 Thank you all, thank you all for joining us for this panel. This is our third panel this morning and this one is on sustainable and net zero energy buildings. So we have a raft of good speakers for this and we are going to start off with Sam Rashkin who is the chief architect for the building technologies office at the Department of Energy's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. So we're delighted to have Sam with us. I think that's my cue to begin. Okay, welcome everyone. I think if I'm the leading first speaker in this topic, the best thing I could do is try to set the table truly what is zero energy and what's a zero energy home because that's what we keep talking about. And I think try and get past a lot of the confusion that's happened around green and defining what green is. So I'm gonna try and give you a clear setup for what is zero energy. And the way I'm gonna do it is give you the basic outline of what we tell consumers because it's a very, very lay audience that needs to understand what we're doing. And at its simplest core, if I try to explain what zero energy is to a consumer, it's not about the energy and the environment and climate change or any of those things. I always try to say, imagine you had Uncle Max who was a best car mechanic in the world you knew and you were about to buy a car. And Uncle Max said buy this car, this model, at this price. That's what zero energy home is. It's like you have the best leading experts in housing telling you this is the house you should buy. And why is that the case? Well it begins with the fact that the house is such an overwhelming purchase. For many buyers it's the largest purchase of a lifetime. And as a result, they're also worried that once you make decisions you can't go back and change how you built a house. So it's a very overwhelming experience. As a result it's very stressful. So buyers often address, no, the location, the schools, they work in the floor plan and the grant encounters that we all know about. But there's also lots of fear about how well the house will hold up. It's value will not have moisture problems, will be affordable and low energy bills. Will there be other issues with comfort and durability and quality. Those are things where Uncle Max would be great. And so what we have is the home experts would choose and it's the reason they would choose it. It has seven must have systems in every zero energy ready home. And the first system is an optimized thermal protection system. No the roof, the walls, the windows, the foundation are built to a much, much higher level. Better than the current code out to future generations of code or better. It's like a house that's future ready. Every leading expert knows you would never make the biggest purchase of a lifetime knowing it would be obsolete or even illegal to build in three or four years. Why would you not get the house the next generation code? So the first thing is this optimized thermal blanket. The second system that every expert would wanna have in every house they purchase is a whole house water protection system, comprehensive water protection. Water issues are in fact the most significant concern of American homeowners. No other concern is raised as much as that issue. And every zero energy ready house is a comprehensive package of details that help protect from top to bottom against moisture and inside as well. In fact, it's moisture ready. The third system, every leading expert we wanna have in their home is a high performance heating and cooling system. Every expert knows that as the homes get more efficient, it gets more difficult. You have less air flow, you have longer swing seasons, comfort's much harder in a high performance home. So they wanna house its comfort ready. That's built with the best equipment, it's professionally installed and it's tested before it's delivered to the consumer. The fourth must have system that every expert wanna have is high efficiency components. They work better, they last better, they perform better in terms of energy use. It's a house that's tech ready from top to bottom. The fifth system that every leading expert wanna have in their home is comprehensive indoor air quality. Every expert knows that homes are getting tighter, there's less fresh air, there's more chemicals and materials that we put into our homes. They know it's not extra credit anymore, it's a mandatory to have a house that has full measures for protecting the health of our occupants. They wanna house its health ready. The sixth system that every expert wanna have in their house also is a solar ready construction. They know that the cost of solar is coming down, they know that solar can take your house to zero and that simple low cost, no cost details can in fact allow you to put solar in any time in the future with hardly any disruption or cost penalty. It's zero ready. And the last must have system that every leading expert wanna have is a house that has enhanced quality assurance. We know that construction is getting more and more challenged, it's hard to find good crews in training trades and they know that homes that are certified, inspected, tested, that have advanced diagnostics and have independent quality control are the way to buy homes. They wanna house its performance ready. And you get all these seven must have systems often for lower cost. Experts know that the true cost