 So, welcome tonight, I'd like to thank the Davis Futures Forum for arranging this event, and I'd like to thank John and Greg for being our guests, who will be enlightening us on a variety of things. I have a little prepared script to go over, but before I do that, I find this typically very annoying, but I'm standing on this side of the microphone, I can see why they do that. How about everyone sort of scoots over here and we kind of fill in and make it kind of cozy and we can all kind of look at this screen. I think that'll be just a lot nicer for the presenters and I think it'll make it nicer for the discussion. If there's a large surge of people who come in, we'll open up the other section. So John Godin is a publishing editor of Canada's Better Builder magazine. He has developed his expertise over the last 30 years. Godin is a builder of energy efficient homes and then as a consultant and raider to builders and renovators of sustainable homes, designers and manufacturers. He has participated in the creation of an energy efficient building rating system, including LEED. Godin has a unique perspective that gives him a pragmatic and hands on approach to sustainable home building because he knows what works and what doesn't work. And joining him will be Greg Mahoney. He's the chief building official for the City of Davis and chair of the Energy Advisory Committee for the California Energy Commission. Greg and John will have spent the afternoon together and so it'll be curious to hear sort of what sort of they've worked on. You put two people, well educated, knowledgeable people who have a lot of practical experience but also kind of looking at the boundaries of practice. You put them in a room together, a lot of times really good things happen. So I know that I'm personally interested in hearing what they have to say and I think it's really wonderful that the Davis Futures Forum has been putting on these events because we can actually see a direct line in terms of the people who came and spoke and some of the things we're doing. We see a direct line for instance as we work on our downtown plan, basically the general plan for the downtown. All the ideas that were brought forward to us from the Davis Futures Forum are directly being implemented with that. But without further delay, I'm going to hand the microphone over to John and thank you for being here. Can everybody hear me with the mic? So thank you very much. Are you recording? Oh, great. Okay. Can everybody hear me, Chris? Okay. I always feel like a bit of a game show host with us. So thanks for the opportunity, Merit to speak. I must say this afternoon we had another engagement at Indigo Architects, which was very enlightening for me because we do actually live in different climates. So I want to go back to my graduating year in university, University of Waterloo. I did my senior honors thesis on a rural self-sufficient subdivision and one of the case studies just happened to be Village Homes. So two years ago when we were visiting, we came to visit Wendy, my partner's here and she's actually the publishing editor of Better Builder magazine. So we went there to visit with her brother-in-law and I started poking around and walking around and I knew the place. I knew it was Village Homes just from my studies and I was lucky enough to meet up with Judy Corbett and it was an inspiration for me. So I'm largely here because of what Judy and Michael Corbett and all the other people helped them achieve with Village Homes. It is an inspiration. So I'm here doing what I usually do. Back home I challenge builders. Are there any home builders in the room? Any builders? There's not one builder. So usually what I do is I challenge builders to build better. And we're in very similar situations because California has a leading energy code. So does the province that I come from, the province of Ontario. But I'm also bringing a challenge from the mayor of East Gulenberry to have a friendly cross-border competition to see how energy and water efficient we can get a demonstration home in Davis. So that's the challenge. And we're going to talk about some of the technologies that we use in Canada and they may be appropriate down here. I just want to underscore that with I'm learning lots about the difference in climate. So hopefully it will be helpful. So I basically started off after planning school as a low energy builder. And one of the names of one of the companies I have is ClearSphere. So that's a consultancy. And I helped production builders build very low energy homes. And I myself was one of the first R2000 builders in Canada. And R2000 was building the home of the millennia in 1984. So I built my first low energy house in 1985. And when I built as a custom builder, I would do the designs, do the mechanicals and actually frame the houses and do a lot of the work on them and probably do two of them a year. So the ClearSphere house was a light gauge steel house that was built for a couple that were chemically sensitive. I started to, I've worked on about five houses for people that had multiple chemical sensitivities. And we were using the steel because it was relatively clean. It didn't have forming oil on it. We're using water-based insulation. So I don't know how well you can make out the poly-icene going in there, which is a water-based foam. And back then actually using solar thermal technology. So I personally have installed about solar thermal on about 150 houses. So the challenge is coming from E. Schoolenberry, who initially had a mandatory approach of requiring builders to build every house to Energy Star. And I'm sure everybody's familiar with what Energy Star is. And I had a hand in writing the Canadian version of Energy Star. And it's about 20% better than the American version. So it's just like this hockey thing. I'm rubbing it in a little bit. And so what I'm very interested in, and I talked to Greg, is California is just about to adopt a performance standard for energy efficiency. So conveniently, you people will be using exactly what I'm using now. So it's a great sort of way to get this comparison if we can find a builder. So no builders snuck in while I was. And we're actually trying to get everybody over to the right here. Is that possible? And that's not my directive. That's the mayor's directive. So is that OK, Mr. Mayor? Yeah, good. OK. So any subdivision over 10 homes roughly had to be 20% better than the prevailing code. So I was involved with an incentive program by another municipality that offered builders lots at a preferred rate because the city owned the land. Sorry about that. And the outcome of that was all during the process, we were consulting with all the stakeholders. Lead was just coming to Canada. I was sworn by the builder not to mention lead. The mayor of Newmarket basically said, well, we would like you to do this lead thing. And by the way, this other municipality over here has already built a lead platinum home. And the builder stood up and said, I'm going to build all 34 of those to lead platinum. So it's this whole thing about challenge and engaging builders that want to do well. So 34 lead platinum homes in 2008 and not quite as high as you got, Dick. But every house was 96 points, which for a production builder was quite an accomplishment. Dick's building actually has the highest, one of the highest point totals, right? Yeah, OK. So on my 50th birthday, I started challenging production builders to get 50 homes that were 50% better than code. And I got a few more than 50. And I'm probably at about maybe 7,000. So that's been very successful. So I just had my 60th birthday. So I didn't challenge builders to get to whatever, 6 million. But anyway. So again, this R2000 program, government program, very successful for creating movement for building codes, but also builders could have a container for showing off leading edge technologies. And in 2006, I worked with other consultants to write the Canadian version of Energy Star, version four. I worked on lead for homes. That's how we got into the 30 floor lead platinum houses. And then in 2012, our provincial building code adopted an energy code, performance standard, in it. So in 2012, we were building a hers 60. And I'm going to show you a scale, what that sort of looks like. So back to East Willenbury, where the challenge is coming from. They actually offered on the bottom there in black, developers 28% more coverage, or more lots, if they actually met these higher