 Good morning everyone and welcome. Thank you for being here at the Expo and this second policy panel. My name is Ellen Vaughn with the Environmental and Energy Study Institute. I lead our work on sustainable high-performance buildings so I am delighted to be able to introduce this panel today on energy efficient building systems. Energy efficiency provides multiple benefits as you will hear. So I will introduce our first panelist. Dunstan McCauley is a member of the Board of Directors of the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air Conditioning Engineers better known as ASHRAE. Good morning. Our sincere gratitude to the Environmental and Energy Study Institute for inviting ASHRAE and myself to speak on energy efficient building systems at today's forum. My name is Dunstan McCauley and I have over 20 years of experience designing building systems for commercial and institutional projects. I'm also a member of the Board of Directors of ASHRAE. ASHRAE is an International Nonprofit Association founded in 1894 that has over 56,000 members whose focus is on building systems, energy efficiency, indoor environmental quality and sustainability. I'll be speaking briefly on energy use in buildings and some of our programs that we have for energy efficiency and energy conservation. In the United States today buildings account for nearly 40% of the total primary energy use and approximately 75% of electricity consumption. The building sector can provide valuable opportunities for efficiency improvement, cost savings and resource conservation through the design of more energy efficient building systems. Improving building performance can also provide an opportunity to help both commercial and residential building owners save money and conserve valuable energy resources. When we look at energy from the global scale the opportunities for energy efficient building systems are tremendous. Increasing population growth and urbanization will result in a global construction boom that will result in a new building construction equal to the size of Singapore each month until the year 2050. To better accommodate this rate of growth cost-effective energy efficient systems are critical for the United States and the global economy, the environment and energy security. ASHRAE members are leaders in these fields and we participate in integrated building design, construction and operation. As a technical society, ASHRAE has resources and expertise to guide in the development of more energy efficient building systems. ASHRAE is well known for our standards and guidelines which provide guidance and best practices to the industry in the areas of indoor environmental quality, energy conservation, high performance building and other related practice areas. ASHRAE prides itself on its standards development processes and is one of only six standards developing organizations in the United States that can self certify that its standards meet their American National Standards Institute's procedures. This means our standards are voluntary and consensus-based and are developed through the participation of all interested and affected stakeholders including engineers, manufacturers, users, government representatives and academia. Importantly, the National Technology Transfer and Advancement Act requires federal agencies and departments to use voluntary consensus standards when legal and practical and to consult with voluntary private sector consensus standards bodies such as ASHRAE when developing technical standards. ASHRAE stands ready to continue helping in this area and for all building industry needs including improving energy efficiency. ASHRAE flagship standard standard 90.1 titled energy standards for building except low rise residential buildings began in the 1970s when ASHRAE was tasked to develop a national standard on energy conservation after the 1973 energy crisis. We met this challenge by developing the premier energy standard for commercial building design and construction. Standard 90.1 has also influenced commercial building designs worldwide by conserving energy and reducing costs for building owners and occupants. Federal law requires ASHRAE standard 90.1 to be the minimum requirement for building energy codes throughout the U.S. On the residential side, ASHRAE is working to improve energy efficiency to home owners by updating its energy standards for residential building standard 90.2 titled energy efficient design for low rise residential buildings. Of significant importance, the Department of Energy Energy Information Administration have stated that nearly one third of U.S. households report facing a challenge in paying energy bills or sustaining adequate levels of heating and cooling in their homes. The updated standard 90.2 will provide tremendous utility cost savings for home owners, providing opportunities to lower energy costs and consumption. Design excellence has been an ASHRAE tradition, so we have taken it upon ourselves to help building owners who want to achieve a higher, who want to achieve higher energy efficiency. ASHRAE has partnered with the International Code Council, the American Institute of Architects, the Illuminating Engineering Society of North America, and the U.S. Green Building Council to develop standard 189.1, which will be used as part of the 