Special Building Tech Forum Sponsor: Wentworth Institute of Technology

By Grey Lee


The Wentworth Institute of Technology will be a special sponsor present at our Building Tech Forum.  Unlike most groups, who provide useful sustainable services or consulting or who develop and roll-out sustainable goods, Wentworth is a university committed to sustainability and a greener future.  As an incubator of future STEM, business, and political leaders, a college campus must embody these forward-thinking concepts and it is refreshing to see Wentworth so willing and able to promote sustainability. 

From Wentworth's Website:


Sustainability can mean many different things. At Wentworth, our approach to sustainability aspires to improve environmental, social, and economic performance, drawing from the Brundtland Commission’s definition of sustainable development:  development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” 

The Wentworth Creed, which dates back to 1904, echoes this in its principle of Economy, stating, “We seek to use our resources wisely at all times. We accept our obligation to safeguard the earth, its resources, its life, and its energy for the benefit of future generations.”

The mission of the Wentworth Sustainability Committee is to provide leadership for reducing the Institute’s impact on the local, regional, and global environment. We recommend approaches for increasing the Institute's commitment to sustainability in all areas of the campus including materials and energy use, waste management, construction, purchasing, and the campus curriculum while staying within the boundaries of the Institute’s financial resources and good business practices.

The American College and University Presidents’ Climate Commitment is an essential tool for Wentworth to promote communication and education about sustainability issues and achievements, and to encourage sustainable practices within Wentworth and the neighboring community.

We look forward to seeing Wentworth at the Building Tech Forum!

Building Tech Spotlight: Advanced Energy Intelligence

By Grey Lee


Advanced Energy Intelligence LLC. partnered with USGBCMA to put on our first annual Building Tech Forum, which gave us the opportunity to discuss all aspects of green building and the broader concept of sustainability.  AEI is an energy management group that collects data on energy consumption and helps clients optimize energy consumption and efficiency. 

AEI's services involve monitoring of weather correlation, base load and plug load, year over year, period over period, seasonal comparisons, peak demand, and Energy Usage Intensity of clients' various buildings. In recent years AEI has presented a poster at the Defense Energy Summit in Austin, Texas, and exhibited at the MA Sustainable Communities & Campuses Conference 2015.  

Check out AEI's website to learn more!

PACE & Resiliency

By Grey Lee

PACE Recap:
Property Assessed Clean Energy Financing & Resiliency

As the senate prepares to review the newly minted bill on PACE financing this spring, we would like to encourage our fellow green building advocates to review some objectives of the bill, and to help share this information in your communities.

Massachusetts Senate Docket 1271 (Previously S.2255), An Act fueling job creation through energy efficiency, was filed by Senator Brian Joyce, and is designed to allow property owners to finance energy efficiency and resiliency improvements.

PACE financing provides property owners access to low-cost, off-balance sheet capital, by way of a betterment lien placed on the property and payable like a property tax bill. Across the nation, successful PACE programs have provided a new and innovative way for property owners to finance energy efficiency upgrades, renewable energy projects, and water conservation measures. The Massachusetts legislation also will allow property owners to consider upgrades that include resiliency improvements to be PACE-funded. The availability of this new tool for project finance will result in new projects which will mean more work for people in the renewable energy & allied industries of Massachusetts.

SD 1271 will make necessary improvements to the Commonwealth’s current PACE program, creating a streamlined, centrally administered PACE program that is capable of achieving economies of scale and will be easily adopted by municipalities. The new program will require lender consent and will focus on the pent up demand for energy efficiency and disaster-resilience financing in the commercial and industrial sector. Commercial PACE programs in 25 other states have accounted for $100 million in project activity. When passed, the Massachusetts commercial and industrial PACE program will help:
 

  • Create Jobs
  • Increase Property Values
  • Encourage Private Investment in Energy Efficiency, Renewables & Resiliency
  • Reinforce the Role of Massachusetts as a Leader in Green Building

To learn more about how PACE programs work in other states see the PACEnow annual report. To learn more about existing resiliency efforts in Boston please see the Boston Redevelopment Authority’s guidelines for climate change preparedness and resiliency. Also available online is a 2013 publication titled Building Resilience in Boston, which helps outline best practices for climate change adaptation and resilience for existing buildings.
 

