One of the most important things to keep in context within the framework of this class is, how does this standard relate to the other systems, standards, and methodologies we’ve seen?  Observe:

• ENERGY STAR:  This government-sponsored system is used widely by building professionals and manufacturers.  But, it is somewhat unwieldy with lots of checklists and tools and has been rejected in multiple jurisdictions for being too complicated.
• State programs and codes: There are too many of these to mention, and they range from prescriptive to performance, regulations to codes.  Standards vary from place to place and can be quite helpful in certain areas – if you know how to take advantage of them.
• Architecture 2030:  This organization sets ambitious goals but provides very little framework for how to get there.
• LEED:  This large and dense standard has achieved what we might call “market transformation” due to its position as THE green building benchmark.  But, to achieve certification you must wade through mounds of paperwork and fork out lots of money.
• Passive House:  This simple and straightforward standard places a premium on high performance, but is perhaps not as comprehensive as some of the other systems.

In contrast, the Living Building Challenge asks the question, “what if every single act of design and construction made the world a better place?”.  With the LBC, the ideal outcome IS the goal, and there are no choices about whether or not you follow the “imperatives”.  If you are trying to reach Living status, you either “go big or go home”.

This brings me to our field trip last week, the last one of the quarter… we are so fortunate in Portland to live in a community that places such value on sustainable living.  We have not just one but THREE Living Buildings in the works in the city of Portland!   The Oregon Sustainability Center, when it is built, will likely be the greenest high-rise ever built and reassert Portland’s status as a global leader in the green design community.  The Key Delta Living Building in North Portland will be a phenomenal resource to its community once it is fully transformed from the gas station it used to be.  But, as great as those buildings will be, they are not built yet.

The Living Building that IS built, or I should say nearly finished, is the commons, a two-family home in SE Portland that is a labor of love for the brothers building it.  Sticking to the integrity of the Living Building Challenge has been a – dare I say – challenge for the owners, but they have come a long way and will have one of the greenest houses in the land when they are done.  We had a good time on this field trip, and even took a class picture!

In discussing the Passive House standard, we learned that there are probably as many as 25,000 Passive House structures all around the world, the majority of which are in Europe, and only a handful of which are in North America.  One of these buildings is the Smith House in Urbana, Illinois, the first Passive House built in the U.S. in 2003 by Katrin Klingenberg, who literally wrote the book on Passive House.  Another Passive House is the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s Solar Decathlon house from 2009, also known as the Gable Home.  This house came in second in the 2009 Decathlon to Team Germany, who won their second Decathlon in a row.  We took this opportunity to talk about the technology and building science on display at the Solar Decathlon, and how great an event this is for green home designers and enthusiasts alike.  You can see more photos and read about my thoughts from immediately after the last event here.

from the Solar Decathlon 2009

Finally we got to the issue of our field trip this week to the Everhart Passive House in SE Portland.  The Everhart family has put a lot of time and effort into the retrofit of their house into a Passive House, and they are extremely generous for opening their home to our class.  For Assignment #5, we’ll be modeling the Everhart home using the Recurve modeling tool. Students are encouraged to bring a tape measure and their sketchbooks, and to “divide and conquer” spaces in the home to find inputs for all the rooms in the most efficient way possible.  See you at 10:30 on Thursday morning!

One of the most common questions I heard from the students during the midterms was, “What are your expectations for us to come up with the right answer?” To which I say, this project and this class are not so much about getting THE right answer THE first time around,  as it is about getting AN answer.  The purpose of the term project is in fact to come up with multiple answers and then compare them with historical data to see how that building stacks up.  Energy modeling tools are imperfect creations… no single entity has a lock on how to calculate the energy consumption of even the smallest home, let alone a large commercial building.  So often, to paint a more accurate picture of a building’s energy consumption, we use multiple tools and then parse out what worked and what didn’t work.  The good news is, working with multiple tools not only gives us results that we can compare, it also offers the students the opportunity to gain experience on programs they may have never had the chance to use before.

And so it came to pass that we had a mid-term review in an architecture school in which everyone was encouraged to keep experimenting and make mistakes! Which in eQUEST is very easy to do  :)   I am really pleased so far with the class’s investment in this project and happy to see the gears turning in their heads, especially since so many engineers and other building professionals think that architects “don’t care” about the systems and the energy consumption of the buildings that they design.  Architects care, for sure, it’s just that often we aren’t given the means to understand and work with this information.  Hopefully this class is a small but serious step on the road to changing that.