2018 code cycle for the International Green Construction Code. The standard provides total building guidance for design, constructing, and operating high performance green buildings. This standard has been incorporated by the U.S. Army, Navy, and Air Force into the unified facilities criteria for high performance building design. As important as it is for new buildings to utilize the latest standards, existing buildings provide a great opportunity to increase energy efficiency. There are several programs created by the private and public entities that are aimed to improve existing building stock. In fact, there were tax incentives for building owners to reduce the building's total energy and power cost in comparison to the minimum requirements set by provisions of previous ASHRAE 90.1. Congress first authorized this tax deduction, 179D, in 2005, and is currently considering reauthorizing it after the bill expires. In addition to these programs, ASHRAE has revised standard 100 energy efficiency in existing buildings. This standard analyzed existing buildings' performance and set energy performance targets that can be used by building owners to reduce energy cost. Standard 100 can also be used by local authorities to reduce load on city infrastructures and can be used by federal and state officials or utility companies to validate performance improvements resulting from tax incentives and other rebate programs. To help building owners and operators understand the energy use of the buildings and opportunities for improvement, ASHRAE has developed a building energy rating program and performance tool called the Building Energy Quotient or Building EQ. The program provides a quick analysis that benchmark building energy performance. The program has two different evaluations that can be used independently or together. The in operation rating compares actual building energy use with metered energy from the utility. The design rating compares the building energy use based on the building physical characteristics and systems design. Building EQ has been around and has started to gain foothold. Recently the University of Central Florida has adopted Building EQ as one of the rating programs to monitor their building energy consumption. In conclusion, ASHRAE promotes the design construction and operation of highly energy efficient buildings through professional certifications and by providing and disseminating technical information for the building and policy making community. ASHRAE helped policy makers address the technical and implementation barriers that can prevent the market from attaining cost effective energy efficient solutions. Thank you for this opportunity and if you have any questions or would like to learn more about ASHRAE and our programs, we stop by our booth in the Rayburn for you. Thank you very much. Thank you so much. Thank you for your contributions. Thank you, ASHRAE. And our next speaker is Dr. Richard Duncan, who is technical director of the Spray Polyurethane Foam Alliance. I'm delighted to welcome you to the panel. Thank you and good morning. I certainly would like to acknowledge and appreciate the opportunity that EESI has given us to speak today. As I begin my talk, I want to talk a little bit about building enclosures because you're going to see a lot of presentations and displays here talking about renewable energy. And of course, the more renewable energy we can use, the better. But there are many parts of the country where renewable energy is not plentiful and having an energy efficient building enclosure is very important. So as we talk about energy efficiency, building enclosures need to perform a couple of things to keep us comfortable. We need to control the flow of heat, air, moisture and water. They're all important to making a comfortable energy efficient building. But how do we do that? Well, you've probably heard we can add more insulation. We can increase the R value of our buildings and that's fine. But that's not the only part of the solution. In fact, buildings are notoriously leak air. And if we leak air, we're exfiltrating conditioned air to the outside that we've spent energy and money to heat and cool. Likewise, at the same time, we're bringing in unconditioned air from the outside of the building, which we now have to heat and cool. So stopping air leakage is a big deal. And in fact, the Department of Energy estimates that any homes built that are more than 10 years old, about 20 to 40% of their heating and ventilation and air conditioning costs are due to air leakage. And in fact, if you look at all the cracks and gaps in these homes, if you add them all up, they're equivalent to having either a window or a door open all winter long in a home. So it's very important that we that we seal these buildings up properly. So air barriers are important. Also, the control of moisture is a big deal. If we have excessive moisture inside of a building, it's uncomfortable. But in addition to that, that moisture can condense, it can cause mold and mildew. And ultimately, it can cause rusting and rotting of the building structure. And of course, that makes the building itself not sustainable. So having a vapor retarder in the building enclosure is also very important. And lastly, we want to control liquid water. And that's sort of obvious we