Energy Circle

ReCircle: Building Efficiency, Deep Energy Retrofits, NESEA and Efficient Computers.

Will — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 15:56:25 +0000

From Energy Circle

Historic Preservation doesn't have to be a barrier to efficiency. (But it could be.)

Energy Circle founder and CEO Peter Troast on how historic preservation regulation could hold up weatherization and retrofit projects, and why it doesn't have to.

Experts at BuildingEnergy10 answer: Just what is a Deep Energy Retrofit?

Energy Circle's newest team member, Victoria, was at the NESEA BuildingEnergy10 Conference this week, where she dug deep into this year's biggest buzz word.

Lots of learnin' going on at NESEA BuildingEnergy10.

Tom Harrison writes that smart building energy experts gathered in Boston are asking the right question: It isn't why we need to improve our buildings; it's how to get the job done.

Peter Troast tweets Deep Energy Reduction Expert Meeting.

One hundred of North America's brightest minds in Deep Energy Retrofits were together in Boston ironing out the most vexing technical details of Deep Energy Retrofits Friday. Building science geekery in 140 characters wasn't easy, but Peter Troast produced a twitter stream of the entire day at hashtag #DEREM which included some prominent twitter guests, including Wolfgang Feist. (Check it out.)

Curated Links from the Web:

All American Energy Efficiency materials.

A new study commissioned by the Home Performance Resource Center found that energy efficiency materials such as caulking, insulation and windows, even, are overwhelmingly made in the USA. (From Green Inc.)

What is a "green" building, anyway? Well, yours.

The greenest building is the one already standing: It takes no new energy to transport building materials and wastes no new materials during demolition or construction. In fact, it's the ultimate act of recycling. Sorting out how we make them more effective is the next. (From Treehugger)

Smart meters having a tough time of it in Texas.

Customers in Texas are finding that their newly installed smart meters are more costly and complicated than the ones they replaced. And they're not especially pleased. (From Green Inc.)

Smart meters having a tough time of it everywhere else, too.

Utilities are facing increased customer service phone calls, Web site visits, and customer engagement when they roll out smart meters—something that may catch them off guard. (From Earth2Tech)

Dell unveils the most energy efficient desktop to date.

Yet another sign that electronics manufacturers are beginning to see the value of energy efficiency. (From Treehugger).

What is a Deep Energy Retrofit? Experts at the NESEA Conference Respond

Victoria Scanlan Stefanakos — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 03:02:55 +0000

At the NESEA Building Energy 10 Conference in Boston, great minds have been busy discussing the best ways to build (and rebuild) better buildings. And talks range from covering mechanical details to virtual collaboration in design. Still, one recurrent theme has dominated the conference. "Net zero" was the buzz word a couple of years ago, says Passive House guru Jamie Wolf of WolfWorks. "Now, it's 'deep energy retrofit.' " As much as the concept is gaining broader recognition, there are varying definitions about what it means.

So, we figured we'd ask attendees and experts: just what is a Deep Energy Retrofit?

Jamie Wolf: "We're aiming to reach a threshold of energy use. We say 70 to 90 percent energy reduction of a bad building. It's dramatic. That's why we use the word 'deep.' Anybody who is going to embrace what it takes do a deep energy retrofit has got to be thinking way beyond personal benefit. At the end of the day, we wouldn't be here if we hadn't stared carbon in the face. We looked at our buildings and said, 'we'd better get a move on.' "

Cador Pricejones, project manager with Byggmeister, Inc., and owner of a (nearly finished) deep energy retrofit in Somerville, MA: "A lot of people define it as a 75 percent reduction in energy. But I don't think it's too helpful to get hung up on the numbers. Whatever you can do is a help, a long as you take a whole-house approach. You can phase it, or do it all at once. Just do as much as you possibly can to the entire house."

Ken Neuhauser, Building Sciences Corporation: "Deep energy retrofits are hard. They are not simple, quick or cheap. I would define them as taking an existing building and reducing its energy use by 50 percent over a new construction, code-built building. If we said 50 percent reduction over the current energy use, that would be easy. But if it's a dog, and you reduce it 50 percent, it's still a dog. We can do better than that."

John Livermore, Livermore Energy Associates: "I would define a deep energy retrofit as … a project that involves super-insulating the building shell, and achieves over 50 percent energy savings."

