 Hi everybody. Thank you for being here. We're going to go ahead and get started so we can stay on schedule. I know that one of our speakers was not able to be here, John Rockwell from Zender America. And I'm not sure about Richard Duncan with the spray. Oh, Richard, thank you. Okay, sorry to get started without you. But thank you for being here. Thank you all again for staying for our second panel on energy efficient buildings. I'm Ellen Vaughn with the Environmental and Energy Study Institute, and I'm very happy to introduce our panel. One of the things I mentioned last time is that the building sector in the U.S. and worldwide really close to that is about 40% of our energy use. And more than 70% of our electricity use. And so we have a huge opportunity to save energy, save money, reduce greenhouse gas emissions by having energy efficient buildings. And they can contribute to other benefits in terms of quality and resilience and that kind of thing. So with that, I will introduce our first speaker, Michelle Sism, and I think your program says Jeremy Browning. So Michelle, thank you for coming on short notice, perhaps. Michelle is with the National Fenestration Rating Council, and it's really important, but I'll let Michelle tell you what they do. Thank you for being here. Thank you. Good morning. As she's mentioned, I'm Michelle Sism. I'm with the National Fenestration Rating Council. The first question I always get is what is fenestration? We'll just go right to it. Windows, doors, and skylights is what we work with. So inefficient windows can cost about $50 million annually in energy waste. NFRC's mission is to try to bring that number down. If you have a house and you're looking at just your HVAC efficiency, for example, and you don't have windows that are performing the way you want your windows to perform, you're still going to be losing all of your heat in the winter and losing your AC in the summer. A little bit of background on NFRC. The Energy Policy Act of 1992 established NFRC as the official rating council for windows, doors, and skylights. Just like any home appliance, a window can be Energy Star certified, and we are the only Energy Star certification body for windows, doors, and skylights. So green building, as you know, is in high demand. New York City, DC, the whole state of California with Title 24, they're starting to put in mandates. Those mandates are because consumers want energy efficient buildings. NFRC is the data and the science to help consumers and policymakers in the transition towards this energy efficiency. Sorry, NFRC has a focus on independence and accuracy. Just like your car has miles per gallon, NFRC ratings ensure that windows perform as they were intended. If you live in a hot human climate like here in DC, today is a good example of that. We're a cold part of the upper Midwest. NFRC ratings can help you to make that home or office as efficient as possible. NFRC is here to be a resource for policymakers. So if there are any in the room, just know that if you have questions about energy efficiency, green building, we can help you. We've been doing this for 30 years. It's our 30th anniversary just coming up. So you don't have to start from scratch. We have experts that can help you. So just a few more little things. Those are the big key points about NFRC and what we do in trying to help with energy efficient buildings. I just want to say that we also work very closely with code officials to enforce compliance. We also work with national labs like Lawrence Berkeley and Oak Ridge to help to promote the science behind energy efficient windows. I think that's where I'm going to leave it for today. And I'll let you ask questions at the end after these folks get to speak as well. Thank you. Thanks so much, Michelle. And so I, and again, we'll have time for questions after the three speakers. Next I'll introduce Dr. Richard Duncan. Richard is a professional engineer, technical director of the Spray Polyurethane Foam Alliance. You all know the importance of insulation. Dr. Duncan, thank you for being here. Okay. Good afternoon. I'm going to begin my talk about not just about clean energy, but one of the first things we need to do to achieve clean energy. And that is to simply make our buildings better. When we talk about locating a building, there are five things that we try to do to make a building energy efficient, sustainable and durable. And they include the location of the site, the lighting that we use, the equipment that we choose to heat and cool and the appliances, as well as the enclosure. And we all always consider the fact that these materials and construction practices need to be durable and sustainable. In terms of the site, there's not a lot of choices here. You're sort of stuck with your location. And in many cases, the orientation of the building. The next one is lighting. And we've made a lot of strides in improving the natural lighting that occurs in buildings, as well as very efficient lighting using the current technology, such as LEDs. The equipment, such as your heating, ventilation and air conditioning and hot water heating, we also have made a lot of improvements in making those more efficient, as well as having efficient appliances. And of course, these are all part of the Energy Star program. In recent years, we've also seen an increase in automation, as well as use of onsite renewables such as photovoltaics and wind power. But now I'm going to get to the enclosure, where the fact of insulation makes a big improvement. We've heard the first speaker talk about fenestration, windows and doors and skylights and making those more efficient. It's also important that the rest of that building enclosure or the building envelope, that's going to be your walls, roofs, ceilings and floors, have a suitable thermal envelope. Another thing that's often overlooked is the importance of air barriers. These are ways to seal the conditioned air inside of that building so you're not wasting energy by air leakage. And