of home ownership is not the sticker price but the monthly mortgage and the monthly energy bill. And in fact, the monthly mortgage may be a little higher for the zero energy home but you save so much on the utility bills. Every month it's actually the true cost is lower. It costs less to own a better home and experts know that's a smart choice. And lastly, they know that you get all this simply by looking for a logo. It's not like greenwashing or it's not like I don't know what I'm getting. If you look for a logo that says zero energy ready home, in fact, you're getting all these seven must have systems and you have this assurance with this government back label. And so that's what we tell consumers. Simply get the house Uncle Max would tell you to get or in this case, Uncle Sam. And one more thing I'll say is a lot of people wanna know why is the federal government doing this program? Why is DOE involved? And I did some analysis. We set up a quick model to look at what are the benefits to our nation for getting consumers to act in their self interest and buy these homes. And just some quick analysis. It adds up to about a third of a trillion dollars of utility bill savings as we reach 30% market penetration about eight million jobs years of work which is about 20,000 new persistent new jobs clean energy jobs or three million job years of work. And it's about almost three million metric tons of carbon taken out of the atmosphere for less pollution. So lots of real really compelling benefits for doing this. So when you think of zero energy ready homes and you think of zero energy buildings just realize this is an amazing business case for everyone. The consumer gets an incredibly better home ownership experience. The builder gets to sell a better home for lower cost while having a higher revenue and less complaints. Communities have homes that have more value, higher tax base and a stronger community with people having more income and our nation gets all these other benefits. So this is a big deal. Thank you very much. By the way I have lots of information up front we can hand out later if you want these notes. Great, thank you Sam. And may we all do the things that are really smart and just make sense, right? So we're now going to turn to Carrie Granchamp. Close enough. You'll have to say that, I'm sorry. And anyway, Carrie, it's the director of construction operations for high performance homes. Can you hear me? My name is Coyote Granchamp. I'm high performance homes. When I started doing the high performance technology I thought I was reinventing the wheel. All I wanted to do is make a better home that's gonna last forever. I didn't realize that Sam had already done all the research ahead of me. I probably should have done that old analogy, know what you don't know or don't know what you don't know. Long story short, practical application is us. We are successfully building home after home. Not only is it a high performance beautiful home but it's a different type of a lifestyle. It's a hospital clean environment inside of these. There is a worry free environment. Most builders don't think they can achieve this level that Sam was talking about. He was talking about getting the solar ready and the air tightness and water tightness and how is this even possible? How is this affordable for anybody? It is. It's the way of the future. This is the way that building will be, as he was saying. It's how it should be. It's the responsible way to build. We actually were very lucky that we got to notice that we were involved in a house that got a negative three hers as of this morning. Which if nobody knows what the hers, it's like a miles per gallon for homes. 100 is a code built house. 67 is the energy start home, which is very, very good. So down to zero is fantastic and a minus three, that's even better. We take all the aspects that he's talking about it but in specific, we do a SIPPS panel. SIPPS panel is a structurally insulated panel system. Gives me very consistent results. I know what the wind load, what the shears, what the waterproofing, how much of thermal dynamics that's gonna be involved in order to get this to a zero energy ready home. I do conventional framing on the inside. I try to do what's called advanced framing, which means there's less material. Just a more reasonable, more responsible way to build. Use standard trusses. Makes it a little bit easier for us. I can do a standard built home as it were looking. I do everything either full of itatic ready, solar shingles or solar panels. We use geothermal for RHVAC. It's a lot more efficient. You are not reliant upon the exterior air. You're reliant upon the 58 degree that is underneath the earth's surface. So again, we have consistent, repeatable results. That is the number one thing that we want. We want people to know that they're coming into our home, they're gonna have exactly what they expect. They're gonna have fantastic indoor air quality and it's gonna be a beautiful home for the rest of their lives. And there you have it. And there you have it. And it's great to know that people are building like that. Yeah, don't be afraid of it. It's doable. That it is doable and that it is in the market and that we can get all of these wonderful, wonderful attributes. So we will now turn to Stephen Washington, who is the Vice President for Business Development and Government Affairs