Policy & Codes
Mainstreaming Resilience: Making Resilient Design Standard Practice
While few argue about the importance of resilience in an age of climate change (with more intense storms, rising sea levels, more frequent drought, and worsening heat waves), there remains little focus on resilient design in building codes, zoning bylaws, and voluntary building rating systems, such as Passive House, Living Building Challenge, and LEED. In this interactive session, the presenters will lead a discussion about how to make resilient design more of a mainstream focus. They will report on inherent resilience aspects of Passive House, recent changes to the Living Building Challenge that address resilience, and new LEED pilot credits.
The Building Process as Infrastructure
Every building is tied to a series of infrastructure systems through government, wires, cables, energy, and humans. In this session an architect examines the "meta-infrastructure" that buildings nestle into.
Cities: How are Our Neighbors Doing?
Cities play critical roles in achieving our climate goals, and proactive approaches toward energy efficiency and clean energy drive economic development, revitalization, and local job growth. This session will provide a detailed look at the efficiency and clean energy plans in some of NYC’s neighboring cities – Philadelphia, Yonkers, and Albany– and discuss lessons learned from efforts to advance energy solutions. Such participation in city-to-city networks and city-state partnerships are particularly effective ways to unleash innovative solutions.
Transportation Infrastructure: Where We Are, How We Must Change
Mass transit in and into NYC serves 15.1 million people, yet people still drive their cars into the City. The nation’s largest mass transit system helps reduce carbon dramatically in the City, and a new congestion pricing proposal is supported in NYC, but ignored in Albany. Learn from two experts about where we are and where we need to go to move people in and out of NYC.
Water: Life Blood of Our Infrastructure
NYC uses about a billion gallons of water per day, and the system that delivers it to our tap is both vast and frail, as is the system to dispose of and reuse our water. Water costs many owners more than energy, and sometimes property taxes. Learn about the system, NYCDEP incentives to reduce usage, successful retrofit projects, and the current and future state of NYC’s sewer system.
Benefits of Cx and RCx: Compliant Buildings, Healthy People
This discussion will examine multifamily and commercial commissioning and retro-commissioning projects with an emphasis on: code compliance; increasing energy savings; preventing building system failures; resolving operations and maintenance issues; and improving indoor environmental quality (IAQ). The session presentations will describe some of the most common aspects of buildings, such as ventilation, to lesser-known measures, like user tools and resources available in the marketplace to start commissioning buildings for compliance, efficiency, and health.
Show Me the Money: If You Can't Pay for It, You Can't Do It
If a building owner feels they can’t afford to internally finance a retrofit job, they drop the ball, the associated savings, and the business for our sector. To avoid these business losses, practitioners need to understand local and regional incentives, traditional financing methods, and cutting edge ways to get your projects done. These three knowledgeable and highly experienced financial gurus will walk you through many ways to help close the deal.
Demand Response Strategies
This session will explore the incorporation of techniques to increase performance in utility-based energy programs and to draw insights from current Demand Response (DR) uses in New York City. Speakers will review the benefits, concerns, and solutions encountered in actual DR projects, successful DR integration at one of the City’s well-known landmark buildings, going beyond traditional building efficiency initiatives during design and construction, and including backup power sources to ensure grid reliability.
Solar in the City
Solar electric (PV) and hot water (DHW) generation systems are visible throughout the metropolitan area, yet some view solar in NYC as obstacle. New York has a thriving market with some of the best incentives and among the highest electricity rates in the country. During this session, experts will discuss successful installations, community solar projects, Building Integrated Solar PV (BIPV), and what the changes in government incentives will mean to the industry.
Microgrid Solutions: From Building to Region
Microgrids are sophisticated backup power systems, both energy supply and demand, to strengthen overall grid resilience. Ranging from single buildings, to neighborhoods, and then to regions, they are able to operate if the main grid is down. This session will highlight a bold NY statewide initiative encouraging microgrid development, and describe both a citywide and regional example of proposed microgrids, their functions, and the institutional concerns to get these systems running.
Lighting = Cash + Code
Lighting efficiency has increased substantially with technology inherent in LED’s, yet few buildings have come on board. Codes will drive changes in lighting down the road that should be addressed today. Daylighting is very important to use, insuring that its inherent heat gain does not negatively impact the building load. Listen to three leaders in the field discuss the newest technologies in existing lighting, lighting controls and code requirements, and effectively using daylighting.
The Property Manager's Perspective: Getting Value from Benchmarking and Audits
Large multifamily buildings in New York City are required to conduct benchmarking and ASHRAE II audits of their buildings by law. Learn from leading property managers how to use these mandates to net real returns for your building. Property managers will discuss the use of benchmarking in routine building operations. Case studies of retrofit projects that resulted from audit recommendations will also be explored.
BQDM: Retrofitting for Reliability
From Brownsville to Woodhaven, new policies and practices that are changing how we identify, finance, and implement energy conservation projects. This session will provide an overview of Con Edison’s Brooklyn Queens Demand Management (BQDM) program then dive into the innovative strategies that are improving grid reliability and savings dollars. From big to small, commercial to residential, we’re covering it all.
New York City's Data Revolution
Building owners and decision-makers of New York City’s largest buildings now have more information than ever before to understand their energy consumption and prioritize investments in new equipment and maintenance. Many building owners are undertaking efficiency measures as a result of this information, but they still face a range of obstacles to pursuing building upgrades, such as limited capital, difficulties navigating financing and incentive programs, and the complexities of undertaking energy efficiency upgrades.
Reforming the Energy Vision's (REV's) Effect on You
The electric industry is in transition. Innovation and increasing competitiveness of renewable energy resources, combined with aging infrastructure, extreme weather events, and system security and resiliency needs, are all leading to significant changes in how electricity is generated, distributed, managed and consumed. This session will describe how New York State’s Reforming the Energy Vision (REV) strategy will lead to regulatory changes that promote more efficient use of energy, deeper penetration of renewable energy resources such as wind and solar, and wider deployment of “distributed” energy resources.
Construction Costs and Operating Costs: Balanced Decision Making
This session will give real world examples of multi-family affordable housing projects that made decisions about trade-offs between construction costs and reduced operating costs. While project teams strive to have no- or low-cost implications for environmentally responsible building features, sometimes a simple payback analysis or life cycle costing can help make decisions. We will have perspectives from RMI’s Super Efficient Housing Program Manager, a green building consultant and an architect to explore some case studies.