Beyond Energy*
Data-Driven Design and the Living Building Challenge
Super-insulated construction, simple yet efficient building systems, and modern solar generation have made net zero energy a realistic project goal for new construction even in cold climates. However, achieving this without the use of red-list materials is a serious balancing act. Moisture control, air tightness, and thermal isolation are critical; evolving envelope products must be tested.
NESEA Emerging Professionals Career Forum
It's back by popular demand! NESEA's Career Forum is a free resource extended to emerging professionals, graduate and undergraduate students pursuing a career in the high performance building and renewable energy sectors. During this forum, participants will gain insights into the sustainable building sector and strategies for obtaining related positions. Topics for discussion will include types of careers available, strategies for gaining experience, identifying opportunities, job seeking and networking.
Does Electric Grid 2.0 Mean Energy Democracy?
The U.S. energy system is undergoing a remarkable transformation to decentralized and renewable power. Transportation and heating are becoming electrified. Clean, renewable power is growing at an exponential rate and competing on cost with fossil fuel energy sources. Smartphones and automated controls allow an unprecedented decentralization of control. This session explores how the 21st century electric grid can give individual consumers power over their power, but only if the rules are written right.
Material Selections: A Life Cycle Perspective Viewed Through One Home
Sometimes the things we think are a poor environmental choice turn out to be not so bad. Sometimes they are worse. Ben Morelli, along with Bensonwood energy & sustainability experts – Rheanon DeMond and Danny Veerkamp - will discuss the results of an LCA of a single family home; from material source through building lifespan. Life cycle assessment (LCA) is one of many emerging tools available to building designers and construction firms to measure and guide reduction of their structures’ environmental impact. The presenters feel it is essential to look at a broad variety of impact categories –not just climate and energy considerations - in order to assess the trade-offs that may be associated with the emerging paradigm of advanced, green buildings. The results of this analysis confirm the importance of systemic energy reduction strategies, while challenging some of our preconceived assumptions on the relative impacts of various materials.
The Future of Net Zero Energy
Net Zero Energy Buildings have reaching a tipping point. The economic limitations that restricted their success in the past have changed drastically and the technologies needed to achieve Net Zero Energy are now readily available. This session will uncover the strategies and technologies used and the policies and programs in place that are accelerating the uptake of Net Zero Energy Buildings and Communities. This session will also highlight inspiring case studies including project teams’ motivation for pursuing Net Zero Energy Building Certification, how they achieved it and how they maintain performance over time. Brad Liljequist, Technical Director of the Net Zero Energy Program of the Living Building Challenge, will uncover the trends emerging in Net Zero Energy and discuss how each participant can take the lessons learned into their own practice.
Drivers, Trends, and Tools for Healthier Materials Selection
This session will educate participants on drivers, tools, and trends for healthier materials selection. As LEED v4 and the Living Building Challenge's Materials Petal become mainstream, designers are starting to focus on material's environmental and human health impacts. In the past, "green" materials were simply defined by physical attributes: the amount of recycled and regional content, allowable VOC's, etc. Because we are now tasked with demonstrating optimization across the entire supply chain, tools and practices which facilitate "transparency" and maximize designers' decision making capabilities are emerging. This presentation will introduce the following: Red Lists, Environmental Product Declarations (EPD's), Health Product Declarations (HPD's), and extended producer responsibility. Our panel experts include a manufacturer which is promoting these tools and finding many benefits through their supply chain optimization, as well as local practitioners who are developing the tools and guiding their implementation.
Achieving Zero Net Energy Affordably Today: Mobile Home Replacement
A modular home factory in Wilder, VT has opened to build zero-net energy mobile home replacement units. While there have been other efforts to replace mobile homes outside Vermont, they have done so with newer manufactured housing units that suffer from poor indoor air quality, high energy costs, and durability issues. This session will provide an overview of the issues with manufactured and mobile homes including financing and depreciation, attributes of the zero-net energy replacement modular home, the design and build process, and the comprehensive whole-house monitoring system. Detailed monitored energy and environmental data will be shared from two years of occupancy. The session will also discuss design challenges/constraints associated with cost, prefabrication, and transportation of a Modular/mobile home. We will present a comparative look at cost and energy with other related housing initiatives, as well as show the cost to benefit analysis of what it would take to bring the project to the Passive House level.
Offsite Construction: the Future?
A panel of Architects and Manufacturers steeped in the offsite construction industry will discuss the future of offsite construction. Topics include the stigma of the industry itself in the US versus widespread successes overseas, challenges of the process within our current system, the truth behind perceived cost/speed/quality advantages, and the frank and current reality of it all.
Navigating Product Selection: How to Find the Greenest Materials in the Age of Full Disclosure
Are you drowning in the arcane alphabet soup of product labels? Frustrated with inflated environmental claims from manufacturers? Unsure of the health and safety risks associated with your favorite building materials? Help is on the way! Join the experts from BuildingGreen, who have been researching and writing about green building products for 25 years. In this hands-on half-day workshop, you will learn how to cut through the b.s. and select safer, greener products, and you’ll get an in-depth understanding of the trove of information you can find in product disclosure tools like environmental product declarations, health product declarations, and the newly required safety data sheets. Understand the full context, get down and dirty with the devil in the details, and learn which information you can safely ignore. You’ll also glimpse some of the newest, most innovative products that are paving the way for a greener future, and you will leave with powerful educational materials to share with clients and other team members. Bring your questions, share your insights, and get ready for an enlightening and entertaining morning!
Whole Property Retrofit: Redesigning Suburbia for an Uncertain Energy & Food Future
How do we turn the "problem" of suburbia into an enormous opportunity to create a set of resilient systems that can adapt to a changing world? Learn how a holistic design process and a whole-property retrofit in Maine has created a suburban model of living that requires significantly less time, money and energy to run while simultaneously enhancing the thermal comfort and well-being of the residents. This case study presents a transferable suite of findings on efficiency, renewables, integrated landscape elements, food production, transportation and “incremental deep energy retrofitting” which have weaned this eighty-year-old home completely off of fossil fuels.