performance standards. And so the unintended consequence of that was developers ticked a box off. And then the builders said to do the undertaking. So the builder would have to buy the lots and the developer could sell them more lots. But he had the undertaking of about $5,000 a house to meet all these checklists. So again, I'm just trying to point out this idea of engaging builders at the front end. And in our market, many builders have become developers, so they don't actually get stuck with some of these things at the tail end of the process. Okay, so there's all these energy requirements. But what happened when it was drafted is it became antiquated within a couple of years. So all the best practices they chose from lead, by the time it was published, were sort of old business. So part of this challenge, and it's in the magazine and I have copies of it, was to encourage the municipality through a challenge with the mayor to rethink what these features were on the house and come up with a checklist. So anybody that knows lead will recognize this, but this is basically a water efficiency checklist from lead and that's what they had to do. But many of my builders actually wanted to do better stuff and the stuff that wasn't on the list. So this whole thing became sort of a challenge for this builder to show the municipality all these other technologies that were available to them to build better than what the ask was. So some of the other things I've worked on and we have very good success building voluntary projects. This is actually five houses, but the three on the left, they're called the teeth houses, three energy efficient houses. So bringing together manufacturers and everybody, the local municipality in a collaboration to do these demonstration houses. And the one right over here is called the hybrid house. So it's a low carbon net zero cost house. So all the measures in it are actually monetized to make sure that they can be paid for on a mortgage when they're amortized over 25 years. So in our market, we don't talk necessarily about net zero. I'll move over here a bit. So I'll include you guys. We actually talk about low carbon. And I know there's a lot of talk about zero emissions or zero carbon houses. I actually don't know what that is. I'm always asking people, can you give me a definition? So again, part of this challenge is to find out sort of what that is. But in a nutshell, on the hybrid house, compared to the national building code, the metric became, how do we get this house footprint down to metric tons? So in Canada, we have metric tons of CO2 emissions. And to normalize that, I guess nobody's playing hockey down here, but that's a hockey arena full of CO2. That's what the house is producing in a year. And then another engagement, much like I'm hoping to do here, where the municipality asks three builders to come in and have a workshop and decide about all the technologies that they want to show off and actually sell. So they are going to educate their homeowners enough to actually buy them, which is an innovation. So what I've been doing for the last 10 years is challenging American builders and Canadian builders. And it's a friendly competition. It's not winners and losers. The border's in the middle. Everybody gets to look at what everybody's doing to see how low we can go on a HERS rating. So here's the challenge, Mr. Mayor. The town of East Willenbury would like to extend a friendly challenge to the city of Davis, California. The challenge is for Davis to build a demonstration home using the HERS energy rating system, which builders will be using very shortly. And the HERS H2O water scale, which actually includes, and it's an ANSI standard indoor and outdoor water use, so it might be a useful index. And to create a platform or a checklist to promote the construction of energy efficient, durable, and water conserving homes in both localities. So is anybody wondering why I'm trying to do this? Do you want to ask me formally why I'm trying to do this? I'm doing this because of this coincidence with Village Homes. So I came here, stayed, saw it, something that inspired me. So I'm actually bringing that inspiration back. And I'm hoping that we can do something collaboratively. Okay, so here's how we start the engagement. There's no builders in the room, right? So there is? Great, that's why you're sitting over there all by yourself? Good. Okay, so how do we get a group of builders up on a roof? And the joke is, we tell them lunch is on the house. Okay, okay, so this is where the discussion starts across the aisle, okay? There's no such thing as a free lunch, right? We have to figure out how to pay for all these extra goodies. And that's what we're gonna try and arrive at. So the very first stage of this whole thing is not you gotta do this, it's engagement, right? So is that a good enough answer to your question? I'm here to engage. Okay, so the most important part of engagement is there's gotta be choice. And the other part of this thing is making sure that we have a knowledge base, but also an understanding through experience of what works and what doesn't work. Because many times what's on the shelf, and again some municipalities in my backyard are just referencing lead, and Greg and I have talked a little bit about that. I'm of the opinion that instead of paying for the certification, we should take that money from you and invest it in the house, if that's what we wanna do. Because it's relatively expensive to do that, right? But there's this whole thing about technology sort of offering us these magic bullets. And there's all this rhetoric about net zero carbon or zero emissions or net zero energy, and I don't know what that is. I'm being totally honest with you and I've been at this for a while. Dick, do you have any answers? Okay, keep engaging, okay. So just a quick sort of a couple of words about leadership. And John Quincy Adams, a great American, fit this into less than 20 words. If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more, and become more, you are a leader. And leadership drives the change. Nothing happens in a vacuum. Nothing great happens without leadership. One does not claim leadership, others refer to leaders as such, okay? And my challenge in my own market is that we've had the change in government that you've had in the United States. We've gone from a very liberal government that was gonna be net zero by 2030. And our code's driving like that, stepping towards that. To just trying to harmonize between provinces and the National Building Code. Which means that in my market, builders will be waiting for everyone to catch up. And so one of the other reasons I'm here is this is a great story to take back with me, where I can challenge them and say, people I talked to in California are doing much better than you guys. And that's, believe it or not, how I've had success. I challenge builders to do better. But I need somebody too for them to look up to. So flexibility and equivalency. So again, Greg, you were saying that your city requirements were possibly looking for lead or equivalent, right? I think it's very good to keep it open-ended. So no soul sourcing programs. And what I'm really interested in is getting the right people in the room, but not downloading onto you. So you don't have to pick up the tab. And by the way, I did buy dinner for everybody tonight, so. And I like to think of myself as a builder, but I'm a recovering builder, so. Okay, so how do we do this? The municipality wants something, builders have needs, and he just said it, they want something. So what's the carrot? It's likely, I think, an expedited building permit or a clear path to what it is you want them to do. And again, Greg, in our discussions is some of these documents that we have to navigate, normal mortals cannot understand them, right? So we've got to make it really clear. And I'm suggesting that that is a checklist. So the Paris Accord has everybody seen Al Gore's second movie, Truth to Power? Wendy and I actually saw it here two years ago, which was really good at the movie theater. But Al Gore was responsible for a lot of this, the inception of the Paris Accord. And so the Paris Accord is trying to get us all to these different stages by 2020. So in 2020, which is not that far away, the Paris Accord is wanting everybody to reduce their emissions to 15% less than 1990 levels, okay? So our building code, and believe it or not, before I published this in the magazine and