Christine DiLallo

Beautifully Productive: Designing Facades That Generate Energy

As building electrification accelerates, project teams are seeking innovative ways to increase on-site renewable energy while minimizing grid impacts and operating costs. Building-Integrated Photovoltaics (BIPV) via solar cladding offer a compelling solution by transforming façades into energy-generating assets. We will discuss design, construction, and economic considerations of utilizing solar cladding, including daylighting, durability, power generation, and the role of incentives.

Emily Brecher

If No One Can Run It, It Doesn’t Work: The Case for Simpler Building Systems

High-performance building systems are only as effective as their long-term operation, yet many energy-intensive systems—including life safety infrastructure like fire pump sets or fire alarm integration—are prone to inefficiency due to complexity, poor maintenance, or lack of operator understanding. This presentation explores how thoughtful system design can reduce energy waste by prioritizing simplicity, maintainability, and user training. Drawing on an example from a higher education campus, it will be shown how an overly complex design that was implemented for the sake of futureproofing the campus has led to the systems being poorly maintained and operated outside their intended parameters, increasing energy consumption and compromising performance. Strategies include designing intuitive control sequences, aligning system operation with facility staff capabilities, and incorporating commissioning and training as critical design deliverables. By reframing maintainability and usability as core components of sustainable design, this session will highlight how right-sized, well-understood systems can improve reliability, support occupant safety, and significantly reduce water usage over the system lifecycle.

Craig Stevenson

Innova (previously branded Ephoca): A Scalable HVAC Solution for New & Existing Buildings

Deep energy retrofits often fail when high-performance HVAC strategies collide with the realities of existing buildings: no room for outdoor condensers, limited shafts, occupied apartments, and tight construction schedules. This session examines the first affordable senior housing project to use Innova units in a passive house-certified building, and why these decentralized, all-in-one systems are ideally suited for both new and retrofit work. Innova combines heating, cooling, energy recovery ventilation, MERV 13 filtration, and bathroom exhaust in one compact unit, eliminating outdoor compressors, refrigerant line sets, and large centralized mechanical rooms. For retrofit teams, that can mean fewer envelope penetrations, easier phasing, simpler commissioning, corridor-side service access, and less disruption for residents. We will share lessons learned on electrification, space constraints, ventilation integration, and cold-climate performance—and show why compact, serviceable all-in-one MEP systems may become a practical pathway to decarbonizing existing multifamily housing at scale for owners today.

This talk will explore how AeroShield incorporates aerogels into both products for new construction and aftermarket retrofits that can be applied to the existing glazing system.

Alexander Falconer

Retrofit decarbonization for Healthcare and Lab buildings

Existing hospitals and laboratories are among the most energy-intensive building types, yet their continuous operation and complex mechanical systems make decarbonization retrofits uniquely challenging. This presentation explores a replicable electrification strategy for high-load healthcare and research facilities, addressing how to phase out fossil fuel heating while minimizing disruption to critical operations and capital expenditure.

The proposed approach centers on replacing conventional chillers with heat recovery chillers (HRCH), supplemented with high-efficiency exhaust heat recovery and air-source heat pumps to increase hot water output throughout the year. I will also discuss how exporting surplus chilled and hot water to neighboring buildings can maximize HRCH utilization year-round, transforming a single-building retrofit into a campus-scale decarbonization strategy.

The result: a practical, operationally efficient pathway to impactful carbon reduction in building types that have historically resisted electrification.

Barbra BatShalom

Simplifying Complexity: BBB, the Easy Button for Materials

Did you know that there are 4,096 permutations of possible sustainability requirements to set materials standards? Then factors can be weighed differently based on internal priorities, yielding infinite possibilities. Owners and firms who do have internal experts have spent thousands of hours doing this – or paying consultants mountains of money. No more. BBB automates all of this complexity.
mindful MATERIALS’ Common Material Framework (CMF) defines a common language for sustainability attributes and Basic/Better/Best is an extension of the CMF to make it actionable at scale. Originally created as a tool for owners to institutionalize product standards and make assessment easier, BBB is being developed by the BBB Collective, a collaboration between Brightworks, Perkins&Will, Green Commons and BuildingEase, giving the industry the first true “Easy Button” to simplify this complexity. BBB is in pilot with influential, global companies and will become available to the public after the pilot is concluded.