Sean Jeffords, Beyond Green Construction: "A deep energy reduction is.. a comprehensive renovation or remodeling strategy that when done properly will substantially improve the comfort, durability, health and air quality of a home or building. These efforts should provide a minimum energy use reduction of 50% or greater to receive DER status."

Linda Wigington, founder of ACI and the 1000 Home Challenge: "Retrofits are what people do when they thicken the walls. We're talking total energy reduction. You're not going to get the 75 to 90 percent energy reduction we're aiming for in the 1000 Home Challenge with retrofits. You're going to reduce heating use—and you could reach 75 percent less—but you're not going to affect other energy use. To get really deep energy reductions, we need to look at how we live in our houses. How we live in them matters a lot."

What do you think? And....as Ken says, percent of what?

Real Learning about Real Tools from Real Pros at NESEA BE10.

tharrison — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 19:25:38 +0000

This morning I have had the chance to flit in and out of several sessions at NESEA's BuildingEnergy 10 conference.

I'm not hearing preaching, I am hearing teaching. The audiences are professionals in the energy efficiency field, and they are learning from experienced practitioners. This is not about why we should improve the efficiency of our homes. It's about how to get it done — and how to make a successful business doing it.

A common message that we preach (er, teach) at Energy Circle is that measurement is an essential tool to make sure you do the job right. Order matters, too. It's not only a waste of time to insulate without doing air sealing and weatherization first. It's just as likely to create trap moisture that can encourage rot, pests and mildew. The house is a system; these sessions are about the science of building, designing or retrofitting a home.

As I listen and learn, I am coming to see that the equation for successful improvements in energy efficiency (known as "building performance") require more than the knowledge of how to use a caulk gun. They require experience, practice, and the smarts needed to interpret the data of a home's performance. The level of the audience here is very high indeed. These are not typical contractors; they are true pros, who know and are learning what it takes to make their work work better.

As the nation continues to talk about Home Star, or "Cash for Caulkers", it's clear we're going to need a lot of folks all around the country to teach, learn and share this knowledge. That way, we get meaningful work done, not just "slap dash" projects that tackle surface level problems.

This is not to say that all energy efficiency improvements require the hand of a pro. Many jobs can be done by almost anyone. Doing it yourself is definitely part of the mix.

But if you're thinking about making changes that are more than trivial, the first place to start is with an energy auditor. You need someone who can help you understand not only the current measurements of your house, but also what needs doing, and how to get it done. Most important, that pro can then return and re-audit after you've made your first round of improvements.

Historic Preservation vs. Building Energy Reduction--How Big a Hurdle?

Peter Troast — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 18:58:18 +0000

The task of reducing the collective energy use of ~120 million US residences faces many well-documented hurdles: lack of financing, the complexity of buildings and homeowner education to name just a few. Yet addressing this is an imperative--few know that buildings, both residential and commercial, use more energy and contribute more to greenhouse gases than either the industrial or transportation sectors. Now, it appears another obstacle to this challenge is emerging--an extraordinarily wide-reaching mandate that weatherization projects undergo historic preservation review.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has a new report out on American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) funding. It was commissioned by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, whose witch-hunt against the stimulus program we don't endorse, but nonetheless, it exposed the breadth of the potential conflict between historic preservation regulation and energy retrofits.

The contentious issue here isn't necessarily an inherent incompatibility between energy retrofits and historic integrity, but with the capacity of historic preservation offices -- underfunded, understaffed -- to evaluate the number of houses that current regulations would have reviewed.

According to a press release from the National Association for State Community Services Programs (NASCSP), "any dwelling older than 50 years must be reviewed by the State Historic Preservation Office (SHPO) before weatherization." Does this really mean that any home built before 1960 must be reviewed by a state historic preservation office before weatherization can be undertaken? According to the American Housing Survey (pdf), in 2001 there were 44.1 million homes built pre-1960. That's 37% of our country's total housing stock. And energy efficiency experts generally recognize that swath of pre-1960 homes as the ones most in need of weatherization, and with the highest potential for deep reductions.

In some parts of the country, the numbers get even worse: the GAO report says that "officials from the Michigan Department of Human Services stated that an estimated 90% of the homes slated for weatherization in their state would need a historic preservation review..." and "as of late fall 2009, the state historic preservation office had only two employees."