showed it to the Ministry of Housing, had not figured out that we were already 44% better than 1990 levels right now. So we're exceeding that substantially, right? So it's pointing out this whole thing about sort of mapping out where we are. And again, that's one of the reasons I'm here. We have a way through the HRS index that you people could be using in less than a year, just for cross-referencing these houses. In my market, so I'm going to just go through some of the challenges that we have in a cold climate because it is a different scenario from what you people experience down here. But the choice for heating, space heating on hot water in my market is natural gas. And if it's not fracked, it actually is the lowest carbon choice next to electricity. I pointed this out today, and Dick, actually I'm going to say this the right way now. Canada's per capita emissions of CO2 are more than the US's. And there's reasons for that. It's probably the tar sands and the fact that there's a few people in a lot of space, right? So the province that I come from, Ontario, has 40% of the population. It's growing really fast because of immigration. We build 50% of the houses. But the whole population of Canada is less than California. You're about 39 million and we're 37. The whole nation of Canada has less population than California. The challenge with California to actually go carbon free is that a lot of your electricity comes from natural gas. So that's a huge challenge. In my market, where Wendy and I live, 26% comes from Niagara Falls, so hydroelectric power. But 60% comes from nuclear power plants, which we can't turn off. So at night, we actually have stranded capacity. And we did this session today, and people were sort of smiling about how low our electricity rates are. So at peak demand, we're paying 13.2 cents, and I'll just rub in a little bit more. Remember, our dollar is worth way less than yours, about 35% less. But at night, it is relatively cheap. So we have this opportunity, likely through battery storage, and that's the key threshold. 14 cents actually makes a power wall work in a house that saves electricity off peak. So we're in this whole scenario of trying to figure out what the big offsets are for a house. And we are actually at the point, which California might be, of diminishing marginal returns from adding any envelope features to a house. It makes no sense to have walls that are two feet thick, right? And in my definition of sustainability, that's really using, if you're using too many resources to get an effect, I'm always doing cost benefit stuff, right? And one of the issues, the problems with doing that is natural gas is extremely cheap in our market. But the house I'm going to show you, the CO2 emissions of the footprint is five metric tons. And so if we got one car off the road, that could actually offset that house. And we have a lot of surplus electricity. I'm going to go right by that one, because it, no, you know what? I'm going to talk about it, because it's controversial. I took it out today because there was a solar panel guy in the room. But solar panels, the way that a lot of them are made, take four years before they actually are net. Because they have a lot of embodied energy in them, okay? Especially if they come from China, and they're made in electrical kilns that are fired by coal. So those panels never make back. This is an energy thing. If we're talking about CO2, you've got to know where your panels are coming from. So a lot of them that are made domestically don't have that issue. But I'm just pointing that out, because I think the answer is a multi-pronged approach to many different fuels, fuel switching, okay? So we've talked a lot about energy, I'm going to move over to water. And again, Canada and the US are right up there with using water. And the thing that we were trying to figure out today was if we go over to water for human use, America is almost 20 times what Canada is for personal use. And I think much of this could be irrigation for agriculture, right? I don't know the answer for that. I'm just putting it up there as a point of interest. So here's the technology that we use north of the border in a cold climate. And this is eight technologies that were put together and they're called the Total Water Solution. And I have a nice video, and I have handouts if anybody wants to look at that. I think the only person in the room that might understand it is Dick. Anybody else understand what's on there? There's a lot of information on there. The more the merrier, so that's good. I have handouts, so I don't mean to diminish anybody's awareness. But I'm just going to break it down because there's energy and water. And so what we're doing because of our surplus of cheap electricity at night is we're using combination hybrid heat. So we're wisely using natural gas on very low load houses to provide space heating and hot water. And then off peak electricity is used with a heat pump at night in the shoulder months to offset the carbon from the natural gas fired equipment. So this is basically a tankless hot water heater or a boiler or a condensing hot water tank that's providing space heating and hot water heating. So on the water side, our code actually mandates drain water heat recovery. And again, there'll be a nice little video that'll show everybody how this works. Two showers saves enough water in this gray water recycling unit. And we have somebody here from greater who can, if anybody has some interest, can talk to you after the fact. But we can do all the toilet flushing for a family of four off saved shower water, okay? So we take the shower, we take 50% of the heat out of it. And we save that water to flush toilets. We actually have leak detection here cuz we don't wanna waste any of the water. We don't actually wanna use ultra low flush toilets because we're saving water. We need a way to use it, which is a little bit of an irony. And we're using structured plumbing. So many people today were sort of talking about how they waste water. When they're waiting for the hot water to get to the top, they're just running it. So a structured plumbing system actually creates smaller pipe running to each fixture. And there's not as much wait time. It reduces it by up to 50%, okay? So promising technology that you're gonna start to see, if you wanna go to electricity is these heat pump hot water heaters. And so they're basically using a heat pump to preheat hot water. And they work at about, it's a coefficient of performance of about 2.5. So one unit of electricity goes in, 2.45 units of heat comes out. The issue with them is they have very low recovery rates. So if somebody takes a long shower, the next person doesn't get it. But again, this technology, and this is one of the offers that I'm bringing to the cross-border challenge with Davis, is one of these drain water units that can recover the heat and preheat this hot water tank. And actually improve its recovery rate almost fourfold, because it's a preheat. So it's using the heat from the shower water to preheat the water that's coming in, and it's raising the recovery rate of the tank. So, gray water again is two showers a day, which accounts for 25 to 30% of the water usage indoor. I know there's a lot of water used outdoors here for irrigation. This is indoor use, actually offsets the toilets, okay? So here's a nice little video, and I'm trying to figure out how I'm going to do this remotely, because I have to click the screen on the computer. Is it up here? Yeah, good. Now I'm feeling really important. This is where the important people sit, right? Okay, so there's a mouse here, okay. This is about three minutes long. Do we have sound? Nope. Is there any way we can get sound, Alan? Pardon? Sound button on the left, microphone. Oh, is this a laptop? I can't find anything. So maybe on here, is it down here? I can't really see that much, is that where it is? Is that right? Yeah, we just got to get the, is it coming from the projector? Is there a remote for the projector? Here it is. These are just screens, there's a central CPU somewhere. So is there any sound on here? No one to touch the power button, keystone, menu. We might have to do this again. Okay, well I'm going to run the video because then you can see what's happening. And maybe I'll describe that, how does that sound? Okay, so back up here. If you get a small diameter one, people have actually tried to put it horizontal. It actually works, but