 This session we're calling passive solar intelligent design And what could be better than making sure that we try to do things intelligently, right? And and obviously passive solar is a very important piece of You know of a designer in terms of how we think about things So we're going to hear from two folks today from first from Michael Hindle Who is the chair of the Mid-Atlantic passive home Alliance, and then we will hear from a see perique Who is a partner with the zenith's design build and so Hi, thank you very much I'm with Mid-Atlantic passive house Alliance, and I want to make one clarification right off the bat While what we do is it is drawn from North American pioneers in passive solar design and super insulated envelopes We are not your grandfathers or fathers passive solar What I'm talking about today is passive house, which is very specific energy standard and associated building Methodologies, so I'm going to begin very briefly with a little bit of background to explain why we need to do this The inner governmental panel on climate change you all know I assume has declared that we need to achieve 85% carbon emissions reductions by 2050 to avoid catastrophic climate change the meanwhile the International energy agency is projecting rapid increase in demand for energy worldwide driven in large part by third-world economies coming online and using more fuel and demanding more energy and Most of that increases in oil and gas if we had a 300% increase in renewable energy market penetration We would be nowhere near our goal of the carbon emissions. We have to achieve So the conclusion there is that there is absolutely no way to generate our way out of this problem I'm not speaking against renewable energy sources. I'm saying we have to do all of that But if we do not address energy efficiency, we have accomplished Next to nothing as far as climate change is concerned We are Disproportionately responsible in the United States we use roughly twice We emit roughly twice the amount of carbon per capita as other advanced civilized industrialized countries Other countries that are beating us in the green energy markets such as Germany and Japan have equally high standards of living But are emitting half the amount of carbon So let's not allow any of our politicians to tell us that this will represent a loss in jobs or a loss in living standards Or a loss in our way of life because it simply will not Finally buildings represent 48% roughly of carbon emissions So if we do we have to begin or we have to at least prioritize The carbon emissions associated with building operational energy use which is where passive house comes in so Passive house it turns out the good news is that passive house delivers these levels of energy use reductions and associated carbon Emissions reductions it delivers them now Basically in Europe there's a group of scientists the 2,000 watt society which aggregated climate data and said how much energy Can we use as a global society and still have a habitable climate and The answer was 2,000 watts of continuous usage per capita Now if you extract out the heating and cooling energy of that Total amount of energy we can use for food Production Manufacturing and everything else the transportation everything we do in our lives We're left with about the equivalent an energetic equivalent of a hairdryer to heat our home on the coldest day of the year Or use that same amount of energy to cool it on the hottest day of the summer So passive house achieves this now. So what is passive house? It is the most ambitious and tested energy standard in the world. You haven't heard in the United States That's because Europe is 15 to 20 years ahead of us It is also an associated assortment of building methodologies and strategies and a set of basic design principles, which I'll get to in a moment It achieves 90% energy use reductions for heating and cooling. That's the standard It's not optional. You can't get a certain number of points and get a certain level of certification You do it or you don't And it achieves when you add back in your appliances Lighting computers, etc. It achieves 70 to 80% energy use reductions overall before Renewable energy is applied which means that renewable energy at that point is much more cost-effective to apply and zero out your energy demand So basically the design principles are that we focus on Minimizing the demand in the first place We do this by optimizing the thermal envelope with a super insulated envelope and high performance windows and doors We have an airtight envelope which reduces the amount of energy that is lost through the infiltration and exfiltration of air But also as an important health and safety consideration reduces the amount of moisture that could be in introduced into the building envelope which could lead to mold mildew and Rot or building failure We have in order to then live in these tight houses, which incidentally do have operable windows This will not feel like any other like it will not feel different from any other house But the building envelope when you want to close up and have it be energy efficient is very tight So we need a ventilation system the ventilation system introduces a fresh flow a Constant flow of fresh air which has been filtered and also heat exchanged So all the energy loss that might be associated with losing warm air to the outside in the winter is transferred to the incoming air supply They're about 96% efficient. So there's almost no energy loss associated with ventilation We eliminate thermal bridges in construction. So if you have an R 13 wall in this country code built wall There's a wood stud going through which has a lower our value. So that wall actually is maybe an R 11 if you're lucky So we eliminate thermal bridges and have a super insulated envelope Finally we optimize and perhaps not finally but the last on my list But it's they're all happening at the same time in the design process is we want to optimize for solar gain through building orientation the solar heat gain factor of your windows and you want tuned shading devices to keep out sun in the summertime So Generally people say green buildings are prohibitively expensive, which is not true turns out that if you Pursue this strategy and reduce your demand so much that you can virtually eliminate your heating and cooling system Which means that your passive houses have been built in the United States for an incremental cost increase in construction of 2 to 15% the 15% house I saw had enormous north-facing windows, which is not a good passive solar design decision So I think that 15% was driven by their desire for a view So they are cost-effective now and that safe let's just say to be safe 2 to 10 percent incremental cost increase in construction is offset by 80% and operational energy decrease so if we were to make every house in this country Every building in this country. It can be commercial or institutional 30 percent more efficient right now We every house or building between now and 2050 would have to be net positive 34 percent Which we all know is not going to happen If every building in the country right now were to be 50 percent more efficient every building built between now and 2050 would have to be passive house. So that gives you an idea of how How important energy efficiency in buildings is so there are all sorts of corollary benefits my time is up So perhaps in the question-and-answer period if we have any we can get to those but now a city is going to talk about a particular case Thank you very much Michael for that introduction. Thank you everyone for being in attendance here Special thanks to the representatives Hi Special thanks to representatives and members of the legislative staff that are here also in attendance I was here last year at the 13th annual renewable energy caucus and it's been quite a year hasn't it we've witnessed some serious storms and Climactic forces that have we've never seen before in this country with the soil and Mississippi