Patrick Pease

Game Engines for Building Performance Visualization

Using Game Engines for visualization of building performance analysis results opens up new ways to conveying data to our clients. The powerful visuals help to drive decision making, understand trade-offs of multi-variable problems, and answer questions in real time. This presentation will share a series of use cases of visualizing data within a Game Engine Environment and share the methodologies used to connect simulation software data into these environments.

Karina Gaft-Azcue

Historic Buildings, Modern Solutions: A Scalable Path to Decarbonization

Located in a former church in Northampton, Massachusetts, Bombyx Center for Arts & Equity demonstrates how historic buildings can advance decarbonization goals without compromising their cultural character or ongoing occupancy. Through a phased, cost conscious approach, CET partnered with Bombyx to identify and implement practical energy efficiency and weatherization measures, including HVAC improvements, duct sealing, and pipe insulation, alongside waste reduction initiatives.

The project is projected to reduce more than 800 lifetime tons of carbon emissions while lowering operating costs and improving long term building performance. This session will explore strategies for reducing energy use in older, hard to decarbonize buildings through scalable, replicable interventions that can be implemented over time. Attendees will gain insight into balancing preservation, affordability, occupant needs, and emissions reduction in existing community serving facilities across Massachusetts.

Peter LaBonte

Cleaner Buildings. Better Performance

Eighty percent of the buildings we’ll live in by 2050 are already standing. They’re leaking energy, losing value, and facing growing carbon penalties. CleanPath grew directly out of separate working groups we were part of that were convened by the DOE, RMI, IMEP, and NYSERDA — each focused on the same urgent question: how do we reduce the time and cost of deep energy retrofits at scale? We know what the research says. Now we’re building the platform to act on it.

The reality is most building owners never start. High upfront costs and complexity stop them before they begin. CleanPath lowers that barrier — compressing retrofits from years to months. Our AI-powered platform connects building owners with vetted contractors, materials suppliers, and financing sources on one seamless platform — tracking projects end-to-end to eliminate bottlenecks.
Some of the partners who belong in that ecosystem may be in this room today.

Peter Darrouzet

Double Your Money and Your Environmental Impact

Transforming an $18 million budget surplus into $36 million of sustainable, energy-efficient heating and air conditioning systems for Hopkinton Public Schools required a creative and strategic approach. CMTA utilized performance contracting to maximize value, enabling critical facility upgrades without additional strain on the budget. By carefully phasing the project, optimizing incentive payment schedules, and addressing product lead times, the project team ensured seamless implementation while improving accessibility across school buildings. This innovative approach demonstrates how architects and engineers can collaborate to deliver high-performance, cost-effective solutions that enhance the built environment for occupants. For clients with tight financial constraints, combining funding incentives with a performance contracting approach proves to be a powerful strategy—enabling project teams to not only make projects possible but also achieve impactful results.

Brian Gaulzetti

Drilling Down on Cost: How Dandelion Delivers Geothermal for New Construction at Scale

Geothermal heat pumps are one of the most efficient ways to heat and cool homes, delivering superior comfort and long-term energy savings. Historically, builders have largely avoided them due to complex installation, unfamiliar subcontractors, and most importantly – upfront cost.

Dandelion has installed over 3,000 residential ground source systems across the nation, using a scaled drilling process that significantly reduces build costs. Paired with incentive support and innovative financing options, what was once a niche luxury has now entered the mainstream. Dandelion has made geothermal a practical choice for builders and developers of single family, townhouse, multifamily, and affordable housing communities.

We’ll talk through how Dandelion removes the cost barrier: what’s driven down installation costs, how we achieve cost parity with air source alternatives, and what it will take to scale geothermal as a decarbonization solution in the Northeast.

Maria Giatrelis

Durra Panel: Decarbonizing Existing Buildings Through Low-Carbon Retrofit Systems

Durra Panel is a sustainable, high-performance wall and ceiling system designed to support the decarbonization of existing buildings through strategic retrofit, adaptive reuse, and modular construction applications. Made from reclaimed wheat straw, Durra Panel replaces conventional drywall and ceiling assemblies with a lower-carbon alternative that delivers impact resistance up to 10 times greater than standard drywall while improving acoustic performance, fire resistance, and thermal insulation.

