite of resources available on the EnergySage web site, GBOH listings are linked directly to additional information such as brand and vendor profiles and reviews, explanations of the full range of clean energy technologies and applications, automated tools to determine appropriate technologies for specific properties, and help with executing a purchase.

A EnergySage home profile

This is an example of EnergySage’s profiles.

For our member network of sustainable energy and sustainable building professionals, the virtual tour is a valuable marketing vehicle for extending brand recognition and increasing a potential consumer’s awareness of their experience and capabilities. Through these customer testimonials, consumers will be able to see the actual results of NESEA members’ work in action. These case studies showcase examples of energy efficiency and clean energy installations across a broad range of applications, property types and geographies, giving consumers confidence to take action for their own properties.

“EnergySage’s research shows that a lack of clear understanding of these technologies and their economics is a major stumbling block to consumer purchases,” said Vikram Aggarwal, CEO of EnergySage. “We are delighted to partner with NESEA on its virtual Green Buildings Open House tour to provide the information and transparency needed to remove these barriers and bring clean energy into the mainstream.”

In more exciting news, on June 13, EnergySage announced that it received a Department of Energy SunShot Startup Investment to further its efforts to make clean energy more accessible to consumers.

Current clean energy system owners can create profiles of their clean energy installations and energy efficiency improvements at: http://www.energysage.com/share-your-experience

 

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