River right now Pushing over its banks and threatening farm life and ways of life for many people down in the southern central part of the United States We've had a housing bubble completely burst and Smytherines fell to the ground when we had existing buildings that were torn down and new Energy hog the term McMansion has been used have started sprouting up all over the country and these were all overvalued and Poorly built and terrible on energy and there's a certain trend going forward that Michael first addressed with the passive house Program, which is to simply change the way we're using energy and change the way our building stock is using energy in this country And you mentioned the number 48% that's roughly close to the amount of carbon output the building sector produces in the United States alone So I come from the building sector design build Portion of the economy where that uses a tremendous amount of carbon not just at the at the after the buildings are built But after they're occupied and after people are using them to heat and cool So the perspective that I come from is I think we can using creative engineering and architecture and principles of thermal reclamation Create an energy-efficient box build a better box than out there today and do so in a manner that a doesn't cost more than it should and be It it creates a situation where you no longer have to sacrifice to be eco friendly and I'm going to get into a specific example quite soon Mike my company's background just to give you a little bit of history on us in 06 We won an award for global green USA We rebuilt 16 square blocks of post Katrina, New Orleans according to a net zero energy affordable housing model So all the buildings produce 100% of their own energy and they were all able to be purchased by local community workers and people that were not Extremely well there didn't have an excess 15% to invest right off the bat From then we've been taking our model of net zero energy design spreading it throughout the country in California We work especially with community redevelopment agency the city of Los Angeles and we're redeveloping certain buildings that are funded by public money But we're meeting the title 24 energy standard in New York We're working with New York State energy research development authority to leverage rate payer funds and to take advantage of various regional greenhouse gas initiative dollars that are incentivizing multi-family building owners to also Reduce their energy consumption on site and that's going to be the theme of what I talked about today Is you can produce energy renewably or not so renewably all you'd like but if you don't reduce how much each Specific site demands that we're not doing very much at all and the house that I was presenting all in the other room The other it's a home actually. I grew up in we're calling it the zenis's house It's a 60 year old timber structure that we're retrofitting to a net zero energy passive house standard And the reason we're doing this is it's multi-fold from one We want to be able to show that new construction aside There's a tremendous building stock in the United States that was designed back during the time when fuel and the cost of fuel Was an afterthought and the houses built 50 years ago were designed very much the way cars 50 years ago They very wasteful very very big engines lots of output and nobody cared because fuel costs were an afterthought now Every time fuel prices go up people start worrying about conservation and here we are at the crossroads another one of those times going on right now We're also out to show that as I mentioned before you don't have to give anything up Let me give you an example in New Orleans What we ended up doing to air condition these buildings was using groundwater very nearby groundwater That was about 10 15 feet below the soil in a very swampy area and we ended up finding out that this water gets heated So why would what do we need to throw away that heat? So in the home that I'm building our wine cell they're in the basement the refrigeration aspect is giving off so much heat They were using that heat to heat the rooftop hot tub. We don't need to give up luxuries anymore You know we can do things we have a thermally Insulating roof or we can call it a roof garden one way or the other but there there's you're allowed to have hedonism You're allowed to have excess in in eco-friendly home. It's no longer one or the other And it's a approach that we're going forward with Oftentimes I'm met with a lot of resistance You know do you have to be a granola hippie liberal to do this and the answer is no You know at the center of all of this are very very conservative principles the principle of fiscal responsibility You know not spending more than you need to the principle of not letting the next generation shoulder the environmental debt We're leaving for them forget about the financial debt But the car the drilling we're doing below rock the way we're fracturing rock and ruining the ground water Just to get a few trips and drops of natural gas is not the best way forward only to burn it in a wasteful furnace No, that's not the way to do this You know the best way to do this is to take the natural resource gifts specific to each at every site and use them It pains me as a designer to see McMansions go up exactly the same house one house across the street from the next Well, the Sun is hitting these houses differently very differently. Why'd they look the same? They shouldn't You know, and it's a responsibility of people in the end user scale people that own the homes that they're in today The ones that say I want to knock down this house and build a new one right here It's it's their responsibility to say wait a second. Can I preserve my existing structure instead of? Tearing this down and building a box that's also going to burn tons and tons of fuel Can I take that same money that my neighbor spent and tearing down that house and use it to make my structure? That much more insulated. Can I do it and the chances are chances are yes, probably you can You know, can I take my two air conditioning condenser units outside and get rid of them completely and use the ground below my slab? To cool my house and you probably can and the gifts are all there. It's all free It's there for the taking the Sun shines on every property every day And only the lucky ones in my opinion the ones that are able to extract value from that and Same goes for the wind that blows You know, it's not about just being the only house on the block that has power when the storm is out It's about being the house on the block that produces power when the storm is out and knocks out the power And I think that can be done and it's being done and I'm working with you know various You know utility-based payer funds and regional greenhouse gas funds like I said to help incentivize and Additionally lower the capital cost of some of these investments And we end up doing is we build a house that performs differently You build a super insulated wall is gonna behave with moisture much more differently than a leaky wall will and as a result of that You can as Michael said cut out the furnace from a house cut out the air conditioning system And it turns out you end up costing the same at the end of the day And you have a building that's gonna last much much longer and that's and there's no there's nothing more Sustainable than something that lives to see another day. You know, you can have an eco-friendly home That's going to last you one generation, but what does that done for you? If you have a home that lasts you 300 years because it's built better and it used less energy the whole time Now we're talking about progress and we're talking about progress at no additional excess cost And I really think that's the best way forward energy independence very much is tied to freedom and national security and energy security is our key out of this Thank you. Thank you There's a lot of good information