don't like to live in buildings that are wet. So builders, architects and designers have a number of different products at their disposal. For example, for insulation, we can use things like fiberglass or cellulose or foam for vapor retarders and air barriers and water resistant layers, we can use films and coatings. But that brings us to spray foam and the industry that I represent spray foam is a very unique product. It's an advanced integrated building technology. And why? Because it allows us to insulate air seal, install a vapor retarder and make the building water resistant all in one single application product. Spray foam is delivered to the building in a two part set of chemicals. It's actually a liquid chemicals heat and pressure added to it using special equipment. It's sprayed onto the wall ceilings floors and and the entire structure. It expands in place sealing all those cracks and gaps. It's continuous providing a solid layer of insulation. In addition to that closed cell foam, which is one type of product also acts as an adhesive. It helps to glue our buildings together and acts as a secondary water barrier. And in fact, a FEMA recognizes closed cell foam is the only cavity insulation that is suitable for reconstruction in flood zones. And several states have acknowledged the hurricane and earthquake resistance of homes built with closed cell foam. Now you've probably seen spray foam in in a number of different forms at your hardware store. You may see it in these one component cans. That is spray foam, but it's much it's done on a very small scale. In the real world, when we're spraying the entire walls of homes or buildings, we bring these chemicals to the job site and 55 gallon drums in pairs. And it's applied using special equipment by trained operators. So we can spray foam inside of walls or on top of low slope roofs. Now, what is the economic impact of spray foam? Well, a majority, a significant majority of spray foam systems and coatings are made exclusively in the US and they help to drive our petrochemical industry. In fact, the US leads the world in the development and application of spray foam, where over 40% of the world's consumption of foam were right here in the United States. The annual growth of our industry is promising. Over the past five years, we've seen the compound annual growth rate of over 11% in our industry. And today, the value of it of installed products is over $2 billion per year. And we employ approximately 40 to 50,000 individuals, making up this highly trained and well compensated workforce. Now, the installation of spray foam is not a do it yourself product, not at the levels we're talking about for installing it on the walls. A safe quality application involves some hazardous chemicals, namely isocyanates that are airborne. They're temporarily there, but it requires certain training and equipment to do that do it correctly. So professionally trained installers are a must for our products. And that's where my trade association comes in. We're the spray polyurethane foam Alliance. We were formed in 1987. And we are the voice and the educational resource for the entire industry, where a 501C6 trade association were composed and founded by contractors, but we also include manufacturers, distributors of the chemicals and equipment, as well as a host of inspectors and consultants involved in the industry. Now, the organization supports best practices through a number of different core initiatives, which include educational programs and events, such as we have an annual trade show and conference at the end of January 1 part of February. We also publish a quarterly magazine, which is free to the public. It's called spray foam professional magazine. And in 2013, we created an ISO compliant SPFA professional installer certification and contractor accreditation programs. We also publish a free library of different technical literature and guidelines to help architects, builders and designers understand more about our products. We also do legislative advocacy, hence why we're here today. We also do research and we provide networking opportunities for our members. For more information, you can visit us at our website, which is simply spray foam dot org, where you can visit us at our booth today. We've also provided at our booth the following printed documents available at our booth and at the back of the room. In the back of the room, we have a an AIA approved presentation. It's an overview presentation. It's rather long. It's something that I'll do as a webinar if you contact us. But it talks about spray foam, its type of applications, the chemistry, all the details you may need to know. At our booth, you will find a copy of our industry level life cycle assessment and environmental product declaration, which talks about the environmental impacts of our products. I should note that the ones that you'll see here were developed in 2013. Later this year, we're going to publish our new update, which is going to include the low GWP blowing agents. Also at our booth, you can get a copy of the latest edition of our spray foam magazine, as well as membership brochures and information about our certification program. If you're also there early, you can pick up one of these really nice reflective vests. If you haven't seen one of