As the building industry faces increasing pressure to reduce embodied carbon and improve building performance, Durra Panel offers a biogenic, carbon-sequestering solution that can be integrated using familiar construction methods. The system supports demountability, circular economy principles, and end-of-life material recovery so products do not enter landfill. By transforming agricultural waste into durable building materials, Durra Panel promotes healthier indoor environments, resilient construction strategies, and scalable pathways toward more sustainable, high-performing existing buildings.

Robert Cooper

Electricity savings in multifamily buildings through setpoint management

Putting limits thermostat setpoint is a known method of reducing energy consumption and carbon emissions. But measuring its effectiveness has traditionally involved explicit tests to vary setpoint limits over a long enough period of time. In multifamily residential, such experiments can disturb residents. In this work, we have analyzed the impact of setpoint management using the existing variation of setpoints and setpoint limits among residents of a building. We applied this approach on a number of buildings using the Embue system and are able to report the effectiveness of setpoint limit policies.

Samira Ahmadi

Scaling Cost-Effective Building Decarbonization

Enverdex is building an integrated platform to help building owners move from retrofit uncertainty to informed decarbonization action. Today, many building decarbonization studies are slow, costly, and highly manual, relying on disconnected tools, custom spreadsheets, calibrated models, policy interpretation, and expert judgment. This workflow can support high-budget projects, but it does not scale equitably across the thousands of buildings that need timely capital decisions.

Our platform uses machine learning to turn fragmented building data into retrofit decision intelligence. Enverdex centralizes building information, connects it to benchmarking and policy context, maps buildings to representative prototype models, and applies multi-objective optimization to evaluate retrofit strategies across cost, carbon, and constructability. The goal is not to replace engineering judgment. It is to provide owners and technical teams with a faster, clearer, more data-driven solution that builds momentum and offers a centralized location for capital decisions.

Kaitlin Hur

Grid-Interactive by Design: A New Approach in New Construction Efficiency Programs

As building electrification accelerates across Massachusetts, new pressures on the grid are emerging as a critical challenge to achieving decarbonization goals. To address this barrier, the Sponsors of Mass Save® are launching a new Grid-Interactive Efficient Buildings (GEB) offering, which will provide direct incentives for new construction and major renovation projects participating in demand-side programs and comprehensive technical assistance to support early-stage design integration. The offering is designed to help project teams identify cost-effective pathways to incorporate grid-interactive strategies, capture available revenue streams, and support long-term energy affordability. By incentivizing both implementation and readiness, the program takes a market transformation approach intended to normalize grid-interactive design practices within the building industry. This presentation will explore how energy efficiency programs can facilitate decarbonization both for individual building projects and at scale across the grid.

Mason Tuff

Below Grade Decarbonization with Foamed Glass Aggregate

For decades, we’ve buried rigid foam insulation underneath buildings without consideration of its long-term efficacy or environmental impact. At the same time, we’ve landfilled millions of tons of recycled glass instead of putting it to future use.

At Glavel, we transform recycled glass into a lightweight aggregate that replaces foam insulation for building slab insulation, reducing carbon and improving long-term insulation performance while embracing circularity.

Glavel is the only foamed glass aggregate manufacturer in North America to electrify its kilns, powering them with renewable energy at its manufacturing plant in Essex, Vermont.

Vincent Romanin

The 120V Breakthrough: Rapid Electrification for Aging Multifamily Housing

How can aging multifamily housing be rapidly electrified without costly electrical upgrades, resident displacement, or years-long retrofit timelines? This session explores a breakthrough deployment at Carroll Tower, a 194-unit Providence Housing Authority high-rise, where 277 Gradient All-Weather 120V window heat pumps were installed in just 12 days. The project replaced outdated electric baseboard heating with high-efficiency heat pumps that plug into standard 120V outlets, avoiding invasive retrofits while delivering modern heating and cooling to residents for the first time in the building’s 50+ year history. Preliminary estimates project annual savings of 450,000 kWh, approximately $94,500 in energy costs, and 219 tons of avoided CO2 emissions. Presenters will share lessons learned from coordinating large-scale installation logistics, minimizing resident disruption, and aligning public-private partnerships across housing authorities, utilities, and state agencies. Gradient will gain practical insights into scalable, cost-effective electrification strategies for affordable and multifamily housing portfolios.