also proper selection of cladding and roofing. Cladding is just an architect's term for siding. If we pick the right colors and the right materials for roofing and siding, we can also improve the efficiency of the building. The fifth part of it is durability. Of course, one of the things that makes a building useful and long lived is the fact that we can control the indoor air quality. We do this by installing things called vapor retarders to control the flow of moisture through the building. We don't want buildings getting too humid or wet inside as that humidity can lead to condensation, which then can cause mold and mildew and eventual early deterioration of the building. We also want our buildings to be water resistant. As you've seen in the news recently with all the flooding and storms that we've been subject to, many, many homes and buildings are being destroyed by floodwaters. So we need materials that are going to be water resistant. And we also need structures that are disaster resistant that can withstand high winds and hurricanes. And at the same time, when we pick these materials to be sustainable, we also want to have materials that have a low environmental impact. So in terms of these factors, when we build more efficient buildings, we're sort of limited the site. You have one building lot and you're pretty much forced to build there. Lighting and equipment can provide great efficiencies, but the thing is with those pieces of equipment, they last 10 or 20 years. They can be replaced and you can always continually upgrade to more efficient equipment. But the enclosure of the building, the walls, roofs and ceilings, that's something that lasts the entire life of the building. So you really only have one chance to do it right. I mean, yes, you can take an existing building and say, well, in 20 years I want to add more insulation or add an air barrier, but the costs for doing that are very, very expensive when you're renovating. If you take your time and do the building right and build it correctly in the first place, you can take advantage of that one chance. So in terms of making a good enclosure, you want to be able to control heat, air and moisture. Basically, you want to keep the inside in and the outside out in that building. And controlling heat is the first thing you can do to reducing the energy consumption of buildings, realizing that more than 50% of your energy costs are spent on heating and cooling of a building. And we do that by controlling conduction of heat through higher R values. We control convection through the use of air leakage or air barriers to control air leakage. And we also control radiative heat gain, which is by the proper selection of the outside materials. Now, where does this bring in spray foam? Well, spray foam has a very consistent R value. It holds its R value at extreme hot and cold temperatures, so it's good for all climates. It also has the highest R value per inch of any insulation that you can use inside your walls. And it's formed in place on the job site, so it forms, it rises, and it actually creates an air seal creating an air barrier for that building enclosure. And some of our products, even closed cell foams, are water resistant. They are closed cell plastic foams that are recognized by FEMA, as well as the Institute for Business and Home Safety, as a structural material that can enhance the structural strength of a building, making it more hurricane and wind resistant, and at the same time, it's water resistant providing resistance to flooding. So in closing, we talked about the building enclosure. You really have one chance to do it. It's important to use the best possible materials. You can use the best possible materials, and also don't forget to include the air barrier, and use materials that are going to be durable, that can withstand flooding, that can withstand heavy wind loads, and the like. So if you're interested in finding out more about spray foam insulation, we have a booth downstairs, and we also have a website called www.sprayfoam.org, where you can learn about how spray foam is used as an insulation and a roofing material. Thank you. Thank you very much. That was a nice big picture on how these complex systems fit together very concisely, so thank you. And I am very happy to introduce another return guest to the Policy Forum. Thomas Sharp, Jr., is President of Thermacote, and I'll let you take it away. Thank you for being here. Thank you. Good afternoon, everybody. And we'd like to thank EESI for sponsoring this event and hosting us, and a very good host. Being able to come and speak into this room and address this facility on this important subject. It means a lot to us. It means a lot to the planet. We're dealing with a lot of things all over the world right now. As the doctor was pointing out, it's very important to build correctly when we're building buildings now. And in Thermacote, as a president and CEO, and also a co-developer with my father of this product more than three decades ago, something very important to us is bringing and adding sustainability into structures. We almost would like to make the topic of my discussion today of tough enough for our roads, but safe enough to be in the classroom with our children. And that's kind of really exactly what Thermacote is. We recognized an ability a long time ago to be able to shed urban heat island effect from our cities and our urban environments. The main way that it's achieved now and rated is mainly by roofs. And if you're doing it on roofs, then you have eliminated or soothed a bit the urban heat island effect on that roof and perhaps a little bit of a drop for the whole community. But you still have so many other hardscapes in the community that become super heat absorbers, such as walls and streets, pavements. And this we really want to kind of talk about today. We recognized this. We went and began our own testing and evaluations of it more than 10 years ago. And the very first things were not wanting to think that we