all the testing is done on them vertically. Okay, so let's watch this. Okay, so the animation will just show you how it works. And again, so Kelly's here from greater. In states like California, there's actually where water is scarce. There's incentives because of high tap fees to actually put the system in. So there's the shower water offsetting the toilet, water. Okay, so the water's going from the shower into the grater and two showers a day is flushing the toilets. So here's the water being saved in the tank. And this is an anti-fouling valve. It's actually a backwash. So hair is the biggest enemy of any gray water system connected to a shower. But it has a special filter in it that's micro-organism resistant. And it actually takes out all the soaps and surfactants. And it uses household chlorine to actually purify the water. That's an overflow valve in case you save too much. Here's a city water connection. There's a bypass in it. So if you need to service it, you can actually bypass it. It's the size of a, there's Judy's car. Her hybrid, right, Judy? In the garage. And there's all the connections. So it's completely self-contained. Uses household chlorine. And it's got absorption cartridges. So there's carbon cartridges that you could add if you want higher water quality. And there's an interface that tells the homeowner exactly what it's doing. But this can be done remotely to troubleshoot it. I think that's right. It can all be done on wifi. Yep. Okay, here's how it works in conjunction with the drain water heat recovery. So the heat is going to preheat the tankless hot water heater or the electric hot water tank. And then the water is actually being saved in the greater system to flush toilets. And there's the offset. Well, and I've got a slide coming up. So our code is actually asking for two showers on the drain water recovery. So it's not that much more work to isolate the gray water on two showers. And then it's really just providing half inch packs, purple packs to the toilets. You're gonna have to ask him, the clicker. You're really fast on that math, I'm like. Okay, so again, and we have many builders that are actually roughing this in. And I think that's something else, Greg, that people are considering, right? Is roughing in gray water systems for later on? So either gray water or recycled water, okay. So there's what it sort of looks like if it's roughed in. There's these purple packs lines that are running to two toilets. There's this bypass loop so that the unit could accept the water here and actually have an overflow. There's sort of what it looks like on a two-story house, on a slab on grade. So the gray water from the showers needs to be isolated from the black water. And there's the pecs runs. So the question was, how much to rough in? Is that where you were, you asked me a question about? I don't think it's really being presented as that. I think there's, and getting back to what's in it for the builder, normally there's some sort of an incentive. So again, in Colorado, if they can get their water demand down to a certain level, they actually get a cash payment per house, right? Is that right, Kelly? Okay, so here's the logic plumbing again. And the way that this works on the hot water side is that we're getting the hot water delivered faster so people don't have to run it and waste water down the drain. Okay, so let's get back to the challenge and I've gotta do this quick because the big hook is gonna come and pull me off the podium soon. Gotta give Greg enough time. So international energy code, which you're gonna be sort of possibly adopting, has your houses at a 51. Our code in zone six is a 54. I have another video that's likely not gonna work, so I'm gonna just go to the next stage. So here's the award-winning house of the cross-border challenge that has the total water solution in it that was sponsored by Enbridge. So I'm not gonna take that house and ship it down here and compare it. We're actually gonna use the software to compare the houses. And if I take that house and I plop it down in Davis in zone three, here's how the scores sort of come out. So here's 41 and again, hers is the home energy rating scale. We don't have the video on there but the typical 2006 house is 100 and California and my locality are down to about 50 and these houses are coming in at 20 or 25% better. If we switch the heating plant over to electric with an electric hot water heater and a heat pump air conditioner, the score actually goes up. So one of the things that the index does is it likes primary energy. So this goes to the fact that natural gas, even though it is a carbon emitting fuel, is a primary energy. Electricity is secondary and it's actually made from other things. So electricity is only a primary fuel when it's coming off the roof or it's coming from a hydro jam. But I can tell you that if you wanted to get to what hers is calling zero energy, you would have to put 13 kilowatts on the roof of this house, which is a lot. And generally when we try and get to net zero on these bigger production homes, we don't have enough roof area to put the panels on. So again, that's why I was making the comment. I don't actually know how to do this on some of the houses I'm working on. But the good news is if you built this house in Davis and you used a heat pump hot water heater with drain water heat recovery, you could take that down three or four points. And it is a carbon neutral fuel if that's coming from solar panels. Okay, so apples to apples comparison. We've got a lot of people that wanna use natural gas. We can't really get off of that. My strategy has been using off peak electricity in battery storage. And we're just about to get at our office like a Tesla Powerwall, so we can run our office during the day on off peak electricity. So that's been our strategy. And then we have a company car that's a plug-in hybrid much like some of you people have down here. But our heating load in a cold climate, we actually need a gas-fired system. Our air conditioning loads, so your load is sort of like half because you don't get as cold here. The air conditioning load obviously is lower because our cooling degree days are a quarter of what yours are, surprise, surprise. And different weather zones. So back to the good builder's score. Just the idea to get a bunch of builders, architects, stakeholders in a room and decide what this checklist looks like. And I have some of these checklists if people want them. I have handouts of the total water solution if people want those as well. And again, we use a limited amount of solar sometimes up to seven kilowatts to get to what we're calling low carbon net zero cost houses. So again, I'll just go through the challenge quickly, trying to get a builder in Davis. So there's a builder back there. Hello? Oh, you're looking at the screen too, okay. Okay, good. And we can get you a copy of the presentation. But if you decide to do this on a house, Grader will offer you assistance under certain conditions for monitoring. We're trying to use the hers H2O scale, which is a very new thing that we're trying to pilot. And there's drain water heat recovery, a unit, if you have a two story house and you want to use that. And so consult and collaborate and then construct the home. And then the first step is show it off and try and do something. So here's Victoria Haxson, the mayor of East Goulinbury at an opening. This works very well in our locality. And the biggest part of this for me was to actually get the town to put in equivalency. So this is just a sample of one of their energy efficiency forms in their checklist, which is pretty exhaustive. So it was asking for energy star mandatory and this other builder is now able to use hers to do it there. And at the end, the waterless toast. So Greg, you're up. And I think I did that in a little bit over 40 minutes, but there you go. Oh, you don't. Okay, you're just, you're gonna talk. I am, but you have to use this because we're recording. Thank you, John. So my name is Greg Mahoney and I'm the building official here. And I was asked to just come and talk and tell you kind of where we are now and how we got here and go through the different ordinances and make some resolutions that got us to this point. We are currently using a different, I guess a different metric to determine energy efficiency than they do in Canada. They're using the hers rating or the energy design ratings, what the California Energy Commission calls