Building Technology

Looking at the numbers pulled out from yesterday’s post, there are a few things I want to note.

First of all, the amount of money being put into building retrofits is pretty astounding. Just under 35 billion is included in the house stimulus package that is strictly for retrofitting and renovating buildings. This isn’t all solely for energy-efficiency measures, but much of it is. This includes money to the DOE Weatherization Assistance Program, money for the US General Services Administration to improve energy efficiency of federal buildings, grants to improve the energy efficiency of HUD subsidized housing for the elderly, disabled, and for Section 8, and for improving schools and institutions of higher education.

All of this is really exciting, but it also creates an astounding puzzle: how to ramp up these programs to such enormous levels quickly and effectively. For example, the Weatherization Assistance Program was allocated $227.2 Million last year. There is a national framework and a network of state and local agencies already in place, and allowances per building have been doubled, but absorbing roughly 25 times the amount of money will be a dramatic challenge.  A national framework for training and certification, as well as some sort of national database to expedite the process of analyzing and retrofitting buildings to the full cost-effective level. FAS is currently putting together thoughts on this, and I’ll have more on this shortly.

Another important point to note is tucked into the section on State Energy Program grants. The bill allocates $3.4 Billion to state energy programs, but allows money beyond normal allocations to be distributed only to states that have “decoupled” utility profits from sales in their regulation. This allows for utilities to profit from energy efficiency, rather than strictly from producing more energy, and it has been shown to be an important tool in energy reductions. It appears as though this was Rep. Waxman’s doing, and a more in depth account can be found here.

In addition to being tied to decoupling, these state energy program grants are to be given to states where the residential building code is equivalent or better than the 2009 International Energy Conservation Code (and for commercial buildings, ASHRAE 90.1-2007). This is also encouraging. There are two halves to improving the national building stock through building codes: improving the codes themselves, and then getting municipalities to adopt them. Hopefully this carrot will help push states towards these improved codes.

Its unclear what of this will emerge in the final version of the stimulus, and I’ll be keeping an eye and adding more thoughts as things happen.

The House of Representatives passed the The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 yesterday, sending the stimulus package to the senate. We’ve taken a look through the bill and have pulled out the sections related to buildings, and more specifically, building retrofits. Overall, we’re pleased to see that so much attention has been paid to weatherization and buildings, and we’re excited to see how this will play out.

We will look through the senate version of the stimulus when it gets sorted out. In the meantime, you can find the full text of the house bill here, and our analysis below.

Read the rest of this entry »

FAS has created two energy‐efficiency proposals for a potential economic stimulus package. The first is a straightforward expansion of the DOE Weatherization Assistance Program, which has delivered significant results in carbon reduction and energy efficiency but is starved of resources. The second is a new program of grants for point‐of‐sale home energy retrofits loosely based on the Weatherization model. Including this program in a stimulus package would reduce US carbon emissions, provide green jobs in the construction industry, and increase the value of US homes. Read the rest of this entry »

Today, the Structural Insulated Panel Association (SIPA) published a story in their quarterly newsletter about  FAS’s presentation at the 2008 ASCE AEI Conference. More information about the conference and presentations, including pdf files of the presentations, can be found here.

You can sign up for the newsletter here, and more information about SIPA can be found on their website at www.sips.org

In August of 2008, UC Berkeley Professor Khalid Mosalam presented a paper coauthored by FAS’s Joe Hagerman and Henry Kelly at the 5th International Engineering and Construction Conference. The paper presents Mosalam’s findings from research into the seismic performance of structural insulated panels. There is a considerable lack of information available about the behavior of SIPs when subjected to seismic loads. The paper focuses on the characterization of the mechanical properties and seismic performance of SIPs using experimental techniques. Specimens studied include both OSB faced and cementitious SIPs, where panels were tested without panel-to-panel connections.

The full text pdf copy of the paper can be found here.

In mid-November, Joe Hagerman and I traveled to China to speak at the US China Green Energy Conference in Beijing, and to meet with officials from Sichuan University and the town of Mianzhu regarding rebuilding housing after the Sichuan Earthquake. Read the rest of this entry »

So its been quite a while since I’ve given this blog the attention it deserves. And that’s unfortunate, because we’ve been up to some quite exciting stuff in the past few months, including (among other things): a trip to china about building a demonstration there in the wake of the Sichuan Earthquake, some exciting talks about developing a home energy retrofit plan that would save energy and create jobs, some interesting meetings regarding indoor air quality in manufactured housing, exciting updates on FAS’s research on the seismic capacity of SIPs, as well as some very exciting news in the world of building research.