Kristin Brubaker

Solving Embodied Carbon Compliance: Turning Hurdles into a Competitive Advantage

The built environment faces increasingly complex mandates for embodied carbon reduction and ESG reporting, and many project teams struggle to manage rigorous new requirements using stale data and clunky spreadsheets. Shedding the historically time-consuming and expensive administrative hurdles is a critical step toward turning sustainability into a competitive advantage.

This talk explores how software is transforming green building compliance. Attendees will leave with clear paths to reduce tedious work and bridge the gap across design, construction, and certification, including direct EC3 (Embodied Carbon in Construction Calculator) integrations for real-time carbon tracking. They will learn about data-driven processes that allow teams to seamlessly calculate the embodied carbon of core materials, identify lower carbon alternatives, optimize smarter procurement, and track results of energy and waste interventions.

By removing administrative hurdles of sustainability reporting, project teams can spend 60% less time hunting down miscellaneous product data and more time building and innovating.

Rob Durning

Keep the Building Open: Low-Temperature Geothermal Retrofit Through Strategic Reuse

For many existing buildings, the hardest part of decarbonization is not choosing the technology. It is making the retrofit practical while the building stays in use. At Wellesley Village Church, GreenerU helped a historic congregation replace end-of-life oil-fired heating and limited cooling with a ground-source heat pump system without treating the project as a wholesale tear-out. The presentation will unpack the strategy: compare geothermal against gas/hybrid and air-source alternatives, de-rate and reuse viable terminal equipment for lower-temperature hot water, preserve useful ductwork and hydronic distribution, phase construction around active congregational use, and use incentives to make first cost competitive. The result is a replicable retrofit model that reduces carbon, limits demolition waste, protects operations, adds comfort and cooling, and makes full electrification financially practical for mission-driven owners. Rather than framing historic buildings as exceptions to decarbonization, this case study shows how careful engineering, controls integration, and occupied-building construction management can turn legacy infrastructure into an asset.

Bethany Moody

Office to Resi: No Building Left Behind

Office to Resi: No Building Left Behind explores the intersection of historic preservation, adaptive reuse, and modern climate goals through the office-to-residential conversion of 31 Milk Street in downtown Boston. As cities confront aging office vacancies, housing demand, and increasing pressure for deep energy retrofits, Boston’s expedited office-to-residential program presents both significant opportunity and complex challenges for preservationists.

Project teams pursuing historic tax credits face greater constraints when planning envelope upgrades. Preservation approaches must also consider a building’s inherently sustainable qualities within the overall treatment and rehabilitation of the historic enclosure. This session will explore strategies for balancing occupant comfort, airtightness, and historic character. Discussion includes THERM analysis of the masonry wall assembly to evaluate thermal performance while protecting historic materials. While there is no one-size-fits-all solution, the 31 Milk Street conversion demonstrates effective tools and processes for defining the upgrade approach and supporting the ongoing resilience of existing buildings.

Erich Ryan

From Pilots to Programs: The Infrastructure Behind Scaling Networked Geothermal in MA

Massachusetts has emerged as a leading market for networked geothermal, with active pilot projects, supportive legislation, and significant utility and state agency investment. As federal tax incentives, transferability provisions, and emerging utility interest converge, the conditions for broader deployment are increasingly in place. By distributing infrastructure cost across multiple buildings, these systems offer a pathway to high-efficiency, fully electrified heating and cooling for property types and neighborhoods where individual-building geothermal would be economically out of reach. The bottleneck moving forward is not whether the first networks get built, but whether the next dozen can be developed efficiently enough to contribute meaningfully to the state’s climate timeline. Each project today involves bespoke feasibility analysis, economic modeling, and data architecture. This talk introduces the analytical infrastructure Jouler is developing to address that gap, with illustrative outputs from a Massachusetts-based digital twin.

Todd Bard & Michael Reive

Sunamp Thermino Thermal Batteries: A New Concept for Domestic Hot Water (DHW) in Net-Zero New Construction

New construction presents the ideal opportunity to eliminate fossil fuels from domestic hot water systems entirely — yet most designers default to conventional electric resistance or gas tanks due to cost, space, and familiarity. Sunamp’s Thermino thermal battery offers a drop-in, future-ready alternative charged via heat pump or resistive electric elements, enabling flexible system design without sacrificing performance. At 70% smaller than equivalent water cylinders, the Thermino integrates easily into mechanical rooms and multi-unit closets. Sunamp’s patented Plentigrade® phase change material delivers four times the energy density of water, supporting instantaneous hot water delivery, time-of-use load shifting, and demand response participation from day one. A Massachusetts school case study demonstrated 66% peak demand reduction and 38% energy savings versus a standard electric tank. As the Commonwealth advances toward its 2050 net-zero mandate, specifying thermal battery technology from the outset is the smartest path to buildings that are carbon-free, grid-smart, and future-proof.

