 The last couple of days have gone back up to Hawaii warm, where we had that incredible cold snap a couple of weeks ago. So if you need to cool down at all, we are going to be taking a little journey today to the ultra cool city of Seattle, cool not only from the weather standpoint, but very cool in being one of the high tech centers of the entire United States of America. That's where Microsoft is, and that in turn has magnetized the city to have a lot of other high tech entities, including the Seattle Energy Office. Seattle is one of the most progressive cities in the US of A, if not the most. Joining us today is none other than Mr. Dwayne John Lenn, who is the Seattle Energy Code Advisor and a long term friend. Welcome, welcome to Hawaii, warm Hawaii, Mr. John Lenn. Thanks Howard. Yeah, I heard you had a terrible cold snap there and got down into the fifties. Is it? There was one morning I live in cool Manoa four o'clock in the morning. It was 55. It's a rough life. We mainlanders know, want you to know that we feel your pain, and we'll send care packages as soon as we can dig out of this snow. Can you show my little greeting card? Yeah, so that little picture on the left I just took across the street yesterday. It was really pretty if a bit a bit cold, but yeah, we're ready to go. Wow, and it was that photo you sent was just covered in snow. Speaking of snow, why don't you give an introduction by doing your first slide, Dwayne? Well, like a lot of cities, Seattle has a climate action plan that says we have to be completely carbon neutral by 2050, that's buildings, transportation, waste hauling the whole bit. What's different here is that we have to show the mayor that we're making progress every year. And this year's report card showed us that we were actually going back the wrong way a little bit. So we needed to take some serious action to get back on track. Big advantage we have here is that the cities individually are allowed to make their own energy code provisions that go beyond the state code, at least for commercial buildings and big apartments. So Seattle's often where new ideas get a test drive. And then when it turns out that the sky didn't fall after all, they get picked up in the next state code or other places around the country. And up till now, Seattle's been the only place in the state that did this. But this year, one county is going for a higher level code and a few of the smaller cities are getting serious about this too. So the legislature is considering extending this to residential so that cities could also require houses in their communities to meet a somewhat higher standard. The idea, Howard, is that if you let the leaders lead, you give the followers something to follow and progress moves along much more quickly. Wow, that is a profound statement. I very much enjoy that statement. And I can identify with its opposite sometimes as a would-be code leader in Hawaii. So just a little background for maybe the uninitiated, there are all kinds of building codes. And you can appreciate that, especially if you're going to build a high-rise. You want a structural code, you want a fire code, a water code, so forth, so forth. And our Duane's and my totally unprejudiced opinion, the energy code is central to it all. And this is the first and foremost way where we are going to get to a carbon neutral economy. That means we produce as much energy, clean energy as we consume. And as all Hawaii residents are aware, Governor Ege many years ago signed into code the aspiration that we will have 100% clean energy by the year 2045. We were the first state in the nation to do that. And maybe the quickest, easiest, most cost-effective way of doing that, of achieving that goal is to build really, really efficient, buildings and that's where Duane and I come in. We write very efficient codes. The advantage that Duane has in living in maybe the most progressive city in the nation is the fact that he can be a leader and others follow. I just really like that concept. So I wanted to get into some specifics here, Duane. Sure. Last week our mayor signed off on the new energy code after a unanimous city council vote. And the headline grabbing part of it is that it pretty much eliminates fossil fuel use for space heating and water heating, the two biggest gas uses in buildings. So we're still letting new buildings use gas cooking in fireplaces for now, but otherwise they'll be running much cleaner. And I should also mention electric resistance heat, like the element in your toaster oven or your hairdryer. We've got lots of clean energy here in Seattle from Hydro, but we have to be super efficient with it going forward so that we'll have enough power available for all those electric cars we're going to have in a few years. And so instead of gas or electric resistance, we'll be using heat pumps. So Howard, would you mind if I took a minute to describe heat pumps? Oh, there we go. In case you're thinking this is some futuristic deal, you've all got one right in your own kitchen. And this is my extremely scientific diagram of how it works. That really cold fluid circulates through the tube inside the fridge and draws more heat out of that cold air so that it gets even colder inside the fridge. And then on the way out of the fridge, it gets squeezed hard enough to get really hot and that heat drifts up in your kitchen. So your fridge acts like a little furnace in there. Same thing on a bigger scale, outdoors. Heat pump squeezes heat out of the outdoor air, moves it indoors, and it's essentially just an air conditioning, air conditioner running backwards. In Hawaii, you mostly just need the heat for your hot