with Basic Power. Stephen? Good morning, can everybody hear me? So Basic Power, we design, we develop and we manufacture innovative technologies for energy conservation and energy efficiency. It's all based upon our electromagnetic reactor, which is a patented device, which we've used successfully in lamp ballasts, LED drivers. We are doing a fuel reformer at the moment and some medical technologies. But the technology that we're showcasing at the expo next door is our energy bank, energy conservation technology, the Basic Power unit. What we are doing initially is cleaning up the AC wave in the building. And this leads me to the points I'd like to make across today, which is about power quality. It's, there's a paradox in energy efficiency in that we take the fundamental sine wave that comes in from the utility company, which looks like this, and we corrupt that with our energy efficiency devices because in order to make something energy efficient, what we're doing is maybe sampling some of that sine wave. So now we have little spikes, switching power supplies, and we're creating what engineers called harmonics. Harmonics are quite destructive in the industrial settings, but we have so many technologies now within a home that are creating electrical noise within the building. One of the other things we're seeing now is a lot of solar on buildings and maybe wind turbines, where we're creating DC power. We're now creating that, turning it back into AC power with an inverter, and then using AC power and turning it back into DC power to power our cell phones and laptops. LED lighting, it's DC powered. So within a building now, we're seeing an increasing amount of electrical noise. And when you increase electrical noise, what you're doing is having to pull more current through the utility company to the same amount of work. So our devices clean up that electricity. If you have an old transistor radio and you detune it to an AM station and you follow all of your electrical leads through the building, you'll see which are the worst offenders because you'll hear the radio frequencies. Our laptops used to have a real big brick transform on them. Now they have little switching power supplies. These are one of the worst culprits. So one of the things that I've looked at is some of the energy star requirements and looked at some of the references to harmonics in there. Within the LED section, there is a reference to some quality controller harmonics, but unfortunately on the switching power supplies, there's not. So we're creating an issue where we're creating more and more efficient devices, which are creating more and more inefficient power. The other issue I want to touch on is electrical grounding. Now we have been in the business for a number of years and probably 95% of the buildings that we do site surveys on have issues with their electrical grounding. Now most people know electrical grounding is important for lightning protection and to prevent electrocution, but it's also has some power quality issues too. If you go to a building that has a very poor electrical ground, we quantify that by the ohms of resistance at the grounding electrode. Most of the new companies with technology are looking for five ohms or less. The telecom companies want five ohms or less and our technology wants five ohms or less. Most of the buildings we go into we're seeing ohms resistance in the hundreds. Even the utility poles, they're supposed to have a ground every mile if a copper rod has not been stolen by somebody. But the resistance of the ground outside of our building, in a manufacturing building, is 700 ohms. So when we correct our building and put a really good grounding now and that transformer gets hit, that power is coming straight into our building because it has a much better ground. Now there's lots of reasons why grounds are not good. Maybe in an older building it was a galvanized rod that's now rotted away. Or maybe the connector is loose. Or maybe the connector's not there at all. Also, well I'm from Pennsylvania where we have about three inches of topsoil. So when you're pushing in a eight foot ground rod and maybe when it goes in a foot you hit dirt rock and so the electrician soars it off and now you have a one foot ground which is not a grounded building. So most of the buildings that we see have grounding issues or bonding issues inside. So you're putting all this nice, very sensitive, smart technology into a building and well then you're creating issues within the building of all harmonics and they've got nowhere to go plus now you have no lightning protection and search suppression for your expensive equipment. So one of the things I would like to see certainly for federal buildings is for people to really start looking at the ground. One of the issues is that in order to get a good ohms reading you need to have a ground clamp meter which costs about 1500 bucks. That's why electricians don't have them. It's usually a visual inspection. The building inspectors don't have them either. So basically they look at it, yes it's in the ground, yes it's nice and tight but nobody ever measures it. If you're in an area where it's very sandy soil you're not gonna get a good ground. If in rocky areas you're not gonna get good ground. So one of the most important things that people can start doing now is looking at the grounding of their houses and also