We support historic preservation. The proposed Mallett Deep Energy Retrofit project we're championing in Freeport, ME is an effort to demonstrate that super-insulated deep energy reductions and sensitive historic preservation are compatible. (The Mallett House we're hoping to retrofit to a 60%+ energy reduction was built in 1875 and has been declared eligible for the historic register.) We appreciate the preservation community's worry about projects that impact the building envelope. But we also think the historic preservation movement is at risk of dangerously overreaching, and becoming yet another obstacle to getting energy efficiency done. A hard line position that the exterior building envelope of historic structures can't be touched means they can never achieve deep energy reductions. That would effectively condemn our aging buildings to hospice, further delay our country's progress toward fixing the building sector's energy and greenhouse gas problem, and deeply harm the long-term cause of historic preservation.

Google PowerMeter: Open API is All Good.

tharrison — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 19:33:35 +0000

At Energy Circle, we have been awaiting the day that Google would open up its API for the Google PowerMeter (GPM) widget since ... well since we learned about GPM. It was clear from the start that they would, eventually, and yesterday, the good news came. Martin LaMonica at CNET GreenTech wrote a good post with a great summary.

In short, any device can, like the TED 5000, send data up to Google PowerMeter. You kind of have to be an energy geek to think that's interesting, but I am a geek, and I know a lot of them. We're interested indeed.

I perused the API—that's its application programming interface, which lets the program interact with other software—a little, and it delivers exactly what I expected: the ability to upload electricity data associated with a Google account. Data can be segmented (e.g. circuit-by-circuit, or to see the data from a Solar PV installation). And data can be fetched back.

Perhaps our earliest disappointment with GPM is that it is not built to be shared. Google's implementation is simply a widget displayed as part of your iGoogle page. It's intrinsically linked with your Google account, with data transmitted securely over HTTPS. This hasn't changed. This should alleviate some of the concerns of the first few people who commented on the CNET article, claiming that Google PowerMeter was just another example of how they were going to use all of our data to take over the world. We're not concerned about that. We're confident that Google has given the world PowerMeter for a good reason: They think they can help make a positive difference. Privacy is important, and the Google account is a good way to ensure privacy.

But if you do want to share your data, the API provides a couple of interesting options. Services such as eMonitor and WattVision (not to mention power companies themselves) collect and store readings on a central server. Those services can use the API to forward this data for personal use via the Google PowerMeter widget, too. This allows the source to keep whatever special details and services their systems allow, and also display on Google.

If you already use a device like a TED 5000, Google has the data collected (every 10 minutes) for people who give it to go ahead to do so. I'm one of them; I now have about six months of history up there. And if users were so inclined, they could grant other services permission to use the API to collect data from user accounts—and aggregate the data in interesting ways. Competitions amongst friends? Tax credits? Comparisons with others in your region? Class action suits against your utility? Think of the possibilities!

One other intriguing possibility is that multiple, distinct sources could update your home's data. Wouldn't it be cool if your utilities, including electricity, gas or oil, even gasoline and other energy suppliers, could pour their data into a central repository like GPM? Then, we could finally have it—the house-by-house total power view. Sadly, we'll have to wait for that, and not just because most utilities take 10 years to do what most other businesses do in one year.

I'm disappointed that Google's PowerMeter API still limits its measurement to electricity. Measurements of other values, such as natural gas or water, are verboten. I'm not complaining loudly (yet). But in my house, we use four to five times as much power for heating and hot water (measured in Watts, Therms or any other equivalent unit) as we do for electricity. It's called Google PowerMeter; I would love to be able see all of our power in one place. Alas, all good things come, in time.

Even so, the open API is well designed (as are all of Google's APIs). And it should be a snap for all of us energy geeks to do interesting and novel things with.

Whiplash: The Best Home Energy Efficiency News from March 1-5, 2010.

Will — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 18:38:17 +0000

From Energy Circle:

The Google PowerMeter API is now open.

We've long awaited the day that Google would open up the API for their lauded PowerMeter energy monitoring widget. It's open. And we're psyched.

The value of tracking your energy usage closely.

Tony Wildish, a computer programmer living in France, was frustrated when he realized that American energy monitors weren't compatible with French systems. He hacked his own system, and shares the results in a thought-provoking guest post at Energy Circle.