Building Tech Focus: Sustainable Minds

By Grey Lee


Sustainable Minds is part of our first-ever Building Tech Forum, which is a great opportunity to discuss sustainability, green design, and more!  

They provide a revolutionary product that helps clients realize the environmental impact of their operations. Sustainable Minds is fundamentally a cloud software and services company, whose mission is to operationalize environmental performance into mainstream product development and manufacturing in an accessible, empowering, and credible way.

To do this, they have integrated our knowledge of product design, life cycle assessment and environmental systems design with expertise in web-based business, software design and customer experience. The result is powerful greener design functionality delivered when and where you need it. The product was recently ranked #1 Cloud LCA software for greener product innovation, and has been used by industry and education in 870 locations and 80 countries since 2010. 

Come out and meet these fine folks at the 2015 Building Tech Forum on 4/22 at MassChallenge in Boston. You will be glad you did!

Read more about Sustainable Minds and their wonderful product on their site

Sponsor: Wegowise at Building Tech Forum

By Grey Lee


WegoWise is an energy management software company that started in Boston and is now international in scope. This video provides a brief explanation of how the company saves homeowners and property owners money all while saving energy.  The concept is simple; WegoWise automatically manages and collects your utility data, saving you time, money, and toil.

WegoWise provides energy and water data in an easy-to-digest report for customer and independent analysis, and normalizes your data to calendar months and rolls up meter data to the building and property level. WegoWise then provides three benchmarks for customers to see the relative efficiency, costs, and savings potential of each of their properties' utilities. The company's success is shown in the data below:


At our Building Tech Forum to impart some wisdom earned from the field will be Dan Teague of WegoWise. It will be great to hear how a wonderful idea can catch on, expand into a growing business, and help people improve their buildings' energy performace – thank you for sharing your story, WegoWise!

Read more about WegoWise on its website.

Sponsor Spotlight: Columbia Construction Company

By Grey Lee


Columbia Construction Company and their employees have been long-standing supporters of green buildings. We welcome them as a bronze-level sponsor. 

Columbia is known for providing leadership, quality, creativity, innovation, passion, and unparalleled client service, and is a respected leader in the A/E/C industry. With 90 years of construction expertise, they provide clients with quality construction services that produce exceptional results.


As one of the foremost Construction Managers in the Northeast, Columbia goes beyond on time and on budget, and adds value by:

  • understanding clients' business in order to achieve their project goals
  • asking a lot of questions and listening…very carefully
  • being positive and building rapport
  • providing creative solutions

Columbia's services include preconstruction services, construction services, design-build, lean practices, virtual construction, extranet, and of course- sustainable construction!  They are a leader in Green Building Construction Management. They are expert administrators of LEED projects. Their dedicated in-house Sustainability Director, along with a team of LEED Accredited Professionals, facilitate throughout LEED certification. This includes proactively finding cost-effective sustainable solutions to keep projects within budget. Columbia is a committed partner with clients in meeting the shared goal of environmental stewardship and social responsibility. 

Read more about Columbia on its website!

Photos taken from Columbia's website

Access to Quality Transit credit? Prove it!

By Adrian Charest, PE LEED AP BD+C

By Adrian Charest, PE, LEED AP BD+C

RSMeans from The Gordian Group

Access to Quality Transit credit?  Prove it!

The intent behind USGBC’s Access to Quality Transit is to encourage development in areas that are connected by public transportation systems to reduce car usage…but do people want to live in areas that are highly connected to public transportation?  In other words, could the effect that multiple modes of transportation have on where people live be displayed?  Using a geographic information system and publicly available data, this article explores these questions and gets to, “Yes”.
 
The public transportation network in Boston is expansive and goes far beyond the city limits.  The system is comprised of four modes of transportation; subways, commuter rails, buses, and ferries, each with entry points consisting of stations, stops, or docks.  The systems operate independently from one another, but are complementary in that together they provide greater access to larger areas of the City.
 
The area around the entry points needs to be determined in order to develop answers to the posed questions.  Working with each system separately, a 1-mile buffer zone was created and merged together around each of the entry points for each respective system creating images as displayed in Figure 1 below.
 