those, they're bright fluorescent. They have fluorescent tape on them or reflective tape. If you walk your dog, you run, you jog, you bike, they're actually a nice thing to have, or even in the back of your car if you get stranded somewhere. Please come to our booth and pick one up and find out more about spray foam insulation. Thank you so much. And I'm pleased to introduce our next panelist, Thomas Sharp, as president of Thermacote. Welcome. Thank you EESI and the Congressional Clean Energy Caucus for having us here today. And maybe I've just invented an organization, as a matter of fact, if there is one. Thermacote is a single component, fluid applied, high performance, acrylic coating, which basically means this is a water based product that applies kind of like paint. It's a clean product. It's not hazardous. It's weighs about half the weight of water. The thermocote formulation may be spray applied to nearly all interior and exterior substrates to reduce or eliminate thermal bridges, air and water infiltration and common expansion and contraction issues caused by radiant and convective conductive heat gain or loss. Basically, heat expansion and cold contraction just destroys building that's moving all these members apart, especially when you get into concrete, things like that. You'll notice all kind of structural cracking and things like that going on with it. Thermocote can actually seal the water from entering those substrates while allowing the water that's inside them during construction to escape, producing a more performance oriented system. Thermocote is tested and is a UL classified product with a zero flame spread, low smoke development. It's also a reach certified product. It's got a CE mark for, like I was mentioned, the concrete protection. Our facility is an ISO 9001 2008, soon to be a 2015 certified facility as well. When you're looking for, say, job development, workforce development in your communities, this is an easy to train for product that actually delivers results and has pathways to ownership for people that enter those programs. The energy which is saved, no matter what the source is, is green energy. If it's produced by a renewable source and we save that energy, it's even becomes a greener energy source to be used somewhere else. We are a collaborative for high performing schools rated product. If you're if you're into redoing a school or building one from scratch, this product is rated for underwear quality in those classrooms and offices and produces a high performance setup form. We've been doing this for quite a number of years. We're the we're definitely the small guy in the room here as a small business in our location just outside of Atlanta, Georgia. I've been informed by our economic development in our state that we're actually a part of the Appalachian disadvantaged business zone. So anything that you can throw towards thermocode, it's always gonna help. And we'd like to keep our time short over here for you guys today and maybe allow for some questions or something of the panels up here. You definitely got a great lineup of people and products here in the building. We certainly encourage you guys to come and walk the showroom floor and see the exhibits. And I'm going to have the shortest one for you here. Thank you for having us guys. Thank you Tom. Appreciate it. And last but not least, I am so happy to welcome for another time. You've been here before. I think John John Rockwell is with is the Northeast Technical Sales Engineer for Zender America. My pronouncing that correctly. Welcome. Good morning, Ellen. Can you hear okay back there? Great. So I'm John Rockwell. Our table is booth number six out in the foyer. Zender America is a business unit of a worldwide group called the Zender Group that is primarily concerned with indoor climate. So by a show of hands, I'd like you to raise your hand if you walked into this room and said, gosh, it smells so fresh and clean in here. Good. That's what I thought. So you don't need to be an expert to understand indoor air quality. We all have lifelong experience with knowing what constitutes indoor air quality. And as I said last year, as a trained architect, I don't walk into rooms like this saying look at the beautiful proportions of this space and the interior decoration and the neoclassical styling and the proportions of the room and the finishes, basically our first response is wow, it's stuffy in here. And that's too bad because of all the efforts made by Ash Ray and from SPFA to tighten buildings up and produce better indoor air quality. It doesn't always happen. It's partly because our industry is accelerating so quickly toward better energy efficiency, which is driving the requirement for more involvement between insulation between coatings between standards and between the actual fabrication and installation of devices that can enhance indoor air quality. Zender makes heat recovery ventilators and energy recovery ventilators. If you don't know what HRVs are and ERVs are, you can come ask me at booth number six, but primarily it's a way of introducing fresh air from the outside of, you know, where it's supposedly allegedly fresh, filtering that air, removing the pollens, removing sort of the urban dirt from that, supplying fresh air to bedrooms and living spaces at the same