had to do a road white. We wanted to do colors. It led to the development of cool colors. But while we were waiting for those to come around, we had to do them white. Pulling on to a coated parking lot and waiting for rain during a drought. Just like when's it going to rain? And so now it's like in Georgia people are probably saying, man, God, when's it going to stop raining? But at that point in time to be able to pull a vehicle onto a parking lot at 35 miles an hour and lock the brakes up to see if this paint was going to stop us or were we going to skid off into the woods? And I got to tell you even with the ABS, man, I almost went through the windshield to think the truck stopped so quick. But we decided at that point to go into the labs and actually spend money in traction tests. So Thermacote, as far as traction goes on roads, has the United States road standard. And they were the lab. They were amazed. They were like we've never seen a smooth coating. You know, you've added no aggregate to make additional traction on this. And yet we've never seen a thing that's not slippery when wet when it's when we're talking about a paint or a coating. But unfortunately, and they were there telling me, there's like 70 other industrialized countries that don't recognize a U.S. road standard. So all of a sudden we've got U.S. roads, international roads, international airport runways. Australia has the strictest anti-slip standard for a swimming pool deck on the planet. And McDonald's even has their own slippery when wet ramp test. We went and did all of these things to have the traction and everything locked down. After that, and pretty much in recent times within the last couple of months, we've received a certification from the city of Los Angeles, Roads and Streets Department to use Thermacote on roads and streets in LA. And we hope that that will spread across the United States. Other parts of the world are doing it. We participate all over the place. Unfortunately, I'd have to admit we make more sales of our products that are made here in the United States outside of the United States. Foreign countries seem to pick up on our technology quicker, but I digress. We have a Los Angeles certificate from the city of Department of Streets and Roads to use this product on the roads. This is as well a material that's listed for the collaborative for high-performing schools material because it's rating on indoor air quality. And so initially we started off talking about a road paint. Now let's talk about Thermacote for inside of buildings, and in particular in this case inside for schools. So we've gone through the process. We've become a listed material with the collaborative for high-performing schools. Within the last couple of weeks I'm very glad to say that we've also got another certification on schools and that is from the city of Los Angeles Unified School District. So there should be some projects coming on that rather soon. Thermacote in buildings is a way to add sustainability. There is a huge building stock that we have of existing buildings, and we're building new buildings all the time. As stated, we've got to build them better. There's a gigantic stock of existing buildings in the United States which need to be retrofitted, and Thermacote offers a rather quick and inexpensive way to add sustainability into those structures when you've got them all stripped down and down to the bones of the building to come back and use the Thermacote first before you start coming back with these other materials to rebuild the building. It's rated on underwear quality. It's got a UL classification with a zero flame spread for all of North America, and this includes Canada. We've got CE marks from the EU for concrete protection where we show that we can keep new water from coming into concrete surfaces. So this could be also going back to roads. Let's get away from buildings a minute. Go back to roads and talk about bridges, infrastructure. We can keep water from going into these systems, but the product has the ability to breathe the entrapped moisture that's already there back out producing a dry substrate that increases sustainability and helps this thing function closer to what the original intent and design was. We use the material in public housing all over the world. We'd certainly invite you to come by and visit our booth. We're in number 13, lucky 13, down on the show floor. This is a small picture, but it certainly will get a big one on our website of some of the French public housing that we've been doing in Paris. Those things are very remarkable for the results that they yield. The bottom line is we just want to use better materials as the doctor was saying and combine with good fenestration to build good buildings and retrofit our existing stock. I think we'll just kind of leave it there with that. Please visit www.thermicote.com and know that we're here for you guys and support. This is a United States developed technology, the whole world of insulating coatings. I'm glad that my father and I participated in developing products for that and to be here today. Thank you guys. Have a great day. www.thermicote.com Absolutely. Thank you so much, Tom. We do have time. Let's see. Time for a few questions. I want to make a point that I think all of you alluded to and that is that there are lots of opportunities for policy actions to help us improve buildings. Of course, it takes all of these different players, all of these different products to come together. One of the things that's being talked about a lot, of course, in this town is infrastructure and new infrastructure, improved infrastructure, modernizing infrastructure. I would urge you to think of buildings and housing. We tend to take things that we are in 90% of our time for granted, but buildings and housing are part of infrastructure and with this new normal we're seeing of extreme weather, I don't think we want to just create new infrastructure the way that we've always done it. We want to really think