Figure 1
                    Subway                                                                                                                  Commuter Rail  
                                                                          
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Bus                                                                                                                             Ferry
 

 

 

 

 
Overlaying these buffers with the Year 2000 U.S. Census Data provides an understanding of each system’s influence on attracting people.  Using the buffers’ areas and the population captured by them enabled calculation of the population density around the entry points.  These results can be seen in Table 1 below which is ranked from greatest population density to least.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Table 1

 

Mode
Sq. Miles
Population
Pop / mi2
Subway
95
995,552
10,479
Commuter Rail
353
1,742,280
4,936
Bus
488
2,228,490
4,567
Ferry
75
261,307
3,484

 

 

 

However, what about the effects of multiple modes of transportation?  Overlaying the individual mode-buffers described above creates areas where there are 1-, 2-, 3-, and 4-modes of transportation available.  For instance, areas where there is only a subway or commuter rail station, a bus stop, or a ferry dock is ranked as 1-mode, not distinguishing between the mode types.  Areas where all four mode buffers overlapped are ranked as 4-mode, and any combination of 2 and 3 different mode types are ranked as 2- and 3-mode areas.  A graphic displaying the results of these combinations can be seen if Figure 2 below.

 

 
Figure 2

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Overlaying these new buffers with the census data shows the impact that multiple modes of transportation have on where people want to live.  These outputs can be seen in Table 2 below where the influence can be clearly seen.; as the number of available modes increase, so does the number of people living in those areas.

 

 

 

Table 2

 

Area
Sq. Miles
Population
Pop / mi2
1 Mode
507
1,493,635
2,946
2 Mode
175
1,172,938
6,703
3 Mode
45
572,605
12,725
4 Mode
5
64,969
12,994

 

 

 

So what does this all mean?  That the Access to Quality Transit credit is in the right direction, people want to live in areas that are highly connected to public transportation systems.

 

Sponsor Spotlight: SMMA

By Grey Lee

Over the past few months, SMMA | Symmes Maini and McKee Associates is honored to have participated in several green building events around the Commonwealth as well as helping to elevate and promote current best design and building practices.

A few of the more notable happenings include joining forces with the USGBC MA Chapter to become Education Partners responsible for helping create national education content. As part of this strategic partnership, SMMA was asked to provide an in-depth overture of their LEED v4 for Schools presentation at the NESEA Building Energy 15 conference. The content of this presentation will soon turn into a national webinar for the Education Partner Program and will be available on-demand through the USGBC Education website. 

Additionally, SMMA has recently submitted one of the firm’s more prominent K-12 public school projects, Winchester High School, into the LEED design review. The school showcases an array of sustainability features and has benefited from the guidance of both SMMA and the Town of Winchester’s Sustainability Sub-Committee.

 

 

Zero Net Energy Buildings Re-Cap

By Grey Lee

So what are they again?
Zero Net Energy Buildings (or ZNEBs) are most commonly defined as buildings that produce as much energy as they consume on an annual basis (this energy must be renewable).

However, there are actually a few different ways for buildings to achieve Zero-Net Energy status: the National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL) offers four definitions of ZNEBs in their report titled Getting to Net Zero. The first builds on the common definition (above), but is specifically tied to the project site: a building that produces at least as much renewable energy as it uses in a year, when accounted for at the site. The second version looks at the source of the energy, so a building that produces, and/or purchases as much renewable energy as it uses in a year. The third definition focuses on energy costs, which means the amount of money the utility pays the building owner for exporting renewable energy to the grid is at least equal to the amount the owner pays the utility for the energy services it uses over the year. The fourth way of defining ZNEBs concentrates on emissions; so the building must produce and/or purchase enough emissions-free renewable energy to offset emissions from all energy used in the building annually.

While these definitions may seem convoluted, they are in direct response to the complex environment of regulations, market forces, and financial incentives that affect different building owners and building types in a variety of ways. The variation between the definitions is an attempt to accommodate the diversity of our built environment so that all parties may participate in the ZNEB market.

These definitions also come into play when you consider recent planning initiatives for Eco-Districts and Zero Net Energy Neighborhoods. Again, there’s more than one way to get to Net-Zero and it won’t play out the same way in every building or every community. While ZNEBs are technically ‘just buildings’ they are actually part of a broader toolkit for transforming the built environment. It’s up to us to assess the potential ways that ZNEBs might be integrated into broader planning initiatives in order to achieve the maximum impact for our communities and the environment.