water or maybe a swimming pool. But here in Seattle, we needed to keep our rooms toasty warm as well. So I might mention that many, many years ago when heat pumps got good, this is decades ago, the hotels started producing a lot of their cold air for the hotel they're air conditioning, with heat pumps taking advantage of that waste cold air, and of course any hotel needs vast, vast amounts of hot water. So we're making use of both sides very, very early in the game. So can I get into an especially geeky topic here of energy modeling? Because this is the tech Hawaii, you guys don't mind. All the big buildings and the complicated buildings like hospitals and labs tend to use energy modeling, which is a big Harry calculation that lets you make some of your part, some parts of your building worse than code in trade for making other parts better. So in Washington state, we decided to make carbon emissions our metric instead of energy use. In Seattle, we love to brag about how clean our electricity is, but really we're still connected to the whole Western grid, which means that turning on the lights, which here might have somebody shoveling another lump of coal into a power plant in Wyoming. So we did assign a carbon value to electricity, in case you're interested, that's 0.7 pounds of carbon dumped into the atmosphere for every kilowatt hour of electricity we burn. That way, instead of calculating how much energy we're using and then converting that to figure out how much carbon emissions we're causing, we're just going straight for the emissions, and we're going to bring those down to zero. And I might mention that it's one thing where Hawaii is way more ambitious than Seattle or somewhat more ambitious in that you're shooting to have that island carbon neutral by 2045 falls. We've set 2050 for our target. Either one is going to be really pretty ambitious. A couple of years back, our city council realized that 2050 is really given what's happening in the whole world. That's too slow. So we started planning a Green New Deal-type arrangement that would move that target date all the way up to 2030 or so. We had to put that on the shelf to deal with this pandemic we're all in, but I wouldn't be surprised to see if it came back to life again once we got everybody vaccinated and opened up our businesses again. We're all being able to take vacations in Maui. So do you have any slides for us, Dwayne? Well, yeah, I think there was one that was just up a bit ago called TSPR. Now, that's this is a whole new acronym for you all to learn. Total system performance ratio. And I've got those two pictures up there because I'm saying we're looking at the whole building's HVAC system. Kind of the way we look at a heat pump in that in that we're calculating what's the overall amount of energy used or in this case carbon emitted in the year compared with the standard. And so because right now the way your codes are set up, you can have every HVAC component in your whole building meet code and still end up with a really wasteful and inefficient system happens all the time. So this brand new concept, PSPR, means that your HVAC engineer has to calculate how much emissions of building will cause each year, both from the fuel burning inside your building and from the fuel burning back at the power plant and make sure that it's no worse than what we've decided is a pretty good building. And Pacific Northwest National Labs out here, their geniuses created a free online calculator so that it just takes the engineer a few hours to work this out. So the first impact of this will be to eliminate the least efficient systems. But maybe even more significant is that for the first time, it's going to force engineers to know what their overall system efficiency is for the whole building. They've never been required to calculate that before, at least not since they were in college. So once we put a number on that, the people who develop the most efficient systems are going to start bragging about it in their marketing materials, if that's human nature. And maybe we'll be starting a little arms race for efficiency. And so I can't really wait to see what the next few years brings us as these new buildings come online. And are you eventually shooting for net zero energy buildings? At the state level, we are shooting for a 70 percent reduction from the code we had back in 2008. To the code we have in in 2030. And and thus far, we are still on track. We are making the right amount of progress, although the next part of it, since we did all the easy stuff ages ago, is going to be especially tough. But and in Seattle, we're talking about a carbon neutral city, really. But I would say that the idea of zero energy buildings is maybe a little bit misplaced because nobody is going to do a high rise hotel zero energy, right? That would require even an extremely efficient building would need 20 or 30 acres of PV. I mean, it just be out of control. So we had to come up with some standard that requires buildings to be really efficient and to use their whatever rooftop space they have, use it well for for renewables and and then figure out how we can do the rest of the renewables for running all our computers and and, you know, making enchiladas and everything else that we have to do. Find a way to get clean energy out to those uses as well. And you didn't use the word electrification, but you you hinted at it. Can you explain how Seattle is headed towards electrification? Yeah. So what we did in in the first instance is that we have now taken away the opportunity to use fossil fuels in your building for space heating and water heating. So those move to heat