taking into account all of the electrical noise that's being created within the building because of all the smart and energy efficient equipment we've got in there. Thank you. Great, thank you very much. I'd now like to turn to John Pullen who is the Vice President for Government Affairs and Solutions with Phillips Lighting and I think we probably all are becoming very aware of the lighting revolution that is underway. So John, welcome. Thank you. It's not me. No, it often is. First, I'm with Phillips Lighting. We're a Dutch company, as you can tell by my accent. We are the world's leading lighting manufacturer. Only the sun produces more light than Phillips and certainly will team with the sun when given the opportunity. The lighting business has dramatically changed. We started 125 years ago. Our first order was the Winter Palace for the Tsar. Worked out well for us, not so much for the Tsar but we made light bulbs, incandescent light bulbs that lasted a couple of months, maybe a couple of years and they burned out and we'd make some more. Manufactured, a classic model. We now produce light that will last conceivably the length, the time of the home itself. We will produce light in the future, fixtures that will produce light for a home and you will never change a bulb out. That's how much this industry has transformed just in the last decade. The advent of LED has not only reduced energy consumption by over 70% from lighting and most buildings, 18 to 20% of the energy consumption is in lighting. Homes varies, obviously. But that is a significant reduction in energy consumption. You couple that with, of course, the fact that the product will last so much longer and back to the point that was made at the beginning, high efficiency components mean that you will be, when you transform a home or a building to LED lighting, you will have a product that will not only reduce energy consumption, it will reduce maintenance cost, provide the quality of light for possibly the life of the facility or at least until the next remodel or the next generation of LED lighting or in the advent of possibly of what's called organic LED. That's probably the next wave of innovation in lighting where light will not even emanate from a fixture but will be embedded in paint or fabric within the contents of a room and the light from the room will come from that. Needless to say, our business model is changing a great deal as is all the other lighting manufacturers in the world, much like the utilities and others that are under great stress or strain because of this innovation. But the end result will be better quality lighting, more energy efficient lighting, longer lasting lighting and consumers that will be able to reach that the objective they want, which is the most energy efficient home or office building or other facility possible. Thank you. Thanks very, very much. It's really, really exciting in terms of looking at all these technology changes. And good luck with that new business plan. Now I'd like to turn to Kurt Riesenberg who is the executive director for Spray Polyurethane Foam Alliance, SPFA, Kurt. Good morning. So I've got probably five things to say. I'm gonna give them about a minute each if I can do that. Our timelines are always compressed up here and there always has to be one guy on a panel without a tie, that's me. So I'm gonna try to keep it as short and informal as I can. I thought about leaving the jacket at the booth. So first of all, I wanna thank Sustainable Energy Coalition and EESI for organizing this great event. I wanna thank everyone for coming today and listening to us. I'd like to thank DOE and EPA for their energy leadership. They've been transformative and we need powerhouses like that making the good things happen. So we're very appreciative of everything that they've done. My name is Kurt Riesenberg. I'm executive director of SPFA, the Spray Polyurethane Foam Alliance. I think a lot of you have maybe heard of Spray Foam, seen it, it's been on a lot of TV shows, extreme home makeover that you can't put on HGTV without seeing Spray Foam being used somewhere. So the market really has grown fantastically over the last number of years. In terms of SPFA itself as an organization, we are a small staff trade association. We do all the typical things that a 501C6 is going to do. We publish technical documents, all of which are free and available for download on our website. So while they get a little bit technical, we do want to make them accessible and available to the customers and architects and folks that are going to be able to utilize those. We have an annual convention awards program. We publish a magazine, as you can see, these are on our booth. Just happens to be at the cover this quarter is Net Zero Energy. And we also published a model LCA for Spray Foam. We have summary copies of that in our booth on the table. There's also a 50 page summary document on our website. I really want to focus just for the remaining minute of what SPFA does on certification. Spray Foam is frankly a bit of a complex installation. Has to be done right. To meet the performance parameters of the product, it has to be installed to manufacturer specifications. And we're effectively making plastic on site. So having your contractors, and I should note that SPFA does represent the complete value chain of the industry from manufacturers through distributors