time. It's extracting stale air and moist air from bathrooms and kitchens. And if you do that at the same rate that meets Ash Ray standards, you're doing what's called balanced ventilation. Now, in a place that has a lot of cooling requirements and a lot of heating requirements and the temperature difference between indoors and outdoors is great. You don't want to be bringing fresh air in at 95 degrees today at four o'clock in the afternoon and supplying that to bedrooms. There's humidity issues. There's temperature issues. Your air condition is going to go crazy and use a lot of energy. And it's antithetical to saving energy. But what you do is you use an HRV or an ERV. That's nothing more than a device with some fans in it and a heat recovery core. And as the two air streams pass each other, the fresh air coming in from the outside and the stale air leaving the building, as long as there's a temperature difference between those two air streams, physics will simply happen. And just like when somebody comes in from the outside and you have a cold hand and you shake their hand and it's really warm, physics is happening there. We don't control it. We don't have a device that regulates it. It simply happens. Energy goes from greater to lesser, from warmer to cooler. Same thing happens in a heat recovery device or an energy recovery device. The warm air will give up its warmth to the outgoing air stream. As a result, your air conditioning needs will be lowered. In wintertime, a heat recovery device doesn't waste the warmth that's leaving the building 24 seven. It actually gives most of its thermal energy to the fresh air coming inside. Is that clear? It's a heat exchanger. It takes the warmth from whatever air stream is warmer and gives it to the cooler air stream. Now that's a different way of approaching ventilation to improve indoor air quality. Probably most of you this morning turned on a switch in your bathroom that made a fan move air with moisture and odors to leave the bathroom. And I should point out that for every minute that you do that, you're just throwing away energy. There's no heat recovery associated with bathroom fans for every cubic foot per minute that leaves that space. You've paid to heat or cool that cubic foot of air. Now if a bath fan actually moves that air outside of the building, as it's supposed to do by ASHRAE and mechanical code requirements, where is that air coming from? If you have a house more than 10 years old and in fact any house, if you use exhaust bathroom fans, it is going to have to suck air in from some other uncontrolled source to provide makeup air for that bathroom fan. Okay. Otherwise the house that eventually depressurized your ears would start to pop and you'd say what's going on here. But at all times millions of cracks or thousands of cracks within your building enclosure are providing little streams of air to come in. You might not notice it. There may not be an initial comfort issue of a chill or a breeze or anything like that. But you will definitely be if you're moving 100 CFM out of a space at any given moment, your house is supplying that 100 CFM. What happens on a DC day when it's high humidity 95 degrees and you get a nice chilly interior somewhere in your wall cavity between the 95 degree outdoor temperature and the 70 degree dry cool interior somewhere in that wall cavity is something called your dew point or your first condensing surface. And as that moist air comes in through your wall assembly and it hits a cool service that moisture is going to condense out of that air just like a glass of iced tea in a hot summer day, the beads of condensation out that and that can be a real problem in your wall assemblies. It's a big problem for mold and it's just not good building science to do that. So if you can do that with an HRV and control where air comes in from from a controlled duct with a grill on the outside that prevents vermin from getting inside, the fresh air is coming in, you filter it, you reduce its temperature substantially simply by the difference in temperature between the two air streams. There's no electricity applied to it other than the fans that suck and blow air in and out of the house. You've come a long way toward enhancing the energy efficiency of a building. And I would go so far as to say that simply adding insulation to a building, and I'm sure Dr. Duncan knows this, is that you just can't add insulation to make buildings more energy efficient. If there are cracks in your building envelope, buildings always tend to leak. I have been in lead platinum buildings supposedly certified to meet incredible energy conservation standards. And because of the dynamics of the difference between temperature inside and outside, the exhaust fans in the hotel bathroom actually blowing stale air into the space. Now nobody intended for that to happen, but something called the stack effect always happens when there's a temperature difference between inside and outside. If you have a tall building that's acting like a chimney when it's 30 degrees outside and 70 degrees inside, there's going to be a pressure dynamic through that building. It is always either assisting your ventilation or fighting against it depending on where you are in the building. So one has to be really careful about the installation of