I’ll be making several posts in the coming weeks to catch things back up to speed, and you can expect more regular updates in the near year.

I’m back from my trip out to Denver for the ASCE AEI Conference, so I’ll be putting up a few posts to catch up on a few things. The first I’d like to update on is the “30 Percent Solution” – an attempt to increase the performance of the model energy code by 30 percent – that I referenced a few posts back.

The final hearings were held in Minneapolis last week, and unfortunately the overall package of energy improvements narrowly failed (receiving over 60% of votes in favor, but not enough to reach the required two thirds majority).

Still, energy efficiency will substantially improve in the nation’s 2009 model energy code governing new home construction, as several individual measures were passed. The 2009 IECC will have several significant new provisions to boost energy efficiency, including:

• Increased insulation in basements, floors and walls;
• Improved window efficiency;
• Reductions in wasted energy from leaky heating & cooling ducts;
• Reductions in tradeoffs that fail to capture energy savings from efficient heating & cooling equipment;
• High-efficiency lighting; and
• Improved air sealing within the building envelope.

While FAS is disappointed the measures were not fully passed, these incremental improvements are encouraging. It is also heartening that over 60 percent of attendees voted in its favor, a clear demonstration of its growing support. We hope (and fully expect) that these efforts will continue, and model energy codes will continue to improve.

More information can be found at the EECC’s website.

I just got done presenting at the ASCE AEI Conference out in Denver. Overall, I was pretty happy with how the session went well. I introduced the speakers and topic, and then John Millhone, a senior advisor to FAS, made a very good presentation about the current energy crisis, and how and why buildings need to play an important role in its solution. I think his presentation really gets to the core of FAS’s mission, and is a great preface to our work in policy and new technologies. John’s powerpoint can be found here.

Eric Tompos, the Vice President of NTA Inc., followed John with a presentation on the sources of design information for engineering SIPs, as well as the ways SIPs typically perform. Eric’s discussion taught me quite a few things I hadn’t realized about panel performance, and was huge for any designer planning to use panels. His powerpoint can be found here (with a supplementary, more comprehensive presentation that describe the methods for developing an engineered design method for SIPs in detail found here).

Khalid Mosalam, a professor Civil and Environmental Engineering out at UC Berkeley followed Eric. Professor Mosalam’s presentation explained much of the work he’s been doing in conjunction with FAS. He explained the current approach to seismic evaluation, the development of a pseudo-dynamic approach that is cheaper than large scale shake table tests, and then how that applies to SIPs and CSIPs. A copy of his presentation can be found here. That said, Professor Mosalam’s research deserves a much more in depth look – I’ll write something more significant about it soon.

I concluded the presentation with a discussion of our Pankow research – how to apply CSIPs to multi-story buildings. My presentation can be found here. The followup discussion to the presentations was good – some very interested people from all different segments of the building industry, from engineers to construction managers.

I’m off to Denver later this week for the American Society of Civil Engineers Architectural Engineering Institute’s Annual Conference. FAS has been asked by Dr. Mohammed Ettouney, the conference’s chair, to present our research on applying cementitious structural insulated panels to multi-story buildings at the event.

I will be chairing the presentation, presenting along with John Millhone, Dr. Khalid Mosalem, and Eric Tompos. John is a senior advisor at FAS, and will be speaking about the role of buildings in the carbon economy, and how advanced building technologies offer one of the most important solutions to our national energy problems. Eric, the Executive Vice President of NTA Inc., is a very well respected engineer in the SIP community, and has provided instrumental advice and guidance to FAS throughout the research project. Eric will be presenting generally about SIPs, focusing on the panel mechanics and basic engineering. Dr. Mosalem, a civil engineering professor at the University of California at Berkeley, will present his research on seismic testing of CSIP panels. I will wrap up our session with a talk about the specifics of our research – the multi-story applications of CSIPs, future areas of research, and the overall potential for CSIPs in the architectural and engineering worlds.

I think the conference will be a great opportunity for FAS, and I’m looking forward to a positive dialogue about the research. I’ll be out of touch while at the conference, but I’ll be sure to post a recap afterwards with some thoughts and insights.