Investing in ZNEBs not only ensures positive environmental impact, but also offers potential for significant cost savings through more efficient and holistic design strategies, as well as insulation from swings in non-renewable energy costs.

How do we get more of them?

ZNEBs are becoming more ubiquitous, and Massachusetts has already made significant headway in supporting innovation in the market. The Department of Energy and Resources (DOER) announced 25 projects selected for the Pathways to Zero Net Energy Program, which is a $3.5 million initiative designed to facilitate the transition to the next generation of high-performance buildings. 

 
 
The next step is to pass Senate Bill 1578: An Act Promoting Zero Net Energy Buildings in the Commonwealth, which is based on recommendations from Governor Patrick’s Zero Net Energy Buildings Task Force, and was sponsored in the 2013-2014 session by Senator Jamie Eldridge. The bill was discharged to the committee on Senate Ethics and Rules in March of 2014, but no further action was taken. This year Senator Eldridge is sponsoring the bill again, under petition of Representatives Chris Walsh, Denise Provost, Marjorie Decker and David Rogers.
The bill seeks to change line “o” of the Massachusetts General Law, Chapter 143, Section 94, and add a line “s” after line “r” in the same section. You can read the specifics available through the advocacy resources section of the USGBC MA website, but there are several key changes to take note of.

In line “o” the bill seeks to establish a Zero Net Energy Building standard for new residential and commercial construction by 2020 and 2030 respectively. Also, the bill would implement regulations as part of the state building code, along with more stringent energy efficiency provisions requiring incremental improvements, starting with a 30% increase in efficiency over the International Energy Conservation Code.

In line “s” the bill calls for public input and consultation with the DOER to establish separate definitions for Zero Net Energy Buildings in both residential and commercial sectors by 2017 and 2018 respectively. The bill calls for the definitions to take into account zero net energy building definitions established in other places, as well as the current and anticipated climate of Massachusetts.

In support of the bill, and in anticipation of the public process that will unfold to produce appropriate definitions for ZNEBs in Massachusetts, the USGBC MA chapter will provide further blog posts on ZNEB practices, policies and projects in other states as well as right here in Massachusetts.

We also want to invite you to the next Green Breakfast, Thursday, March 19th at our Headquarters in downtown Boston. In addition to providing additional information on ZNEBs, we will also have presentations on Property Assessed Clean Energy financing (PACE) and Net-Metering.

 
 
 
 
 
 

 

 

 

EMD Serono Team Attains LEED Platinum for Project Bridgeway

By Grey Lee

Congratulations to the EMD Serono team which attained LEED Platinum for their “Project Bridgeway” at their campus in Billerica, Mass. Many excellent companies came together on the project team to make this a success. Special recognition goes to Chapter Sponsor, The Green Engineer, for their work to facilitate the LEED project.

USGBC Chairman Rick Fedrizzi had this to say: “On behalf of the US Green Building Council, I congratulate you on achieving LEED certification for Project Bridgeway. Your project has achieved LEED Platinum certification under the LEED for Commercial Interiors Rating System with a score of 81 points. This is a showcase example of sustainable design and demonstrates your leadership in transforming the building industry.”

Chapter members Chris Schaffner and Erik Ruoff (of The Green Engineer) and Chapter Board Chair Jim Newman (of Linnean Solutions) were on hand to support the LEED plaque ceremony.




Nice work, everyone!

Check out the LEED Scorecard of Project Bridgeway on USGBC's Website.

 

From the website of Ellenzweig, an architectural firm involved with Project Bridgeway:

The EMD Serono Research Institute in Billerica, Massachusetts, will serve as one of the four hubs for the company’s global research and development organization, fosters enhanced collaboration and synergies to discover and develop innovative therapies with a focus on the therapeutic areas of oncology, neurodegenerative diseases and infertility. The state of the art Billerica facility is now home to approximately 200 scientists with expertise in cancer biology; cancer immunotherapy; oncogene signaling; manufacturing cell lines; medicinal chemistry; molecular modeling; protein engineering; and therapeutic antibodies.

Image credit: Ellenzweig.com     Check out more images of Project Bridgeway on Ellenzweig's website.