it. And I think that that's a good way to go. The energy commission, what they've done over the last many years is they establish an energy budget based on the size of the house. And so you have to meet an energy budget. And so then when communities like ours want to, you know, pass or propose a reach code rather than say, okay, from this, you know, say 60 on the EDR rating, we want everyone to comply with a 50. We end up having to say, okay, we're gonna require a 10% compliance margin. So 10% better. So that energy commission has recognized the value in rather than rewriting, you know, their software every time that they just say, okay, this is the energy design rating that you're gonna have to achieve to be code compliant. And coming up in January 1st, 2020, we're gonna have energy design rating. A code compliant building will be somewhere between 30 and 40, depending on whether it has gas or electricity, like John had mentioned. The houses that are electric only don't score as well on the rating. And I know it's kind of unfortunate, I guess for some people, because there's kind of this desire to get to all electric buildings, but right now the way it's set up, the compliance really favors a house that also incorporates gas. And so another requirement that John kind of touched upon about cost effectiveness, one of the requirements in the California energy code is that any energy efficiency measures have to be found to be cost effective over the 30 year mortgage. And so that's something that was written into the Warren Alquist Act in 1976 or something, I think is when it was passed. And so any energy efficiency measures that we want to adopt or incorporate into our municipal code, we have to demonstrate cost effectiveness and that can be expensive, but fortunately we're in a climate right now and I don't mean our physical climate, but political climate where even PG&E recognizes the value in energy efficiency. And so their codes and standards group typically pay for these cost effectiveness studies that we can utilize in our energy efficiency ordinances. So I just wanna kind of run through where we are, how we got here. City of Davis is really a leader in energy efficiency. They had an energy code in the mid 70s before the state of California had an energy code. And we also had council adopted our resale program. I don't know, we didn't talk about the resale program, we should, it's kind of a really innovative program that is challenging to administer. There's a lot of different groups, energy commission, a lot of different groups are interested in our resale program because they see it as a way to further energy efficiency. And so when you sell your house in Davis, you have to come in and pay for an inspection, time to sale inspection. So we look for things that are maybe done without permit. And so the benefit is twofold. One, there was an energy efficiency component associated with that ordinance. And that is that if you had a house that was built before 1978, you may not have had any attic insulation. So you're required to retrofit with R19. That's what the ordinance said back in 1976 or whatever it was. But the other, I think, and what many people see as really valuable part of that ordinance is that people get permits. And so when people get permits, then they comply, you know, they're kind of forced to comply with the code, including the energy code. In fact, I've been working with the energy commission and they did some studies and found that somewhere, they did two studies. One found that 8% of the people who do HAC changeouts get permits. The other one said 10%. So that's, a lot of people don't get permits, which means then there are all these requirements like duct sealing or refrigerant charge and airflow and fan watt draw that are required to verify a time of HVAC changeout. Well, just to, you know, they asked, well, what about you and your resale program? What kind of compliance rates do you get? So we went back three years and looked at all of our resale inspections. That was 1700 of them. And 95% of them got permits for HVAC changeout. So it's a really effective program. Like I said, it's not easy to administer. But anyway, that's our resale program. And like I said, our resale program back in the mid-70s had an energy efficiency component to it. And I don't know, maybe folks like Dick, I'm not gonna ask you to do this, but I could probably fill in the blanks between mid-1970s and now because I started with the city of Davis in 2006. So I know what's happened since 2006. So in 2008, I was asked to write a green building ordinance. And I really, I guess I have to thank city of Davis for kind of forcing me into this position because it forced me to become really kind of educated in regards to green building and energy efficiency. And so I became lead AP and hers raider and did all these things in BPI building analysts so that I can learn more and I could be, sound like I know what I'm talking about anyway. So in 2008, the council passed an ordinance, a green building ordinance. It was the first one in the region and it was the most comprehensive in the state in that we required tier one compliance. I'm sorry, I'm mixing those up. We required it for all residents, all projects, residential room additions, remodels, alterations. And because we didn't have Cal Green at the time, we adopted build it green as our, it's a rating system. We adopted that and we would require thresholds based on the size of the house and the type of project it was. And for non res, we adopted lead and we fell short of the lead certification levels. This was kind of an introduction to green building. It's not something we'd done before, we'd done energy efficiency, but both of those, both build it green and the lead, we required a 15% compliance margin. So it wasn't just, we kind of coupled energy efficiency with green building requirements. And in the build it green part of it, I don't know if any of you are familiar with build it green, but it, we highlighted different areas or the system, the program highlights areas that they see as the most important to comply with energy efficiency and water conservation and natural resource conservation. So that's kind of what we're promoting using the build it green. So that was in 2008. In 2011, state of California required all cities to adopt Cal Green. And so our approach was not to require compliance with two different sustainability approaches, which would have been the lead and build it green on one side and Cal Green. So we rescinded the ordinance for lead, our green building ordinance for leading and build it green. And we adopted Cal Green tier one and we are the only city in the state of California that adopted tier one. And when it first came out, it was only applicable to new construction. We applied it to all construction projects except single trade permit. So we really did have the most comprehensive green building ordinance in the state. And along with that, we also required the 10% compliance margin. Then moving on, and those of you who I don't know may or may not know about Cal Green, it's not a rating system like lead or like build it green. It's actually just a collection of best practices that should be incorporated into a project. It was really fashioned after both build it green and lead. So it addresses the same areas of site selection and water conservation and energy conservation and natural resource conservation and indoor air quality, all the things that lead and build it green address. So then moving on to 2014, the city adopted a PV ordinance for all new single family dwellings. And then in 2016, or thereabouts, there were a couple of projects that came before the council. And there was a lot of discussion about what kind of sustainability measures should be incorporated into these projects. So those were probably the first two. There was Nishi and the conference center on Richards and Hotel. And so there was kind of this precedent set with lead gold equivalency. And the idea was that these projects had to demonstrate a level of sustainability and energy efficiency and water efficient, all these things that go along with that that was acceptable to the community. And so that kind of set a precedent. And so when new projects came in, there would be this expectation that they would comply with lead gold equivalency. Although there was a few things associated with lead gold equivalency. Well, lead gold, like John said, it's really expensive process to