about how maybe things have changed that require us to think in terms of resilience and looking to sort of the future and adaptive design and that kind of thing. With that, I will stop talking and open it up for your questions. Anyone? Yes, I wanted to ask about SPF. I know that a few years ago there was kind of EPA scrutinization of SPF compared to other installations and I just wanted to hear you speak about that and why it might actually be a really great option. Okay. Yes, so the question you're referring to is that the spray polyurethane foam, it's actually made on the job site. It involves a combination of two chemicals, just like you would an epoxy. One of the chemicals is an isocyanate and this is sprayed into the air, it's an aerosol and this isocyanate does, it is a chemical sensitizer and as a result, our contractors must wear full personal protective equipment. The good news about the isocyanates is that they react with moisture in the air so within about 6 to 10 to 12 hours there are no measurable isocyanates. So we were working with the Environmental Protection Agency to improve our contractor's awareness of wearing the proper PPE during installation. And that's why we have a reoccupancy time of 24 hours after installation, it's non-measurable. Thanks for that question. Yes, sir. Oh, here comes a microphone. Yes, I have a question about, so today we are a little bit swimming in the problem of the plastic. So what will happen with all this foam tomorrow or maybe in 20 years ago, I mean 20 years from now or maybe 50 years, can they be recycled or reused or what's happening after when we demolish the building? Yes, with spray polyurethane foam, it is a thermoset material. Some foam installations are thermoplastics which can be remelted and formed into other materials. Thermoset materials are a little bit more challenging. They do not melt and soften and cannot be used sort of recycled in the traditional sense. However, what does happen with polyurethane foams is that they are ground and they are used as fillers. There's also new technologies in Europe where they're chemically recycling. They're able to convert the chemicals back to in an earlier state through chemical treatment. So there are opportunities to recycle our foams and they are being used. Thank you. Other questions? Yes, sir. Do you want to increase the fire retardancy of it perhaps? Well, there's certainly foam that's used in roofing all the time every day and it needs a protector on it. I have encountered some foams that they're using in the Middle East that actually come out, I'm not sure if you're familiar with them or not, that come out in a color and they're actually supposed to be self-protecting. I'd say the jury is out on that because those things are new and I'm saying new the last time I saw one on a roof in Doha, Qatar was probably about three years ago. It is an area that I go to often and spend a lot of time. The foams are, it's a good way, you know, you're going to stop some leaks, you know, you can fill a cavity. Regarding thermocotes protection, it is a suitable protection to put over foam that's on a roof. So that's a good question and I wanted to kind of mention that there's, sometimes when people want, ask a question about buildings, I always say it depends because there are so many variables and so I was going to just ask Michelle, presumably NFRC is rating a number of different products that might be aluminum, they might be wood, right, they're all kinds of different materials. Yeah, we do, we rate also both residential and commercial products, so we have a wide range of materials. As you mentioned, we have aluminum windows that primarily are only sold in southern states these days, but we also vinyl composite wood and the residential side is all of the things that are built in a factory and then for the commercial side, it would be more things like a curtain wall that you would see and those are rated in a different manner, but again are starting to come in more and more materials and the markets are starting to cross over, the more people want to have a curtain wall in their home, there's a lot of new opportunity there to work on efficiency as well. And then you're going to have different glazing, different glass types of double pane, triple pane. Yeah, we see fewer and fewer single pane, we're going into double, triple, sometimes even quads are out there and as well as a wide variety of gas fill. You can go from everywhere from just plain old air to argon, all of the xenon, and there's a lot of different research in that, along with some new innovative technologies like vacuum glazing and photochromic glass and other things. The photochromic glass is the... It changes tints automatically, usually based on the angle of the sun and so instead of having to get up and close your curtains or move your blinds, your windows, just darken kind of like your transition lenses in your eyeglasses but with a little more finesse. I can see that being really important for the retrofit market where we didn't necessarily have an opportunity to change the location, the orientation of our building, right? So yeah, all these variables, one thing I think is important to remember is what do you want your building to be? What do you not want it to be? How do you want it to perform? And when you're very intentional and deliberate about these things at the outset, I want it to be affordable, I want it to be sustainable, I want it to be durable, I want it to be resilient, I want it to be safe. Codes and standards protect us and give us many of these things but not necessarily high performance which a lot of these companies that are innovating are able to do. And then of course you have a budget so you really have to think about what do you want, what do you need and then how do you make those trade-offs? So any other questions? We have a couple minutes for any other questions you might have. And okay, so I want to thank our panel very much and thank you all for being here. Appreciate it.