ventilation systems and one must make sure that they're properly functioning and being commissioned or balanced to work properly. So I'll leave it at that. If you're interested in learning more about heat recovery ventilation and how you can save energy by reclaiming the energy that you would otherwise waste as you exhaust stale air from the building, come see me at booth six. I have brochures and catalogs and can explain it in more detail if you'd like. Thanks so much. John, thank you so much. I wish you would have been my high school physics teacher that would have been a lot more entertaining, but it's fascinating. This is a great example of bringing science to the policymaking process. So thank you all. Thank you for for your good explanation. Thank you all for being here and for listening. We actually, I think, have a couple of minutes for questions. If anyone would like to pose a question or comment or if any of the panelists would like to add a couple more things. Open the floor. Yes, sir. Thank you so much for the question. Thank you. Did everybody hear the question, which was are there of the panelists, are there policy recommendations that they have for for this audience for for Congress? Yeah, I could try to answer that. When we talked about things like air barriers and tight buildings and more insulation, most of that is actually built into the model building codes, whether it's the ASHRAE or the International Code Councils Energy Code and they actually work together. Those are built into these building codes. However, what we see at a state to state level is different adaptation of these building codes. We see some states that are back on the 2009 version of the code, which doesn't require this air tightness. So if we can get the states to all adopt the most current version of these codes, at a state and local level, I think that would be a fantastic start. Thank you. Anyone else? Yes, I think that's an excellent point. Also, I think one of our biggest opportunities that we miss for energy conservation is in existing buildings and looking at some of the opportunities with building EQ to understand your building energy usage. It provides a basic energy audit so you can find identified a low hanging fruit for saving energy where you can find low cost or no cost measures that you can implement to in terms of reducing the energy usage of existing buildings. I think if we can start to tackle existing buildings and lower the energy consumption, we can make a huge impact in our total energy consumption. I would just say that I'm not so sure the flaw is only in the different standards from state to state, although that is a significant thing. From my experience, boots on the ground, it's the enforcement of those standards and making sure that you can verify things. So standards that simply legislate how a building should perform without the verifiable field performance of those buildings is flawed. I think and there are federal districts outside this country. The Metropolitan District around Brussels, Belgium, has decided to go with what's called the passive standard. Can I see anybody who's heard of passive house as a building performance standard? It's something you should look into that uses building science and verifiable ways of proving how the building works that reduces primary energy by up to 80 or 90 percent for heating and cooling, not for plug loads like lighting and things like that, but drastic reductions so that the 40 percent building, the responsibility that the gentleman from ASHRAE mentioned, the contribution that buildings make to global warming and to carbon dioxide levels is substantial. So if we can address existing buildings and prove that they work the way the standards are supposed to work, we'll come a long way. And I also may add some other ideas talking about existing buildings. You know, we have federal regulations that require auto manufacturers to publish an MPG number for automobiles, but we don't really have anything like that for buildings. When we build new buildings or even purchase existing buildings, it would be great to have an MPG or how much energy per square foot, if you will, that that building uses every year. And I think if that becomes more disclosed and part of the selling process, I think that will also help to increase energy efficiency in all buildings. Something else that's going to help is going to be to reduce the urban heat island effect. And that's where the sun is heating up the services in our communities. So if we can produce cool walls, you know, the things are more geared right now towards having cool roofs and things like that. That's a good start, cool walls, and of course other hardscapes such as pavement, parking structures and things like that will reduce the overall temperature in a city if we can address that urban heat island effect. Thank you. And I think Mr. McCauley also mentioned tax credit. So if they're at the federal level, I think that's certainly something to look at, you know, for energy efficiency and renewables. And yes, existing buildings, what new construction is typically one or 2% of the entire building stock. So we have the built environment. We have to make it better. And so I want to thank this panel very much. This has been very interesting. I want to thank you all for attending.