get certified. But our staff, and so there was a presumption that perhaps our staff could verify compliance. But I'm a lead AP, but I'm the only lead AP in the building division. So our staff doesn't have the expertise to verify lead requirements. We know Calgary and we know California energy code. And so again, we went back to this thing where should we be pursuing two separate approaches for sustainability on the same project? So we just actually recently passed an ordinance that was just a week ago, two weeks ago, two weeks ago. Where we actually eliminated that lead gold equivalency because it did cost extra money to have third party verification. What we did was we did analysis of lead requirements, Davis municipal code requirements, Calgary requirements tier one, and then the California energy commission with a 10% compliance margin, kind of translated that into a score. They would be equivalent to a score we'd receive in the lead system. And then we added some features that would get us to lead gold equivalency. And those were photovoltaics. So the ordinance requires the lesser of 80% offset of electricity use onsite or 15 Watts per square foot of the solar ready roof, which is a solar ready roof is a term that's defined in the energy code. And it's about 15% of the roof. And so there was also, like I said, 10% compliance margin. We also codified the city of Davis electrical vehicle charging plan, which had previously been approved through council resolution, but we codified it and put it into the municipal code. And we also again required the 10% compliance margin. So that was actually 2019, but I'm going to go back to 2016 and the lead gold equivalency because I kind of jumped a little bit. So there was, even though these projects have not been built still, that was kind of a precedent that was set. In 2017, I think we actually took a really big step. And so like John had mentioned in 2020, January 2020, we're going to be going to basically zero net electricity in the state of California. And so the state of California Energy Commission is going to require that we have enough affordable takes to offset the electricity, the model of electricity use in the building. And initially the goal established a while ago, years ago, was to get zero net energy by 2020. That's when Governor Schwarzenegger was in office. And so what they found was they couldn't quite get there. Anyway, so along the way, we've been planning for this 2020 zero net electricity. And so we thought that we would take a significant step between then and now to kind of an intermediate step. And so we were able to request and receive a cost effectiveness study that showed that 80% electricity offset with affordable takes was cost effective in this climate zone. And also that single family dwellings, 30% compliance margin, which in the past all we've ever required is a 15% compliance margin on single family dwellings. So 30% compliance margin was cost effective in climate zone 12. And so for single family and for low rise multifamily, 25% compliance margin. So that is the ordinance that was passed back in 2017. And that's the one that's enforced now. And like I said, in a few months, we're gonna be going to zero net electricity and also changing the way that we do measure compliance, which is gonna be the herd scale, which is what John uses in Canada and what a lot of other states use. But California, we have our own way of doing things and have for a long time. There are actually a number of things that are going on. Like Brett said, I was in the chair of the Calbo Energy Commission Advisory Committee. And about three or four years ago, I wrote a letter to Commissioner McAllister identifying a number of things that made it difficult to comply with the code. And the relationship between Calbo, California building officials and the Energy Commission has been somewhat strained over the years, but I really, I don't know, Commissioner McAllister took it to heart and he's actually taken action on every single thing that we identified was potential barriers to compliance. And so the kind of the last thing that we're looking at is the actual formatting of the energy code. And they just recently, a few weeks ago, forwarded me a copy, a word copy of the energy code, which I haven't done before, so that we can, Calbo can work on reformatting it to make it consistent with all the other parts of Title 24, all the plumbing code mechanical code, because it's written in a much different way and it's very difficult to navigate. And a brand new inspector, you can take the plumbing code and ask a question about water heater and they can go to the index and they could look it up and find it. You can't do that in the energy code. In fact, you have to go to seven different places. This is an example I use. If you're gonna install, replace a water heater, you literally have to go to seven different places in the code to get all the information that you need. And so they took it to heart and they're allowing us to play around with their stuff and they've changed the forms and they've reinstated the index, the index of the energy code went away in the late 90s. I don't know why, but they've agreed to reinstate the index. So I think, I don't know where it seems like we're really on the verge of some really big changes. There's a lot of policy pressure to move towards zero net energy and deal with carbon and all these things. Like John, I'm kind of with John. I don't know what carbon emissions. I don't know how to measure carbon emissions, but I know how to measure energy efficiency. And so like I said, I think we're on the verge of some important changes. So, Judy gave me strict instructions to make sure that we had enough time for questions and answers. That's why, and so are you both willing to take some questions from the audience? And we'll use the microphone for those of you who might have missed that a little bit. This is being recorded so that other people can sort of watch this presentation. So even though it might seem quite comfortable to not ask the question with the microphone, I will hand the microphone to you. Just as a courtesy, if you could keep the question relatively short and concise, I believe the two gentlemen here will be available for after this to perhaps answer more longer sort of discussion these sorts of questions. With that, anybody have a question they would like to ask? So, John, this is a question about Canadian builders and US builders, I think. You were describing how you put out a challenge and the builders say, you know, we'll try to rise up to it. And we've had the experience here more of trying to put out a challenge and having a lot of pushback from the builders that they can't, they won't, it's impossible. Do you have any suggestions for why that is and how we might overcome it? Okay, I'm actually gonna say it's engagement. So, and I'm gonna look over here. Well, actually I can give a specific example. Actually, Eric Rowe had a project before the council, the live work units off of Fifth. And one of the questions was about photovoltaic for the individual units and that came up and there were some, as he described it, there were some concerns about the roof, orientation and sizing, which would make it difficult so that for each unit to have its own sort of photovoltaic sort of array. Anyway, we approved the project and I will say that about a month later, Eric reached out to me and said, hey, you know, you brought up that question, we've been doing some work and actually it looks like it's more feasible than not feasible. So I think your question is accurate that in my experience, many or perhaps most are sort of reluctant, but I think there are some good examples in our community that when we approve something, the standards aren't sort of the maximum they're going to try to do, they'll actually try to do even better than that. But. Yeah, so just quickly, I do mechanical designs, I do all sorts of other consulting. So it really, a lot of my clients don't actually understand the code or the energy part of it and they're small business people. So there's this natural reluctance to do more. Many times when we do these engagements, they find out it is doable back to the point and that's where we have the success. So it's bridging this gap. So I won't speak for John, but there are builders in town who choose like Dick who choose to build far above the code and are not necessarily required to. And I don't know if you sounds