Paul Eldrenkamp, Passive House Consultant, discusses the NESEA BuildingEnergy10 Conference.

One Passive House pioneer talks about the significance (and potential for hilarious memories) of the NESEA Building Energy Conferences, in one of a series of NESEA "Thought Leader" interviews.

Alex Wilson, Executive Editor of Environmental Building News, discusses BuildingEnergy10.

Green building expert Alex Wilson shares his favorite green building product and how the famed NESEA Building Energy Conference has grown in one of a series of NESEA "Thought Leader" interviews.

Curated Links from the Web:

Calling all energy geeks: Pike Research conducting a survey on the smart grid.

One of the hottest topics in our energy future is the smart grid's potential to drastically increase efficiency and reduce waste. But how smart is it? And how can it improve? Pike Research wants your opinion. (From Earth2Tech)

Efficiency First responds to the WSJ's coverage of Boulder's energy efficiency program.

The WSJ piece suggested that energy efficiency incentive programs may not work. Efficiency First rebuts—and points out that the proposed Home Star program would address many of the problems that have plagued Boulder. (From Efficiency First)

Suzanne Shelton on the problem with Boulder.

Shelton Group CEO, and sponsor of the well-regarded EcoPulse survey, gives her insightful, research-based take on The Boulder Situation. (from Shelton Group blog)

What's the most environmentally friendly insulation available?

The insulation made with recycled materials and the least embodied energy, or the insulation with the highest R-value? Treehugger's Lloyd Alter recounts lively debates he's had on the subject—and raises questions well worth asking. (From Treehugger)

California city sues couple for removing front lawn grass in an effort to save water.

Sometimes you read something that really makes you wonder. This is one of those things. (From L.A. Times)

Ahead of the Curve: Alex Wilson on the NESEA BuildingEnergy10 Conference.

Guest — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 17:24:38 +0000

The following interview was conducted by the Northeast Sustainable Energy Association (NESEA) with Alex Wilson, a lifetime member and former Executive Director of NESEA, and Executive Editor of Environmental Building News, and has been reprinted here with the permission of NESEA. We urge you to visit the BuildingEnergy10 Conference website for more information about the conference, and would point out that online registration ends March 5 -- no time to waste!

Some 4,000 renewable energy and green building experts will bring their cutting edge thinking to Boston next March for the BuildingEnergy10 Conference and Tradeshow, the annual event organized by the Northeast Sustainable Energy Association (NESEA). Now in its 35th year, BuildingEnergy is the oldest and largest regional building energy and renewable energy event in the country, with participants coming from across the Northeast – from Maine to Washington, DC.

Q: How did you come up with the idea of creating the BuildingGreen Top Ten Products? Has your list made an impact on the companies/products selected?
A: This is America – the land of “Top 10 lists.” That's not something we should be proud of, but it's a reality. We realized nine years ago at BuildingGreen that naming the "Top 10" products would be a way to get exposure for some of the many very exciting products that are being introduced each year. Along with calling attention to cool products, the most exciting thing about this list has been how much it's helped those companies. In some cases, this recognition has put fledgling companies on the map – really jump-started their futures.

Q: Do you have a favorite green product? What is it, and why do you like it?
A: That's a tough question. I guess it has to be TimberSil, a treated-wood product produced by infusing sodium silicate into wood then heating the wood to create an amorphous glass that surrounds wood cells, rendering it unrecognizable as a food source for decay organisms. The stuff is non-corrosive, imparts fire resistance, and contains no VOCs. As an added bonus, I recently learned that the sodium silicate TimberSil Products’ use is derived from rice hulls, a waste agricultural product.

Q: How long have you been affiliated with NESEA and the BuildingEnergy conference and trade show? What do you get out of the relationship?
A: A long time. I was hired by NESEA as executive director in 1980, and in 1983 I organized a conference at Mount Snow in Vermont that became the first of the BuildingEnergy conferences. Not long after starting at NESEA, Ronald Reagan was elected and promptly eliminated the DOE program that had been providing about half of NESEA's funding. That turned out to be a blessing in disguise, as it forced us to expand our focus away from just solar energy (we were at the time the New England Solar Energy Association) to cover energy-efficient construction, quality construction, and broader issues of sustainability. The BuildingEnergy conferences emerged through those efforts. As a result, NESEA became a stronger organization.