Drew Belcourt

Mitsubishi Ecodan Pro CAHV

Part of the Mitsubishi Electric ecodanPro family of air-source heat pump solutions, the CAHV is a high performance, environmentally-friendly heat pump water heater. The CAHV was engineered to be an energy efficient, low-carbon alternative to fossil fuel-burning systems. This innovative water heater uses R-454C refrigerant, which has a GWP of 148. A lower GWP means a significantly reduced environmental impact compared to other watering heating solutions, and R-454C is even more eco-friendly than other low GWP refrigerant options.

Jared Lebos

Avoiding the Main Panel Upgrade: A Scalable Path to Residential Electrification

As residential electrification accelerates, outdated electrical infrastructure has emerged as a major bottleneck to deploying EV chargers, heat pumps, batteries, and other high-load technologies in existing homes and multifamily buildings. Main panel and service upgrades can add thousands of dollars to projects, slowing adoption and limiting decarbonization efforts across the existing building stock.

This presentation explores how retrofit-compatible smart circuit breakers can provide a lower-cost alternative to traditional panel upgrades while enabling dynamic load management and circuit-level visibility within existing electrical panels. By modernizing installed infrastructure rather than replacing it, this approach can help contractors complete more electrification projects while improving affordability for building owners and residents.

The session will share lessons from contractor engagement, utility partnerships and prototype deployments across single family and multifamily buildings in Massachusetts, highlighting practical strategies for scaling electrification across older residential buildings.

Hector Ortega

Reducing Thermal Bridging at Projected Window Installations Using a Thermally Broken Cladding Attachment System

Moving windows outward to align with the insulation layer can reduce thermal bridging, but it also introduces challenges related to structural support, constructability, and interface detailing. This presentation shares a mockup-based study based on the Akira connection using a thermally broken cladding attachment (3.25 ISO Clip) to support the dead load of a projected window while maintaining thermal continuity at the backup wall. The approach builds on thermal modelling and structural validation, with a focus on how the system can be implemented in actual construction. The detail is designed to accommodate movement and manage weather barriers by allowing any water that may enter the assembly to be drained through defined paths. Observations from the mockup highlight key lessons related to installation, sequencing, and coordination between trades. This case study presents a practical, buildable approach to improving envelope performance at window transitions

Spencer Jarrett

Design early, decide better: Sustainability from day one

Many sustainability decisions happen too late, after a project’s massing, orientation, program, and basic form are already fixed. Sustainable Planner brings climate, urban context, and carbon intelligence into the earliest stages of design, when teams still have the greatest ability to change outcomes. The tool helps architects, urban designers, developers, and consultants generate and compare concept options using urban rules, building typologies, microclimate indicators, and high-level CO₂ estimations without requiring advanced simulation expertise or a fully developed BIM model. Users can evaluate sun exposure, shadows, planned wind insights, thermal comfort indicators, massing constraints, and early embodied carbon signals before moving selected options into deeper analysis workflows such as Carbon Designer 3D or ENVI-met. This lightning talk will demonstrate how accessible early-stage technology can help teams make faster, better-informed decisions that support lower-carbon, healthier, more resilient buildings and districts.

James Hannah

Decarbonizing Existing Multifamily Buildings through Control Optimization

As we move to decarbonize existing buildings, focus shouldn’t just be on the efficiency of the equipment, but on how efficiently it’s controlled.

Large multifamily buildings and hotels have central plants that over-produce heating and cooling. By better inferring the true demand for heating and cooling in a building, real time HVAC control optimization dynamically adjusts equipment setpoints to more tightly follow the demand curve, resulting in a 20-30% reduction in energy usage.

With a good understanding of building dynamics and control of some of the largest energy-using equipment, control systems also have the opportunity to add grid interactivity, utilizing demand response and peak shaving to further reduce demand during times when electricity is the dirtiest.