like you're one of those who chooses to build who wants to go above code. And so they do exist. They're just not all builders are that way. John and Greg, thank you for speaking tonight. I appreciate it. My name is Eric Rowe. I'm a local builder in Davis. Been doing so for about 25 years and to help answer your question a little bit and pose a new one of my own. Green building costs extra money than standard building. And oftentimes there's not the funding for that. If you build the house, you cannot sell it for that extra money you put into it. You need that unique buyer, that unique owner that wants those features. So if the city pushes for those features, those green building energy efficient features, it costs a builder more money to put those features in the house. And who's gonna pay for that? Oftentimes the buyer or the owner is not willing to pay for that. They like to say I have this wonderful energy efficient house, but they're not willing to pay for it. So that's the disconnect. That's the challenge right there. Let's look at a Tesla automobile. They're $100,000, that's what they were when they came out. Now they're cheaper. So the technology is improving, things are getting cheaper. So if green building can continue to get cheaper and cheaper, then it's easier to require it and it's easier for a builder to include it. And then it's a win-win situation, but things take time. So perhaps we've been in a situation of imbalance in recent years or recent decades where we're pushing for these energy efficient features, but they hurt the feasibility of a project. And in communities like Davis or the wealthier areas of the Bay Area, people are green oriented, they have a little extra money and they're willing to do that. But if you look at other communities in California, maybe outside the cities, people don't have that extra money. So it's hard to push or to require them to do that green building. So those are a couple of my thoughts. So hopefully Davis, California, the United States can continue to find affordable ways to push for that green building and green materials become less expensive. Thank you. Can I respond to that? That, so with my consulting hat on, I actually help builders market. And the first level of my engagement is I have to prove to you that I can save you money so you can pay me. That's the very first part of it. The second part of it is the huge innovation is educating people that they wanna buy these things. And I'll pull a page from the book of the late great and I just having a mental block about Steve Jobs. I got his name. It's actually not a consumer's job to ask. It's our job to sell. So some municipalities have led us as an innovation offer to sell people upgrade packages. And we're very successful on it. So there's a baseline of a certain percentage better than a model energy code. And then there's these other packages. And we usually have a 30 or 40% absorption rate. So back to your point, they pay for it and they understand the value of it. But it's in educating them. It's making them aware of why they want it. So I'll ask a question. I've noticed that homes for sale in England when you look, not even just brand new homes but just regular homes for sale, it has a expected energy cost per year. So people are able to look and go, oh, wow, this is, and there's different alphabetical ratings if my memory serves me correctly. And so people can look at almost two identical-ish houses and sort of in a quick thumbnail go, oh, wow, this one's just gonna be so much cheaper to live in because it's just, my yearly utility bill is only gonna be half of what this other one is. Does Canada have a similar sort of system so that as a home buyer, you have this metric that you can compare home to home? Yes, and so I didn't get to show the video but our building code lets us use a couple of different systems. If everybody wants to go to betterbuilder.ca, you can see a video on there. And that's the importance of the index, right? So Greg's talking about these things. The ERI index is an international energy code index. The HERS index that I'm talking about is a verified rated number that's very affordable for builders. So yes, we do. The province that I'm in actually tried to, they were just very close to getting, I'm trying to remember the name of it, it was an acronym, but people had to provide an energy rating at point of sale. And the issue sort of became that the real estate lobby lobbied for it not to happen. But again, with this energy code coming in, if you start using this index, that's what you get. And it's an ANSI verifiable monetized number. So getting back to doing this, to rating a home, and you have a great opportunity because the banks recognize that on a mortgage. They don't actually do that in Canada. So the appraisers actually recognize that better house as having lower operating costs. So any other, wow, okay. So I'll go here, here, and then here, if that's okay. First of all, thanks to both of you, Greg. That was a wonderful summary of what's been happening with Davis codes in this millennium. And I hadn't ever seen that all presented and I was behind, so much appreciated. John, we had a good time today talking and that's why you pointed at me several times. We talked mostly technology. But one of the things that I saw a study on today, and it's kind of a repeat of a much bigger one that was done by the National Renewable Energy Lab, showed that as soon as the house is finished with a PV system on it, the value of the house increases by $10,000, by more than the cost of the PV. And I guess I feel like we too often lose sight of value increase when we're trying to do our economic analyses. But my real question to you is, is there any data similar to that in Canada? We get more sunshine here, so maybe they're less valuable where you are, but it's certainly been a trend all across the US. So the adverse happens, deck in Canada, solar's considered a liability because there's more insurance that goes along with that. So what I'm working hard on is getting appraisers to recognize that as an asset, just like you're talking about, that that solar on a roof is actually something that buys people disposable income to offset operating costs. But you're way further ahead in the United States than we are in Canada. Our programs in Canada, basically in a nutshell, and this is rather sarcastic, I'll prepare you for it, is paying people to do things that they should be doing for themselves anyways. There's all sorts of grants and programs and handouts, and people get dependent on that. I wish we could really just get that house that he builds recognized as being better with the solar on it, and actually monetizing the value of that when an appraiser goes. It's the appraisers that decide whether there's value there. Well really it's the buyers in the end, but the appraisers have to track what buyers want. So if a buyer goes back to the bank, I agree with you, but if the buyer goes to the bank and the bank says that doesn't have any value, that's got no value. And that's just starting. There's a registry here in the States. But again, there's this interesting thing happening in California where we haven't been using the index. And I go through this all the time with builders. They tell me how great they are, and then I go out and look at their houses or I test their mechanical systems. And then they actually hire me to help them sort of fix it or do better designs. But I have to show them my value. And so this thing about the index is very important because you haven't been rating your houses. You don't know really how to determine what a net zero house is. We have people using that terminology without getting a verification. So hopefully we can do this on one house and sort of see how it settles out, right? Hi, I have a 50 year old house. I have blown in a ton of insulation. I put foil in my attic. I put in two whole house fans. I put in a white roof. But the house's heating bill is terrible because there's no solar gain in the winter. So my next step is to basically pull off the drywall, put it in insulation. But that's not gonna benefit. It's better just to pay the heating bill than to basically upgrade the house. So, and the buyer I sell it to will never know that my house is basically a money sink because the gas bill is really obscene. So the question is why couldn't the city force me and other people to disclose our gas bills, our electric bill, and our water bill on resale just