My connection with NESEA also helped to launch my next career – as a publisher. When Nadav Malin and I came up with the idea of Environmental Building News in early 1992, we tested the idea on the NESEA membership, and a remarkable 14% of them signed up as paying subscribers. We were off and running. I've maintained a strong connection with NESEA throughout these last three decades, serving two terms on the board and attending dozens of conferences.

Q: As a member of the media, you are a gatekeeper when it comes to publicizing sustainable products and projects. Is the competition for coverage intensifying in the green category?
A: Oh, sure. When we started EBN in 1992, we were the only publication focusing on green building. It's now a fairly crowded field – though we continue to be the only publication in the field that does not carry advertising. This policy allows us to be totally objective in writing about products and technologies.

Q: How would you like to see NESEA evolve over the coming years?
A: A lot of people say they like NESEA just the way it is, and they don't want it to change. But the strength of NESEA has been its ability to evolve to meet new needs. NESEA started out as a solar energy organization 35 years ago, and it has broadened and shifted its focus time and again over its history. To succeed, I think NESEA needs to continue being an organization that evolves – a "learning organization," if you will.

Q: How would you like BuildingEnergy to evolve?
A: By reporting on the cutting edge in energy design and construction, BuildingEnergy will by its very nature evolve. It is often the first place I learn about new ideas and new technologies. With the slow-down in new construction, I expect that BuildingEnergy will be focusing more on renovation than new construction over the next couple years.

Q: Who should come to BuildingEnergy, and why?
A: People who need to know where building practices are heading, people who want to be ahead of the curve, people who want to be leaders rather than followers. For me, BuildingEnergy is also the place where I reconnect with friends and associates – the networking opportunities are invaluable.

For more information, and to register online, visit the BuildingEnergy10 website. Also be sure to check out all the other great NESEA thought leader interviews with the likes of building experts John Straube, Betsy Pettit, Jamie Wolf, and Paul Eldrenkamp. Many thanks to Alex Wilson, and to NESEA's Jo Lee for permission to reprint this article.

Tony Wildish's Simple Idea: Read His Electricity Meter. Then Record What it Tells Him.

Guest — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 16:18:21 +0000

By Tony Wildish*

A year ago, I started hearing a lot about the TED Energy Detective products. I thought at the time that they sounded like a great idea. Like a calorie-counter for dieters, being able to see the numbers whenever you need to is a great way to make you aware of your consumption.

The only problem for me is that I live in France, and TED was not available for our 230 volt/50 Hz supply at that time. So what could I do to begin to understand my electricity consumption? I decided to make a weekly reading of my electricity meter, and see if that would tell me anything useful over time. Reading the meter once a week is a far cry from having real-time results like the TED would give me, but I figured I might still learn something useful. Here's what I found out:

Plotting my energy use

The graph shows the result, with the day of the year along the x-axis and the number of kWh per day on the y-axis, calculated as the daily average between two successive weekly readings. Our total electricity use for the year is about 13,000 kWh, or 36 kWh per day, averaged over the year.

If my math is correct, the average in France works out to 41 kWh per person per day, so we're about 14 percent below average for a 2-person home. About two-thirds of homes in France are heated primarily by electricity, ours among them. So we're probably doing a bit better than that number alone suggests, because the average is including people who heat their homes with gas and oil. That's nice to know, since we had already taken steps to reduce our consumption.

We don't use heating in summer, of course, and we don't have air-conditioning, either. So the flat summer use of about 17 kWh per day is also instructive. That represents electricity used for our hot water, cooking, washing machine, fridges, computers, TV, lighting and other constant factors of life.

Clearly we use more electricity for lighting in winter than we do in summer because of the shorter days. We doubtless use more for heating water, too, because the water that comes into the apartment is colder to start. I can't quantify how much more that would be because I don't have detailed measurements, so I'll just ignore that effect for now. I'll assume that my 17 kWh per day baseline in summer is the same in winter, which means that anything above that constant load can only be the electric heating.

Given that 17 kWh per day is almost half my total, that leaves the remaining 19 kWh per day for heating. Heating is the biggest single system for which I use electricity. If I want to save 1 percent on my total electricity use, I can do it by saving 2 percent on my winter heating. That's good to know; it's nice to have a number for the amount it represents.