Mark Vasu

Enabling Smarter Retrofit Planning and Implementation Across Building Portfolios Leveraging AI

Building envelopes are essential to the energy efficiency of buildings, affecting the efficiency of other building systems and presenting over 30% in energy savings. However, a lack of actionable data on the envelope delays retrofits, impeding the process of creating a greener built environment.

Paired with drone-data capture, AI presents a scalable and cost-effective solution. AI can efficiently process hundreds of thousands of data points, pinpointing envelope risks and measuring energy loss. This enables targeted retrofit recommendations that maximize energy savings and ROI.
This methodology is beneficial for complex retrofit scenarios, such as assessing buildings in sensitive areas. Further, this solution can be leveraged by the public sector, delivering insights to design tailored incentive programs to increase retrofit implementation.

A case study will be used of a Massachusetts airport that leveraged AI to inform envelope retrofits as part of a portfolio wide prioritization effort to achieve organizational decarbonization goals.

John Heaster

Turning Construction Surplus into a Circular Supply Stream

Remat is a platform transforming construction surplus into a structured, reusable supply stream for the built environment. Today, large volumes of high-value materials from construction sites, renovations, and fit-outs are discarded due to fragmented coordination, limited visibility, storage constraints, and lack of documentation. This contributes significantly to embodied carbon emissions and unnecessary landfill waste.

Remat connects contractors, developers, owners, and reuse partners through a centralized marketplace designed specifically for construction materials. The platform enables organizations to identify, document, and redistribute surplus materials while tracking environmental impact through ESG and carbon-diversion reporting. By improving transparency and accessibility, Remat helps reduce waste, extend material life cycles, and lower the environmental footprint of construction projects.

Our approach supports a more circular and equitable built environment by making reuse more practical, measurable, and scalable. Through pilot partnerships with industry stakeholders, Remat aims to accelerate material circularity and decarbonization across existing and future building projects.

Luke Winston

Reservoir: Reinventing the Most Overlooked Appliance in the Built Environment

Buildings account for 40% of US carbon emissions, and domestic water heating represents one of the largest and most overlooked contributors. The water heater hasn’t meaningfully changed in decades – it operates on a fixed, passive schedule, fails without warning, and in most homes consumes more energy than an electric car. There are 120 million of them in the US alone.

Reservoir is an intelligent heat pump water heater designed to change that. Using machine learning and integrated hydronic controls, Reservoir learns household usage patterns and dynamically manages heating across multiple elements – including an ultra-efficient heat pump – to minimize energy consumption without sacrificing comfort. The system can act as a dispatchable thermal battery, shifting load to lower-cost and lower-carbon energy periods and integrating with on-site solar generation.

The result is a water heating platform that delivers meaningful carbon and energy reductions at the residential scale – and does so in a way that homeowners and the grid both benefit from.

Madeleine Barr

The Solar Puzzle Piece: Right Sizing a Solution to Fit a Building’s Needs

Solar PV comes in many shapes and sizes, with options like parking canopies, community shared solar, and net metering, there are many ways to customize a system to fit a building’s constraints. In this case study, we’ll discuss an affordable housing property owned by Allston Brighton Community Development Corporation which faced a variety of challenges in the solar design process that could have derailed the project. An older roof, required transformer upgrades, and low onsite usage all had the opportunity to cancel or downsize the project. Together, ABCDC and Resonant Energy investigated a variety of creative solutions which allowed the team to install a large system without triggering the transformer upgrade and ultimately saving the owner nearly $400,000 in electricity costs. In this session we’ll walk you through the problem solving process that made this project successful and share key learnings relevant to other retrofit projects.

Michael Timberlake

Feasible or Infeasible…That is the Question

This 5 minute session will present an expanded decarbonization study framework based on our own experience. It falls under the strategies for ZOT planning although it also applies to deep dive planning. Benefits of the enhanced process include deeper owner engagement, recommendations that are more likely to be constructible, more reliable cost projections, and cost savings during next-stage design.

The two major components to be focused on are:
1. Early stage feasibility assessments of electrical capacity, structural capacity, and wall assemblies, and
2. Owner input on options and implications early in the design process.

Robert Blount

Buildings of the Past Retrofitted for the Future

ROCKWOOL Smartrock® is a stone wool insulation board designed for use as continuous insulation on the interior side of concrete and masonry exterior wall assemblies.

