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!

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!

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

• 3,060 unique visitors
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Oh how I love statistics.  But let’s see what our top ten countries sending visitors were:

1. United States (duh)
2. United Kingdom
3. Canada
4. China
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6. Malaysia (that’s a cool surprise!)
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Welcome to all my international visitors, wherever you live!  And to those of you who actually pay attention on the occasions when I post something of value, I’m going to give you a little bonus tidbit:

Check out this article on Treehugger about the zero-landfill Subaru plant in Indiana.  I know I’ve been threatening to write a post about used cars, and I probably will here soon, but reading this article about the Subaru plant gives me warm fuzzies and actually makes me open to the possibility of getting a new car at some point.  Of course living in Oregon means that if I bought a new Subaru, I’d fit right in.  Now just make it electric and give me a wind turbine to plug it into, and I’ll be all set.

On the other hand, when you decide you need to go “real” shopping, you might never really consider Goodwill to be your first choice.  Right?

Well, let me introduce you to the concept of second-hand shopping “for real”, which is to say, going to the second-hand clothing store to buy items that you might wear every day, or at least NOT to a pimp & hooker party.  I realize this isn’t a new concept; vintage stores have been around for a while now and happy hipsters are no stranger to the ironic high school t-shirts from the 70′s.  But shopping at vintage stores has always been an unsatisfying experience for me – unless it’s a really REALLY special piece, I don’t hold the belief that clothing, like houses, appreciate in price over time.  So, NO, I don’t want to pay $80 for that dress that probably cost $15 in 1982.  Nice try though.

All of that changed when I discovered Buffalo Exchange.  Merely coming to the realization that places like Buffalo Exchange exist was a revelation for me.

Image courtesy of Time.com; visit the article here

A quick search around the internet tells me that I might be late to the second-hand clothing party, but then again if it took me so long to figure it out, then I know that there are others who haven’t yet.   Anyway, as per my usual disclaimer, this blogger is not paid to endorse or hawk any particular product or store, but if I find a product or a place that I think fits into a  “greener lifestyle” mantra, then I’m happy to talk about it.   Here’s a few reasons why I enjoy shopping at Buffalo Exchange so much:

1. Their clothes are not so “vintage”. Most of the clothing that seems to show up at the Exchange is from within the past 10 years or so… Sure, there’s some vintage items in there, but it’s actually contemporary stuff.  It’s a bit like having the chance to raid your roommate’s closet except that you are raiding ALL roommate’s closets all at once.
2. The prices are well within reason. Shopping at this second-hand clothing store – which sells both used AND new stuff – will not break your bank.  Most of the clothing I’ve bought has been between $12 – $20, and every once in a while, if you’re lucky, you’ll come across a pair of jeans or a designer piece that was once sold for upward of $200.  It might still cost you $50 at the Exchange, but it beats paying the original marked-up price.  (Back to my housing analogy, I think clothes are much more like cars, in that there is always an initial sticker price that is jacked up for name-brand appeal, and then as soon as you put it on it is worth about half as much.  But I will save my lecture about buying used cars for another post…)
3. Having less choice is sometimes really awesome. So this may not make too much sense, but let me explain.  Sometimes when I walk into a store, and they have an entire section devoted to cute dresses, each in about four or five different colors, I become really overwhelmed.  I am a very careful decision maker and if I like even two or three of those dresses, I could spend an entire evening trying to decide which two I want, and in which colors.  Buffalo Exchange takes that stress away from me.  There’s something almost liberating about going straight to your size section and knowing that what’s there is there, and that unless it’s a new piece sold only at the store, you’re not worrying about which colors to get, because that’s your only choice.  AND, per #2 above, you’re probably going to spend less on it, as well.
4. You can sell your own used clothes there too. It’s very satisfying to know that an outfit you might not be interested in wearing anymore might be very appealing to someone else.  My advice is to purge your closet before going, sell your clothes back to them for store credit, and then reward yourself for recycling by shopping!  They rarely buy all of your clothing but if it’s a unique and well-maintained piece, you’ll probably get something for it.  They also take shoes and bags!

In conclusion, next time you need a new outfit, or next time you start to take that bag of old clothes to Goodwill, try Buffalo Exchange, or another local second-hand store*.  Your wallet will appreciate it, as will the planet, since you’ll be diverting those materials from the waste stream.

*Note:  it’s been my experience that consignment stores are much more complicated than the second-hand stores that I am speaking about… If I remember correctly there are usually membership fees involved, but you should investigate for yourself if a consignment store might be as good – or a better – option.

• Buffalo Exchange   (www.buffaloexchange.com)
• Recently featured in Women’s Day and Lucky magazines
• 14 states nation-wide  (Including two here in Portland!)