pump systems. And for now, we left those smaller uses, the cooking in the and in the fireplaces. They're they're pretty emotional issues. And and we don't really have good replacements for them. Yeah, at least at the commercial scale. So we the important thing was to to take a big step forward, eliminate probably 90 percent of gas use from new buildings. And and and importantly, focused on making all of our other electric uses more efficient in that way. We're taking a giant step towards electrification. I think maybe first in the nation in that in that sense, which probably at hydro, you've got that's a lot your logical place. The hydro is great and our population keeps growing. And we need that electricity for a lot of things. And so we there's also a little worry that climate change could seriously impact our snowpack. Which we depend on to keep melting little by little during the summer and feeding our eating our dams. So we've got to be cautious and use our electricity, our clean electricity as wisely as possible. Should we move into refrigerants? Yep, let's do refrigerants. Yes. OK, so little known fact for you. Just about exactly half of all the refrigerants used around the world. And refrigerants, I'm talking about every every heat pump and chiller and air conditioner uses this fluid to move things around. About half of that. Ends up leaking out into the atmosphere. Some of it by slow leaks, you know, grocery store coolers are notorious for this. But also, when the maintenance guy wax a pipe with his stepladder and all the refrigerant in the whole building dumps out at one time. And so our most common refrigerants have global warming potential that's a couple thousand times worse than carbon. So it doesn't do us any good to be super, super careful about reducing our carbon footprint if we're also going to cause even more global warming with our refrigerants. Right. So Washington state, you can see on the map there joined a few others in starting to tighten up the rules on what kind of refrigerants we're going to allow. And they're already going further than that in Europe and Canada. So this puts the manufacturers on notice that they need to get equipment out onto the market here that uses less harmful refrigerants. An interesting tidbit for you, though, Howard, for heat pump water heaters. We've found that the best and most economical systems available use CO2 as their refrigerant. So instead of using refrigerants with a global warming potential of 2,000, it's a global warming potential of one. And you'd have a hard time getting much better than that. Wow, that is really, really impressive. And you were talking about the entire city going green. What about all those gazillions of cars and trucks you have in your great big city spewing all of that nasty stuff out of the tailpipe? You're going to do anything about that. You know, I've noticed the same thing happening on H1 in Honolulu at rush hour. But for sure, that's a gradual process we're moving in. And it's one of those things where a small state like Washington doesn't have a lot of political clout as far as changing the whole industry. But with California moving forward assertively, we're going to be able to follow along on that. And our plan, I think there is actually a proposed legislation and process to eliminate those sales of new fossil fuel engines in 15 years or so. So it's one of those things where we have to gradually we have to make it possible for people to plug their cars in for other things to happen. And we have to then watch that manufacturing process happen. I have noticed that all the big car makers are sinking all of their chips into this big bet now. So I think it's just a matter of time. And, you know, there's another thing I wanted to mention about global warming stuff is foam plastics that the real environmental problem isn't the foam insulation itself. It's the blowing agents they use back at the plant to make them. So now we're requiring everybody to use plastics that were made with blowing agents that are way less harmful and industries responded nicely to that. Notice, of course, when you saw that map before, when California does something, it makes it a lot easier for the rest of us smaller states. An interesting thing I learned is that is that while the new blowing agents did raise the cost about 10 percent for every inch of thickness, they also gave the installation about a 10 percent better art value. So it was really a watch there. Wow, that is impressive. Just when I thought I knew everything, I definitely did not know that. And the vehicles that you were speaking about are electric vehicles, which are very much promulgated here in Hawaii, especially on this island. We have much shorter distances to drive. Yes, that helps. We're pushing them like mad. And I might say that when we look at total electrification, we're looking at these great big batteries in these cars and these trucks. And they can interface with the utility. And if the utility needs some extra juice, they can, with agreement with the vehicle owner, actually tap those EV batteries as a source on a very temporary basis. Just to mediate a term peak. No, that that works. I think that concept is known as the smart garage. And I think it's got a lot of potential there. And then the owner of the vehicle gets compensated by the utility. That that sounds like a better deal than running a gas peaking plant. Hey, can we talk about solar panels? Oh, we don't know anything about solar panels. Yeah, I love it because solar panels get people really excited. And they're shiny and high tag and really visible. Well, all of my efficiency stuff is either completely