and blenders and consultants all the way to the contractors where the rubber really meets the road. And the contractors represent 70% of our membership. This certification program is an ISO 17024 accredited certification program. Anyone who's gone through certification development knows that that's quite a feat. We felt that it was necessary. This program is only three years old now, but we did jump through a lot of fiery hopes to make sure that this program was as rock solid as it could be. Because not only is the industry relying upon this to make sure that things are done properly and Spray Foam's installed safely and to get the performance that you're supposed to, but also as an avenue for differentiation among those contractors and for something of an easy button for customers. Because a lot of times you're dealing with customers and they've seen Spray Foam and they kind of get it, but they just really don't. Giving them that one added easy button to know that if this person is nationally certified to an ISO certification, I have one more level of confidence in their capabilities. Higher certified workers, please. In terms of SPF performance, Spray Foam has a lot of performance benefits. I could sit here and talk for the next two hours about that probably. I'll just hit a couple of highlights. It is easier to maintain indoor air quality with Spray Foam and to manage occupant comfort. It provides additional racking strength to walls when it's used as insulation. It has an unlimited wind up lift speed rating from UL when it's used on a roof. And within the context of our session here in Net Zero Energy, buildings really what it comes down to is the combined performance benefit of high R value along with air sealing that you're gonna get in something of a one stop shop with Spray Foam that's pretty hard to replicate with any other competing technologies. When you have that continuous insulation, you're going to see a dramatic reduction in energy use in the property, whether it's commercial or residential, and it's gonna allow for the downsizing of mechanicals and a whole bunch of other benefits. You compliment that with renewable energy or distributed energy resources, microturbines, fuel cells, photovoltaics, whatever it might be, and you're quickly on your way to a very high performing building or Net Zero Energy building. In terms of the, well I also wanna point that as you invest in those technologies, those aren't cheap. You're gonna put a lot of money into using that type of power, generating that type of power on site. You don't wanna do that and put them in place for operation on a building that leaks like a sieve. So having the air sealing in addition to a high R value is absolutely essential in reaching that zero energy buildings. That type of performance, premium performance, comes with admittedly a little bit of a premium cost and that'll be my transition to the last minute in terms of policy. When you are dealing with something that has the type of performance that SprayFoam does and people are gonna be willing to pay for it, you have a lot of competing technologies in the marketplace. So in terms of the policy, starting back at EPAC 2005 and then reauthorizing the tax extenders of December 2015, last year, 25C Energy Efficiency Residential Tax Credit, 45L, 179D, the commercial building tax deduction, a three part up to a dollar radius square foot. In terms of those, SprayFoam qualifies for those incentives, particularly in the building envelope side of commercial building tax deduction going after that 60 cents a square foot sub-provision of that bill and SprayFoam is gonna play a huge role in that for you. But in terms of our somewhat higher first cost, anything you can do to bring down that first cost is absolutely essential. So you gotta step up in technology, you get toward your payback faster, you're gonna put higher performing technologies in your building, reduce that first cost down to a lower level of other lesser competing technologies and you get the higher performance. So if we can reduce that first cost, more people are gonna take advantage of SprayFoam and put these higher performing technologies in their homes and their buildings. So I'd just like to say that we're very big supporters of those energy tax provisions. It's unfortunate that it's sort of groundhog day every few years when you have to go through these extenders and get these approved. We'll be doing it all over again in 2017 because there are no tax titles and the current waiting to be conferenced energy bill. But we do, however, support with ResNet, we work with ResNet and high performance building congressional coalition to push for measures such as the mortgage incentives on the Senate side. But anything you can do to bring down those first costs is absolutely critical and we wanna support that. It gets people, it gets the technology in and gets them to their payback that much faster. So in terms of policy, we could talk about that all day as well, but those provisions are particularly important to us and we're hoping to see those continue in the future. We have a booth and please stop by if you have any other questions. Great, thanks, Kurt. So to round out this group is John Spears who is the president of the Sustainable Design Group and he's also doing some very, very interesting work. Thanks, Carol. We design and build grid independent solar