Process and Practice

This session presents lessons learned and actionable recommendations for designers, operators, and owners of central heat pump water heater systems (CHPWHs) from on-going research of early adopters. A NYSERDA study monitors hundreds of data points per minute to track performance, demand, and faults in five CHPWHs. With the addition of operations staff feedback, failure causes and efficiency-drivers are determined and low-cost improvements implemented. Presenters will discuss design vs.

Everyone knows sustainable design is good for people and the planet—like spinach, it’s good for us, but not everyone wants a bite. This interactive session shows how to make sustainability irresistible by connecting it to what clients really care about: budget, performance, and social impact. Through real-world stories and hands-on scenarios, you’ll learn practical ways to reframe sustainability as smart business and great design—no greenwashing, no lectures, just results.

With mounting climate and carbon pressures, leadership depends on collaborating across disciplines, communicating value clearly, and convincing stakeholders to act—especially in existing buildings. This session explores recycling construction materials as a practical, low‑risk circular strategy especially in policy‑driven retrofit markets like NYC under Local Law 97. Using architectural glass as a main case study, presenters will show how specification, coordination, and metrics can reduce waste and embodied carbon within familiar project workflows.

The building decarbonization conversation is shifting from one focused on emissions, energy use and cost, towards something more tangible: the air people breathe, the buildings they live and work in, and the systems that protect them from an increasingly unstable and unpredictable natural environment. This session will discuss “Holistic Value” frameworks for evaluating building design and construction, associated energy use, and human and environmental impacts.

In many affordable housing preservation projects, seemingly good electrification projects are deemed infeasible. We present real NYC projects where the decision was made not to electrify, and how the decisions were made. Then we turn to the audience: using your own assumptions and experience, convince us otherwise. Through live discussion, we explore why teams reach different conclusions and what it will take to move the right projects forward.

As AI reshapes, well, everything, practitioners are asking: How can I use AI to expand my impact without compromising my values or professional judgment? This session presents complementary perspectives on AI adoption. Elizabeth Kelly shares how she transformed her decarbonization expertise into an AI-enabled workflow, to help a small consulting practice rapidly identify investment-ready retrofit opportunities while keeping human expertise and accountability centered.

Can the fight against climate change also create a more resilient and emergency-ready campus? Stony Brook University’s decarbonization efforts prioritize resilience and engagement of a cross-functional team of campus stakeholders representing facilities, workforce development, capital projects, communications, and community relations. The new infrastructure will include a fuel cell microgrid integrated with networked geothermal, that can provide clean, reliable energy so that the university and its hospital have consistent delivery of heating, cooling, and electricity during an emergency.

By sharing measured results from multifamily housing ventilation system retrofits across organizations, this group of industry leaders comes together to accelerate learning and raise the bar for retrofit performance. Focused on central ventilation systems, presenters share case studies with pre- and post-retrofit data, examining gaps between modeled and measured outcomes, commissioning lessons, and operational challenges to help scale successful approaches sector-wide.

This session will focus on how AI is impacting project workflows today. One of AI’s strengths is reducing manual effort and enabling analysis at a scale not feasible with human labor alone. In true NESEA style, this is not a thought piece. Multiple technology providers will kick off with a round-robin, sharing how they use AI to deliver value today. The session will then shift to a structured discussion, bringing in attendee perspectives on AI’s environmental impact and how we can leverage technology to solve problems, not compound them.

This panel will highlight practical lessons and past experiences of designing energy efficiency and decarbonization programs and projects with communities in mind. We will focus on how involving communities, big or small, is essential to the execution of different sustainable initiatives, and argue that this method has the greatest potential for long-term benefits.

How do high performance building practitioners persuade clients to pursue deep reductions in operational and embodied carbon? Industry experts from architecture, energy consulting, and development share lessons on owner decision making, cost, risk, and defining an acceptable outcome for new construction and rehab projects. The discussion offers honest reflection on what persuasion methods succeed, when results are limited, and how some strategies fail. Presenters will also share lessons learned, and perspectives on what strategies work best with various stakeholders.

New York State is leading by example to decarbonize facilities in support of the state’s climate action goals. State entities (Office of General Services and SUNY) managing large campuses (Empire State Plaza and UAlbany) have been working to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This panel will discuss the approaches and processes, and share the unique challenges of developing long-term action plans for State facilities while balancing operational and organizational priorities.

Embodied carbon assessments have traditionally excluded MEP systems, but recent analyses show MEP systems contribute more embodied carbon than structures and enclosures for certain building types. This session will bring together experts from different sectors to emphasize the importance of considering the embodied carbon of MEP systems alongside operational carbon. Speakers will share the current challenges in this field and provide a roadmap for quantifying, and ultimately reducing, MEP embodied carbon.

The member businesses of the Seed Collaborative pursue a common mission: to lock carbon into the walls of buildings through the use of straw structural insulated panels (S-SIPs). The bigger bet they are making, though, isn't about the material; it's about the model. This keynote goes inside a network of decentralized, bioregional manufacturers built around one cooperatively owned hub, with shared R&D, financing, purchasing, and training that no single small manufacturer could afford alone.