This innovative product utilizes INTELLO® PLUS by Pro Clima as an integrated smart vapor retarder, allowing Smartrock to adapt to changing humidity conditions, while also creating an airtight layer when properly sealed. Smartrock is noncombustible, and achieves a Class A fire rating for flame spread and smoke development ( in accordance with ASTM E84, and is classified as a noncombustible material in accordance with IBC Section 703.3.1)
Smartrock provides stable, long-term thermal performance, even with changes in temperature. The integrated smart vapor retarder controls vapor movement through the assembly, allowing the substrate to dry in both directions
The integrated membrane provides an airtight layer when installed with proper sealing of insulation joists, fasteners, and other penetrations.

Smartrock offer fast and straightforward installation without off gassing, use of foam plastics or need to clear project sites during installation.

Matthew Warshay

Improving building efficiency with Smart Controls

The largest source of emissions and wasted operating spend in American real estate is the building stock already standing. In New York City alone, roughly 70% of greenhouse gas emissions come from fossil fuels used to heat, cool, and power buildings — yet most still run on decades-old mechanical systems, with operators having almost no real-time visibility into how those systems actually perform. The result: enormous energy waste, aging infrastructure that fails without warning, and growing exposure to climate laws.

Smart controls offer a critical solution — enabling operators to cut emissions and costs quickly, without major infrastructure upgrades. Runwise is a smart control platform operating across 10,000+ buildings nationwide, saving customers over $100M to date. Working with operators including Related, LeFrak, Rudin, and the NYC MTA, as well as affordable and rent-stabilized housing providers across the country, Runwise will show how smart controls address the building sector’s biggest sources of waste across heating, cooling, and water.

Tim Fu

Sensible: the world’s first compact, low-GWP window heat pump

Sensible (formerly Bootbox) is a high-efficiency window heat pump designed for multifamily buildings, delivering a sleek, lightweight solution to one of the built environment’s most persistent challenges: decarbonizing existing housing stock without costly retrofits or disruptive construction.

Aging multifamily buildings rely on fossil-fuel heating systems that drive high energy costs, poor indoor air quality, and outsized carbon emissions, burdens that fall disproportionately on low- and moderate-income residents. Sensible addresses this directly. The unit weighs just 50 lbs, installs in under 5 minutes, and runs on electricity using R290, a refrigerant with a global warming potential of just 3. It provides heating, cooling, dehumidification, air filtration, IAQ monitoring, and outside air intake in a single plug-in appliance, with no electrical upgrades or construction required.

By pairing installation simplicity with high performance, Sensible enables housing operators to cut carbon emissions, lower tenant utility bills, and improve indoor environmental quality, advancing financial, social, and ecological health all at once.

Elizabeth Murphy & Brian Benson

The Compound Effect of Precision Through Partnership – How Small Decisions and Strong Design-Build Teams Reduce Impact at Scale in a Complex Research & Lab Project

This lightning talk explores how an integrated design build team delivered a 320,000 SF life science and research facility that pushes the boundaries of performance, constructability, and sustainability. The project demonstrates how early collaboration, client standards, and whole-team commitment drives achievement. Prefabrication was a major component – unitized triple pane curtainwall system (some units spanning 20’x6.5’) shipped from Germany, offsite built AHUs, exhaust stacks, conduit assemblies, and geothermal components – which required more than 70 coordinated crane picks. A rigorous QA processes reduced rework, improved safety, and minimized waste. A no cardboard mandate driven by fire prevention policy eliminated a major waste stream. The building pairs high performance envelope (0.153 cfm/sf at 75 Pa—50% below code) with a geothermal system of 221 wells and 51 miles of piping. Targeting LEED Gold and WELL Bronze, and low embodied carbon targets, the project shows how every small decision contributes to long term environmental and operational excellence.