This discussion of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions seemed like an appropriate time to talk about how they are calculated.  Many of the tools and programs we are looking at in this class focus on energy consumption, but very few give outputs for GHG emissions.  If someone wants to calculate these emissions, an understanding of how variable GHG emissions are is necessary.  Following is a chart that gives rough averages for pounds of CO2 for each unit of energy measurement.

We talked a lot about tools and online resources that can calculate the estimated PV load for a building, once the energy consumption has been calculated.  Students will likely find a lot of help in these tools for their Term Project requirements.

Finally we talked about the Field Trip, which is a tour on Thursday morning of the PECI offices at Portland’s very new First & Main building. Assignment #3 is to use the spreadsheet analysis tool to try to come up with “Level 1″ outputs. Some inputs students will be able to find on their own throughout the space, but some will not be obvious and will be given at the time of the field trip.  This should also serve as a reminder that students wishing to receive input on their mid-terms from REAL energy modeling professionals will have a chance to do so during the field trip!

The Energy Trust of Oregon (ETO) is an organization funded by the public purpose charge of its 4 member Investor Owned Utilities (IOUs) – PGE, Pacific Power, NW Natural, and Cascade Natural Gas.  This means that if you live in Oregon in one or more of these utility territories, there is a small charge on your bill each month which goes to funding ETO.  This money, in turn, is used by ETO to achieve energy efficiency throughout these corresponding territories.  But why?  Primarily because energy efficiency is a resource, just like the energy itself… if we collectively save enough energy, that means we can postpone, or even avoid altogether, the building of a new power plant.

ETO runs many programs which serve nearly every imaginable building type.  Among them are the New Commercial Buildings Program and the New Homes Program.  Both of these use incentives to encourage (or entice, if you will) architects, builders, homeowners, realtors, and everyone else involved in the life of a building to build more efficiently.  The New Homes Program, in particular, uses a metric called the Energy Performance Score (EPS) to describe the energy consumption, costs, and carbon emissions of a home.  This is much like the benchmarking, or “labeling” for homes that we discussed in last week’s class.  The EPS looks like this:

We then talked about codes, which – let’s be honest – are the LEAST bad that you can do.  They are a minimum standard and as such, when you are talking about designing a sustainable building, you probably want to work harder than code.  The good news is, there are now real codes for green building.  For energy, there is the IECC, while for green construction, there is the IGCC (supported by the AIA, ASHRAE, ASTM, USGBC, IES, and others).  In California, always ahead of the game, there is Title 24 and the recently adopted CALGREEN code.

All of this talk about state and local green building leads to our field trip this Thursday, which will be at 10:30 am the EcoFlats, 3951 N Williams, Portland, OR  97227.  The EcoFlats built a sustainable new multi-family complex in North Portland in part with guidance and incentives from the Energy Trust.  Assignment #2, then, is for the students to use the EcoFlats building as a “prototype” to do an energy model in either eQUEST or SketchUp with the EnergyPlus OpenStudio plug-in. eQUEST and EnergyPlus are both Department of Energy supported energy simulators, and it’s important that the students get some experience in one of these industry standards.

THEN we tried to do a demonstration of the EnergyPlus OpenStudio plug-in for SketchUp.  This did not go as planned, possibly because the program is buggy on Macs, or just because it is clumsy to begin with.  In lieu of the difficulty we encountered trying to get this plug-in to work, students who are able to actually get outputs from an energy model created with OpenStudio may get a “special prize” in next week’s class, if they can show us their work.  Students who ran an eQUEST model and want to show us their work may also get a “special prize”.

Happy energy modeling!  :o)

The amount of federal money spent on the DOE and EPA in 2011

We went on to talk about the biggest programs administered by the EPA and DOE, including ENERGY STAR, WaterSense, BetterBuildings, Building America, and most recently, the DOE’s Home Energy Score.  The Home Energy Score is the latest in a long line of attempts at “labeling” buildings or homes.  Labels have been used for years successfully on things like food for nutritional information, and cars for miles per gallon, so labels for homes are often described using these analogies – a Home Energy Score describes the energy “content” (consumption) of a home in the same way that nutritional labels describe the energy content of food.

Nutritional labels describe energy content in food...

...just like Building or Home Energy labels describe energy consumption of buildings.