homes here in the Washington, D.C. area and we also have an international group that develops solar applications for the developing world. When I first started out in the early 70s, I became intrigued with the notion that we could build houses that are completely self-sufficient. I was inspired by a bunch of radical builders in the New Mexico Desert building completely off-grid, sustainable, self-sufficient at the time is what we call it, homes. And that got me thinking. That seems like it's a good idea. And I've spent all my career doing nothing but focusing on that, the technology, the policy, the applications, developing technology to do that. In the mid-90s, I had the good fortune to go to South Africa and see what the rest of the world looks like. And I came to realize that if you take a bigger global view, 40% or more of the world's population doesn't have access to housing, energy, clean water to drink, sanitation, those sorts of things that we take for granted. So the issues that we were dealing with here in the US, energy bills, things like that, seem mundane in the global view. But coming back here and thinking about how we now approach the responsibility we have as architects and builders of the built environment to give our customers and the world ahead of us the most, the best buildings that we can. We should look beyond the steps that we're currently taking now to a much bigger view. We build a house called an earth home. The earth home is designed to be completely self-sufficient. Now they're primarily designed for developing countries because this is where people really need it. And we've been building houses using dirt to build the walls, compressed earth bricks that we take off the site that are 90% labor and about 10% material, so it's very, very affordable. Photovoltaics for power, rainwater collection for clean water, composting toilets for making fertilizer for their garden, which is watered by the gray water from the sinks and showers and so on. And then good architecture so that the buildings stay comfortable year round without any need for a mechanical system. These buildings work great. They are very, very cost effective in the developing world. But what about here? So here we have a very different market. Here we build expensive custom homes. I mean we do some entry level stuff too, but most of our clients are well off people looking for a retirement home or their first home and they've got some money to spend. But they still have basic needs that we need to focus on in all of this. And the first one's building a healthy house. So the house has no toxins in it. We use nothing that could cause harm to the occupants. And then we make sure the air is fresh and ventilated all the time. The second thing we have to make sure the house does is that it's secure. What happens when the power goes out? People living in multimillion dollar homes in Potomac have to move to a motel if the power's out for more than 24 hours because they can't live in their house. If you live in the country and you have a well, you don't have drinking water, you can't flush the toilet, you gotta move to a motel. How is that a good thing? And why do we build houses that way? It is so straightforward to put in at today's prices and technology a system that could back up your power so you never lose power again. So we have a healthy and a secure house. The next thing is it's also gotta be economical. Well, the magic of these houses combined with tax credits and incentives and low mortgage rates, we can build you off the grid self-sufficient, well, I call it grid independent, not off the grid, but grid independent. Power goes out, you don't notice really. At a monthly cost of home ownership, less than a code minimum, cheapest house you could buy with the same square footage. Sam mentioned it briefly. The cost of home ownership is the mortgage cost plus the utility cost. You add those up. If you add another $20,000 to the cost of your mortgage, that's 100 bucks a month to offset about a $250 utility bill. You now have $150 extra per month in a healthy, secure, self-sufficient solar home. Plus at the end of the year, you'll probably get 15, a fair amount of tax credits on your tax bill based on federal and local tax credits. So in my mind, this is what we should be doing. We should be really focusing on the big picture, looking at all of the infrastructure systems that we need to build a more resilient future with grid independent solar homes, looking at water and waste as integral parts of the infrastructure of the house. And then lastly, most of my clients drive electric cars and they're charged by their solar system so they don't pay for fuel either. Thanks. Great, thank you very much, John. And I think the great news is that there is so much that is now available and it just keeps getting better. And more and more that is coming into the marketplace, policy is important as you've heard from everyone, but I think that it is very, very exciting. And of course, buildings are essential in our society and they use most of, so much of our energy and produce so much of our emissions. So thank you all very, very much for being here. Hope you will also go and visit all of those booths and we will now be getting ready for our next panel, which is going to focus on defense. Thank you all very, very much. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you.