That 19 kWh per day is an average throughout the year, but that doesn't tell me much about daily use. The graph peaks at about 62 kWh per day, so heating was accounting for 45 kWh per day at those times. The first 60-80 days of the year show considerable fluctuation from one week to the next. There are two high-consumption weeks around day 50 which stand out from the rest, and indeed we did have a very cold spell here at the beginning of February. But that two-week period only adds about 6 or 7 kWh per day over the weeks around it. So I can see that my heating demands vary with the weather, and now I have some idea of how much.

Hot water as electricity hog

There's another very instructive feature in that plot: It's not one I had planned on, nor do I care to repeat it. At the beginning of September, on about day 240, our water heater broke down. The plumbers took about four weeks to fix it completely, and we had two weeks without any hot water at all. During that two weeks, our baseline dropped to about 7 kWh per day. So I learned that heating water takes about 10 kWh per day in summer; the other 7 kWh per day power all the other things we use all the time.

Thanks to this experiment, I discovered that our cooking, lighting, computers, fridges, and washing machine use about 7 kWh per day. Providing us with hot water takes 10 kWh per day, and heating in winter takes up to 45 kWh per day, depending on how cold it gets. I also learned that heating accounts for a bit more than half of our electricity use, averaged over the year (19 kWh per day).

That's nowhere near as much detail as I could get from a real-time energy monitor, but I think that's an impressive amount to deduce from a simple weekly reading of my electricity meter.

*Tony is a programmer living and working in France, in the Geneva valley. A lifelong interest in science and nature has fueled his concern about the environment and the ways we are affecting it. When he's not surfing the Web, he enjoys photography, gardening, and walking through the Jura foothills.

Paul Eldrenkamp is Counting the Days until the NESEA BuildingEnergy10 Conference.

Guest — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 17:50:40 +0000

The following interview was conducted by the Northeast Sustainable Energy Association (NESEA) with Paul Eldrenkamp, founder and owner of Byggmeister, Inc., long-time NESEA member, the first Passive House Certified Consultant in New England—and if that doesn't impress you, he also has a Bachelor's degree in the History and Literature of Medieval Europe. The interview has been reprinted here with the permission of NESEA. We urge you to visit the BuildingEnergy10 Conference website for more information about the conference, and would point out that online registration ends March 5—no time to waste!

Some 4,000 renewable energy and green building experts will bring their cutting edge thinking to Boston March 9-11 for the BuildingEnergy10 Conference and Tradeshow, the annual event organized by the Northeast Sustainable Energy Association (NESEA). Now in its 35th year, BuildingEnergy is the oldest and largest regional building energy and renewable energy event in the country, with participants coming from across the Northeast—from Maine to Washington, DC.

Q: NESEA will award a $10,000 prize for Zero Net Energy Building Projects at BE10. Could you explain the difference between a Zero Net Energy project and the Passive House approach?

A: Passive House sets a very specific – and very low – operating energy "budget" for any home or building constructed to Passive House standards. Zero net energy buildings are an impressive accomplishment, but they generally have no particular budget beyond the limits of what the building can produce on site over the course of a year via renewable sources (solar and wind, primarily). A net- zero building is very likely to be a low-energy building, but not always. A house built to Passive House standards will (depending on climate zone) get a fair amount of energy from the sun in the form of gain through the windows and via solar thermal for domestic hot water, but a Passive House building does not have to have PV mounted on the roof or on-site wind, or any other on-site electrical power generation.

Q: You are one of about 100 or so certified Passive House experts in this country. How and why did you decide to become certified?

A: I really like the rigor that the Passive House approach brings to the concept of green building. I think a fair number of "green" builders and designers were getting frustrated with how much air time was being taken up by things that just didn't matter all that much, in the end. The focus on clichés like bamboo flooring and recycled glass tile were getting in the way of any real progress in building performance standards. Too many people were feeling really good about doing a lot of things that were, in the end, meaningless. I think that's why The Passive House approach captured the imagination of so many people in the green building movement. It's incredibly rigorous – it's a whole new way of thinking about design and construction. It may be too rigorous or misguidedly rigorous – that's a legitimate, important debate to have. But the fact is, the Passive House movement has gotten us thinking and talking about just how much energy a building should really be using, and that's exactly the conversation we need to be having right now. In fact, we needed to have it 20 or 30 years ago. In the end, we US designers and builders need to figure out how to make Passive House standards our own – but in a way that does not dilute the message and allow backsliding or gaming the system. A way that impresses the Germans rather than depresses them.