This Thursday we’ll be going on a field trip to the Water House, 1616 NE 140th, Portland, just north of Halsey.  The Water House is the first WaterSense certified home in Portland, as well as an ENERGY STAR certified home and an Earth Advantage Platinum home.  On this field trip, students will also be gathering information for Assignment #1: use the EnergySavvy online tool to create a basic energy label of the Water House. It is a good idea to go through the EnergySavvy portal once, say with your own house, to get used to the inputs the tool asks for.  Once students have gone through the EnergySavvy online assessment tool, they are to take a screen shot or create a report of the results and put it in their assignment binder.

Our first field trip and our first real assignment!  The EnergySavvy online tool is a great “icebreaker” to become familiar with the idea of gathering inputs for energy audits and energy modeling.  Next week we’ll talk more about labeling within the context of state and local codes and programs.

Assignment #7 is to sign up on the Web site EarthAid.com, to see how you use energy in your own dwelling, and to see if knowing how much energy you use will help you save it.  We’ll all “friend” each other on EarthAid, get points, and try to earn rewards.  At the end of the quarter, we’ll see how we did.  Sign up for Earth Aid now using the link below:

(If that doesn’t work, click here)

On this, the last day of March, we are talking about energy modeling.  Students in the class are assigned a term project in which they are to select one building and conduct a complete evaluation of it, including at least three different forms of energy modeling or assessment.  They can pick any three, but a good strategy would be to pick at least one that they feel comfortable with, one that challenges them, and one that is entirely unlike the other two.  For instance, if I were doing a very small building, I feel very comfortable using HEED for smaller structures, so I might pick that first; I find eQUEST incredibly challenging, plus it is an industry standard, so I would pick that one to become more familiar with it; and finally, I might use the spreadsheet analysis method to balance things out.  If I were doing a larger building, I might try to use Google SketchUp with the Open Studio plug-in, since it uses DOE’s Energy Plus as its back end; I’d try Ecotect just to see if I could do it; and maybe I would use EnergyPro as my third, since it is more focused on systems and less on geometry.

There is no right or wrong method to achieving the results of the term project… but be strategic about which programs you pick, have a reason for picking them, and then do your best.  If you encounter problems or don’t know what certain inputs mean, start a list of questions, and bring them to class with you.  Students will have several opportunities throughout the quarter to ask questions of energy modeling “experts” and each other.

Here is a “scale” of energy modeling that we talked about today in class.  There are definitely other types of modeling tools out there, and one of the objectives of this class is to let students try several of them and become familiar with the process of determining energy consumption of buildings.

Energy analysis programs range from those that are based in text inputs to those that function with visual inputs. There is no right or wrong way, but they each have their quirks!

Any questions?  Let me know!

Portland is much the same way, although to a lesser extent.  One thing that is for certain is that bikes get a lot of attention here, which is quite evident when you consider the $620 million Portland Bike plan.  Another really awesome aspect of Portland is the Providence Bridge Pedal, which celebrates both the city’s bike culture as well as it’s many iconic bridges.  One Sunday morning in August, the city shuts down all the bridges – including the highway bridges – and 20,000 people on bikes ride around on them for hours.  This year the route took us up and over the I-5 (Marquam) bridge, down onto the 405, and up onto the top deck of the Fremont Bridge, which reconnects the 405 with I-5 to the north of the city.  It was awesome!   And it looked something like this:

On the 405

Atop the I-5 Bridge

On the St. John's Bridge

Which is not to say that Portland does not also love other forms of transportation as well.  There’s the MAX, which is our extensive light rail system; the Street Car, which has hosted many groups from my hometown of Cincinnati for explorations of its success; the REAL train, aka Amtrak, which is an excellent option for going to and from Eugene all the way to Seattle; and of course, cars, which people don’t really drive that well here.  However, if people do have a car, and they are lucky enough to have a diesel car, they can go to this local garage that I just heard about called Green Drop Garage for a biodiesel conversion.  Apparently they are also in the habit of exchanging oil changes for vinyl records or craft brewed beer.  Or perhaps that was a one-time offer?  Nevertheless, it’s so Portland.