invisible or really boring. Explains why I don't get invited to parties very often. But I just wanted to make clear that the dull stuff like my insulation and water heaters and lighting controls all have much faster payback, especially where you are, you're paying 35 cents a kilowatt hour out there. And with efficiency, you never have to worry about whether Hawaiian Electric is willing to pay you for your excess power. But still, in Seattle, we're gently ramping up our solar requirements that now we require a quarter watt per square foot of interior space. In case you're wondering, that's about three percent of the roof for a two story building or 36 percent for a 20 story building. Um, we did have a couple problems developing this. And one was that our affordable housing people have really tight budgets and two that some buildings wanted to use their roofs for gardens or sun decks or whatever. So to solve both at once, we said affordable housing doesn't have to comply with this at all. And also other buildings that don't want to put the solar on the roof can comply by gifting their solar over to some affordable housing in town. So we'll see how this plays out in a few years. But but to me, it looks like a match made in heaven. Yeah, we're looking at a similar proposition where our latest code requires that residences have EV ready electric vehicle ready stubs in their garages so that when you're ready to put your charger in, all you have to do is unscrew the gadget and stick your wires in and boom, you're ready to go. And in shopping centers, also, they must have X number of EV EV ready chargers. I mean, and the advantage is that this occurs when you're building something a lot easier to put a wire through the ground when there's just bare dirt in front of you instead of when you're looking at a huge slab of concrete way, way, way down. Trenching through those existing parking lots is always a drag. Yeah, one more thing I wanted to bring up, Howard. Sure. Most of the buildings, this is the building performance standards issue. Most of the buildings we have 30 years from now, you can already see out there today. Because in most of those that were built back when we didn't care too much about energy efficiency. So it's a tough problem because landlords are almost never in the mood to spend money on upgrades, right? So a couple of years ago, the state here decided to give all the big building owners a few years advanced notice and then they'll either have to beat this average efficiency standard we've set up for their building type or prove that they're making progress every year on an upgrade plan. Or if they don't do either of those hit pretty big annual fine, a dollar square foot per year for the whole building. So Washington State is serious about this. And in fact, there's a bill in the legislature right now that will require this for buildings, 10,000 square feet and up instead of 50,000. I can see immediately that the owners of the existing buildings will just welcome this with open arms. This is why we built in a big cushion in advance so that you had five years or so before it kicked in at all. And then you don't have to have it all together at that point, but you at least have to be making progress. You have to have a plan in place and be making progress every year on it. But yes, I'm there's a lot of reasons I'm not popular, but that being the enforcer of new regulations is always is always one of them. See this way, Howard, we've got we're we're tapping down on the overall carbon emissions from our buildings. We're making the buildings more efficient in the way they use electricity. And we're going back in and getting our existing buildings to start coming up to stuff as well. And all these things have to converge in just about a decade from now. And I think that's when they'll let me retire. Yeah, except you'll be having much too much fun. It could be. Yeah. Yeah. And unless, well, I certainly get the same reaction from people because every year we are building new buildings most most every year, but it's replacing or it represents only one percent of the entire building stock in a given year, unless Seattle. I mean, you guys are going to like gangbusters. No, it's about it's about one percent get built and one percent get overhauled. Yeah, that's a slow, a slow process. So we have about one minute left. Any wrap up summaries of the great cool city of Seattle. Yeah, you you really need to get everybody on board as best as you can. You need your electives to be where you are. You need labor to understand what's going on and be included in this. And and we, you know, the activists all want to go faster. There are other developers want to go slower. We all are playing in the same playground. We've got to do it together. Well, you and I have been to national conferences and what we're talking about locally, and I can certainly identify with what you're talking about happens at the national scale. That definitely makes life interesting. And don't think about retiring. Dwayne, I mean, you can you imagine all the stuff, you know? And if it just went and sat in a rocking chair for the rest of its life, that would be a crime. Indeed. So we'll just keep having fun with this, Howard. Yeah, yeah. And on that cheery note, Dwayne John Lund, manager of energy codes for the great city of Seattle. Thank you so very much. This has been great fun. And I believe your contact information was on the last slide there. So if people want to pepper you with questions and suggestions, please do. And with that, we bid you fond of you, Dwayne, and our beloved audience, think, take away code green. See you next time.