disclose the actual bill? Is there any state law on the resale inspection? We have a process. Is there any reason we couldn't do that, especially for the city, and the question for the mayor? I think you can ask for it during a transaction. The last house I bought, I asked for the utility bills. There is a, there was an appraiser that I know she was trying really hard to get that to be part of the sale is to disclose information about the energy use of the house. And yeah, the real estate market, they are the real estate industry. They fight things like that. I was a real estate agent for a short time and there was a willful ignorance about problems and houses and whatnot. You didn't want to know anything, you didn't disclose it. I was told by the lawyer for Lyon Real Estate never ever as an agent look up the sexual fender registry because if you know that someone lives by you have to tell it. So you never ask questions. So if your house is a problem, you never disclose it. Across the board disclosure would do that. So it would be a way of forcing the real estate agent to actually disclose problems. So Alan, you worked for Lyon Real Estate? Lyon Real Estate. Okay. I actually just sold my house and I disclosed that it took a long time for hot water to get to the master bath. Actually, I had a really expensive on demand pump that I took with me when I went because it was not disclosed to me. I mean literally four and a half minutes for hot water to get to the master bath faucet and I spent about $800 installing. Actually, the first one cost me about $250 and that one failed. So I bought a much more expensive one that worked really well and so I took it with me and disclosed that it takes a long time for hot water to get. So again, I'd say it's consumer awareness and buyer beware. But again, back to somebody who's making the comment in Europe, they have the energy label. That's the easiest way to do it is to require whatever the house is at is to require an index on it and it's not somebody making up the number, it's somebody following a prescribed ANSI standard. So and that's what hers is or that's what the ERI numbers about. And so the state of California actually has hers to verification in which it is an audit that places you on that chart, on that scale. And so there was what, there was a thought by the energy commission that that would become part of the sale is that auditors would, or you could use it as a marketing tool where an audit could come in and say, this is how this house rates on this scale and you could use it as a marketing tool. It hasn't really gained a lot of traction. And one of the reasons is that depending on who does it, it costs probably more than a few hundred dollars to have someone go out there and do an audit. Great, so I have a question. Hi, Tom Phillips, I worked on green buildings and indoor equality for the state of California for years and advise, build a green and then help develop the indoor quality things but also more recently working on climate adaptation and resilience measures. Lead, as you may know, has the pilot measures. We got a little one and build a green also for climate adaptation resilience. So my first question and I sent you an email. Yeah, and I got it and I got answers for you. Okay, so we can talk about that later. But the basic point is that Canada is doing some good stuff to look at future climate and weather files and use that to factor in to the increased say cooling demand and wind and rain and other issues over the life of the building because we know it's changing so fast now that we need to aim 50 or 100 years ahead. And Vancouver's doing that, I believe, and the National Research Council has several projects to develop that. It's moving more slowly here in the U.S. So I guess I would just ask you about things like passive house and other projects and approaches that are already going near zero energy without just really good design and construction. They have a CO2 metric that they calculate and California's gonna move that way. So I don't know if you realize that, but as of last summer they were talking about it. Yesterday they set it in a workshop. The new metric for the new building standards cycle is gonna be base carbon base. So that's doable. They have to work out the details. They've just updated their weather files because the last five years were historically hot. They're gonna also work on developing future weather files. So I guess, have you seen, I've followed the passive house stuff. It seems to be growing in Canada and I think they can go all electric, at least in the urban areas. And they survive the Arctic cyclone or whatever you call it, the bombs and so on, with power outages and maybe battery backup. And how that relates to California is that we're gonna have climate like Phoenix by mid-century. And there's already a production builder there doing market-based single-family homes, net zero. They're doing near-passive house, super airtight deficient and they can downsize all the heat pumps, the PV system and now they can afford batteries. And they also get utilities subsidies because it's all grid tight. So that's already doable. Davis should be doing that now and also reducing carbon even beyond that. And so that's my question to Davis and Canada. How do we take basically this technology, high-performance building, it's already out there, there's big projects and how do we go beyond that because we're an emergency situation with climate change basically. We've got 10 years. No, I agree. So I do have quite a bit of experience with passive house and the interesting thing of passive house is it actually came from California. It was called the Low Cal House and the Germans sort of put their name on it and then it came back. So when I was over in Germany looking at passive houses and I've actually helped build one in our climate, it's very specific to climate. So the idea of passive house is to get the house to basically heat itself and it's very airtight. The houses that we're building now are equally as airtight. It focuses on minimizing thermal bridging and conduction, which is really a cold climate thing. So there's, again, you guys have the best stuff. It's ASHRAE 90.2 and Greg talked about this undertaking that you have to do to prove cost benefit. ASHRAE 90.2 does that and it's just in its draft form. So I saw a presentation when I was at a conference. So in this climate, it's more about the types of windows you use rather than thermal insulation. Yeah, and I was in a building today and I saw something I've never seen before where there was vertical shades on the west side of the window, which makes a lot of sense. I hadn't done that before. If you're asking me about passive house and energy intensity, the houses that I work on are equally as good as that. All these things are measurement tools and they're all very important. In Canada, there's not that many passive houses built. So my philosophy is to try and catch the mainstream. So I wanna have an influence over 10,000 houses instead of 100 houses. So I'm doing everything I can with baby steps to try and bring it into the middle, right? We need those passive houses to show people the possibilities, but the builders that I work for, both production and custom, production and custom builders, that's a long way for them to go. So actually, it seems like. So I would say at 390.2. So I've been asked to make sure that we sort of end roughly on time and I think there'll be plenty of time in the next few minutes to have a more in-depth conversation about some of these details. I just wanted to thank the Davis Futures Forum again for hosting this event and thank you very much for coming. And I will, on behalf of my colleagues on the City Council, accept the challenge that the Canadian. And I'm just having to go out a little bit on a limb assuming that they will be supportive of this, but I will probably reach out to Eric Rowe and you and Greg and some of the people in the audience to help us figure out how we do this. I can say that we do offer density bonuses and various other things for developers to incentivize them to do the right things in other areas. So I don't see why we couldn't do something like that for something that heads in this direction. But thank you once again. And if you're open to it, I do know that there are several people in the audience who would like to talk with you further. Judy, did you wanna say anything in closing? Or we, so anyway. Thank you again.