I’m still waiting for the Subaru I thought I was going to get for moving here!  Oh well, I still have Dorothy…

BTW, I think this picture represents the last time Dorothy was truly clean

1. The oil leak that is destroying the Gulf of Mexico. Duh.
2. The likelihood of a major earthquake striking the Pacific Northwest in my lifetime. Let’s be honest:  I love my new adopted city, and I’m not leaving anytime soon.  But I am also probably not going to buy a brick or stucco house in this city, not unless it’s been seismically reinforced, or one story (but what’s the fun in that?).  The last time a major earthquake struck here was in 1700, and obviously the city was mostly settled after that, so many modern buildings were built in the absence of a strong seismic code.  And the chances of a big one hitting are pretty high.  Like, 4 in 10 high.  D’oh!
3. Jevons paradox and Khazzoom-Brookes postulate. Before you get all excited that I’m using strange, big words that you’ve never seen before, check out the Wikipedia articles that I linked to and then come back.  You’ll see that the two concepts are very similar in nature, and that they both allude to one thing: the idea that the more we increase efficiency of technology or energy, the more we consume as a society.   So you can imagine, then, why this might keep me up at night… I work for an energy efficiency company!  Our whole job is to increase the efficiency of buildings and help you save energy, and therefore money.  But I can’t help you save money if – as these concepts state – you end up increasing your consumption because you are saving money.  So, I will beg of you this:  do not become a statistic!  Don’t succumb to these concepts!  Please let me help you save money!
4. And finally, Hovershark.  I mean, seriously.  What the heck is this?!?  Are they evolving that quickly?!  I only live an hour and a half from the ocean, can they hover that far?!?  :)

image courtesy of www.warrenellis.com

1. I was engulfed by “all-hands” company meetings. Although it was a mad rush to get ready for the meetings, I loved it and it was neat to see all the people that I work with in one place.   It was also great to hear that the things that I think are so important are important to the people that I work with as well.  300+ people working towards a higher cause is a pretty powerful thing.  (Net Gain:  Emily + Western U.S.)
2. I found an apartment and I’m moving.  It all happened very quickly but it took me about 5 minutes to decide that I wanted the place… it’s lovely and spacious and has so much character.   I feel really lucky to have found such a great apartment just in time for summer – it’s effectively been 3 years since I had a home in a neighborhood of my choosing, in a city that I feel comfortable in.  So obviously, that’s been a process.  (Net Gain: Emily)
3. I’m house-sitting for some very attention-starved animals, one of which I am allergic to. I love animals and for the past year I have lived in an apartment in a house with a dog and two cats.  I am house-sitting in this same house while the owners are away.  One of the cats got attacked a few weeks ago, so he is recovered at an undisclosed location;  as a result, the dog and the other cat have been following almost my every move in the house.  And as much as I like the cat, I am allergic to him!  So it is hard, especially considering the move.  But I am really going to miss the dog.  (Net Loss:  Emily’s 4-legged roommates)
4. Which brings me to the oily, ruined Gulf of Mexico. Referring, of course, to my love of animals as stated above, what really gets me about this mess is the animals that are being killed as a result.  Not just turtles anymore, but birds, fish, the entire ecosystem.  And as a result of the loss of part of the food chain, people’s livelihoods are being completely obliterated.  I am so disgusted and saddened by the situation, that I have – frighteningly – been rendered numb.  After all, what can I do?  What can YOU do?  We can only sit back and watch as the oil keeps coming out, and beaches keep closing, and more and more ecosystems are destroyed.   It’s totally overwhelming.   I feel, truly, that the best thing I can do is to keep doing my job, and to do the best job I can, so that I can help improve energy efficiency in buildings and hopefully reduce our dependence on oil.    (Net Loss:  Humanity, The Earth, dolphins, etc.)
5. “Privatize the Losses, Socialize the Gains”. Speaking of losses and gains, someone recently told me that there was a movement afoot to push this type of economic system in our country.  And I have to express how dispiriting I think this is.  I am overcome lately with the sheer number of people who are not doing what they are supposed to be doing, so many of whom are trying to take advantage of others, game the system, or flat out cause this country to fail.   BP, Goldman Sachs, Halliburton, nearly every politician running for office this year…. It’s exhausting.  I am amazed that anyone can even watch the news anymore.  I can only watch fake news on Comedy Central and even there, I sometimes can’t handle it.  So, that’s a little bit of where I’m at right now.  (Net Loss:  my sanity)

I'd like to think this dog will miss me when I'm gone

Anyway.  That’s where I’m at.  I will try to get back to you sooner, rather than later.   Good luck everyone…