Q: Back in the 70's, Massachusetts was leading the way in terms of superinsulation and air sealing. Are we still out in front when it comes to these kinds of issues?

A: From a policy point of view MA is doing very, very well – we're among a small handful of the most progressive states with regard to energy efficiency and green power initiatives. On the other hand, although there are many outstanding practitioners in MA, I don't feel that we're way out in front in terms of what's getting done in our field. But we are definitely holding our own.

Q: How would you like to see BE10 evolve over the coming years? How would you like to see NESEA evolve?

A: I would like to see BE and NESEA becoming fewer and fewer years ahead of the rest of the industry. Not because NESEA is losing ground, but because we’re continuing to get better at changing the industry and getting everyone on board with the NESEA way of thinking.

Q: What is your role at BE10 this year?

A: I'll be on a panel talking about "counting, measuring, and reporting" -- a topic near and dear to my heart.

Q: What is your favorite BuildingEnergy memory?

A: Joe Lstiburek jumping in the pool fully clothed at a conference in Cromwell, CT in the late 1980s. That was back when he drank beer.

Q: What do you get out of going to the show? How long have you gone?

A: I've been going to NESEA conferences since the late 1980s. I love the energy that's often palpable in the air – the feeling that this is important, exciting (if often frustrating) work that we're all doing, and that we're all learning from each other as we go. It's hard to come out of a Building Energy conference feeling jaded. If that ever happens to me, I'll retire.

For more information, and to register online, visit the BuildingEnergy10 website. Also be sure to check out all the other great NESEA thought leader interviews with the likes of building experts John Straube, Betsy Pettit, and Jamie Wolf. Thanks to Paul Eldrenkamp, and to NESEA's Jo Lee for permission to reprint this article.

Whiplash: The Best Home Energy Efficiency News from February 22-26, 2010.

Will — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 19:48:09 +0000

From Energy Circle:

The PowerHouse Dynamics eMonitor Energy Monitor: Revealed.

The early data is in from the world's first circuit-level energy monitor at the Energy Circle house. The results? 1) Peter uses way too much electricity in the basement, and 2) We have a truly important product on our hands.

Betsy Pettit Explains Why NESEA's BuildingEnergy10 is Important.

Betsy Pettit, President of Building Science Corporation and Chair of this year's Building Energy conference, on why the conference has been relevant for 35 years, and continues to be.

John Straube Explains Why NESEA's BuildingEnergy10 is Fun.

John Straube, building science professor at the University of Waterloo, engineer at Building Science Corporation, talks about why he keeps coming back to the Building Energy conference, and why you should too.

We Explain Why Bloom Energy Doesn't Get Us Too Excited... Yet.

The Bloom Energy Server is stunning, intelligent, and potentially revolutionary. But if you're expecting the $3000 magic box in your basement that was alluded to on 60 Minutes, it looks like you might have to wait... another ten years or so.

Curated Links from the Web:

The Meters May be Smart, the Utilities are Another Story.

A Wall Street Journal article highlights the apparent incapacity of utilities to utilize what they have learned through the deployment of smart meters. The lesson? It's taking them a while to catch up.

Australian Prime Minister Demotes Rock Star Over Insulation Debacle.

Peter Garrett's demotion illustrates, for us, not the need for rock stars to stay out of politics, but the need for scammers to stay out of the home performance profession. (From Reuters)

Give These Guys a Medal! GE's "Smart Home" at the Olympics.

Actually, GE is calling it the "Home of the Future," but the shipping-container-based home on display at the Vancouver Olympics displays the company's various smart-grid enabled appliances, which communicate with utilities via the smart grid to cut peak usage and make home electricity consumption as efficient as possible. (From Business Wire)

Today, Electrician. Tomorrow, Energy Contractor.

So, we were a little early when we ran a similar headline in Whiplash two weeks ago (i.e. we didn't literally mean "tomorrow"), but the concept is gaining momentum. (From Mother Nature Network)

Hip Hop Bus Throws Down for Climate Bill.

The Hip Hop Caucus Clean Energy Now! Tour ended this week in Washington, D.C. after a powerful drive from Louisiana with Repower America to support a climate bill in the Senate. (From the Hip Hop Caucus blog)