Brendan Shea

New Roof Uses, Need New (and Old) Redundancies

Modern roofs are no longer simple weather barriers with a few scattered HVAC units. They host dense solar arrays, stormwater detention systems, heat pump condensers, green roofs, high SRI coatings, and outdoor amenity spaces. Each added system brings more penetrations, mechanical attachments, foot traffic, and maintenance personnel; all multiplying the opportunities for waterproofing failure, a painful combo of waste, headache and cost.
Meeting this challenge demands innovation and some old school fundamentals. New technologies like electronic leak detection, infrared drone scanning, and fluid-applied flashing help expand our diagnostic and protective capabilities. But they work best alongside proven fundamentals: multi-ply waterproofing assemblies, rigorous specification language, building envelope experts, and early, sustained coordination among trades.
As roof uses continue to evolve, so must our strategies for preserving watertightness through construction and long-term building life. Layered redundancies, informed by both new technology and best practices, keep complex roofs performing as intended.

Kelly Westby

Show Me The Data

The building industry has spent the last decade setting ambitious decarbonization goals, yet building owners, designers, utilities, and policymakers still have limited access to post-retrofit performance data that demonstrates which strategies actually deliver results. This lack of shared evidence creates uncertainty around investment decisions, program design, and the scaling of building decarbonization.

Show Me the Data (SMTD) is a new collaborative framework designed to address this challenge by bringing together organizations across the industry to share, align, and analyze real-world post-retrofit performance data from existing multifamily buildings. Through standardized data collection, peer-to-peer learning, and transparent discussion, participants compare ventilation, electrification, and other retrofit strategies using actual energy, cost, airflow, demand, and operational performance data.

This presentation will share findings from SMTD’s pilot workshops, including lessons on ventilation upgrades and partial electrcifation, but more importantly it will also demonstrate how structured data sharing can accelerate more cost-effective carbon reduction strategies, improve building health and comfort outcomes, inform policy and utility programs, and create a scalable model for continuous industry learning rooted in measured performance rather than assumptions.

Michael Orbank

Rethinking C&D Waste Practices

Historically, C&D waste was nothing more than a burden to be shipped off site, paid for, and forgotten. But by taking a holistic look at the processes that generate C&D waste, along with emerging technologies and solutions to reducing this waste, you find that you can not only save money, but reduce landfill burden, empower your community, and reduce scope 3 emissions through collaboration, innovation, and simply asking “why?”.

Vipul Singh

From Incentives to Implementation: Leveraging Third-Party Funding to Deliver Low-Carbon Buildings

As building performance standards tighten and decarbonization mandates accelerate, owners and project teams must deliver low carbon buildings while managing cost, schedule, and aging infrastructure. This talk explores how ambitious sustainability requirements can become practical, actionable projects.

The session highlights how utility and other third-party funding can influence early-stage decision-making for both new construction and retrofits. By integrating energy modeling, lifecycle cost analysis, and data-driven system comparisons into design workflows, teams can evaluate electrification pathways, prioritize investments, and balance performance targets with financial feasibility.

The focus is on treating utility incentive programs as a design assistance tool rather than end-stage rebates. When introduced early, programs such as Mass Save can influence design decisions by offsetting study costs, reducing upfront capital barriers, and enabling high-performance solutions that might otherwise be ruled out.

Through offerings such as Comprehensive Building Assessments, retrofit projects can compare decarbonization strategies and quantify tradeoffs before design decisions are made.

Case studies including schools, institutions, and commercial properties demonstrate how this approach supports diverse project goals.

Jason Todd

High-Performance, Low-Carbon Wood Fiber Insulation

Evolving energy codes, building standards, and green building reporting requirements connected to permitting and incentive programs are driving demand for low embodied carbon, high-performance construction materials. This lightning talk explores how wood fiber insulation meets these stringent requirements, offering naturally carbon-storing and energy-efficient performance while delivering exceptional thermal, acoustic, and vapor-managing properties. Replacing commonly used insulation materials with wood fiber insulation can significantly reduce global warming potential while supporting healthier indoor environments, sustainable forestry, and regional manufacturing. Gain insight into leveraging material choices and EPDs to achieve measurable embodied carbon reductions and advance climate-conscious building practices.

Annabella Zamora

Optimizing HVAC with AI

Trane AI Control transforms how intelligent building systems can help create a more sustainable, comfortable, and optimized built environment. Traditional HVAC operations often rely on fixed schedules, reactive maintenance, and limited visibility into changing occupancy, weather, and indoor environmental conditions. These challenges can lead to excess energy and water use, higher operating costs, inconsistent comfort, and unnecessary carbon emissions.

This presentation highlights how AI-driven control strategies can continuously optimize HVAC performance in real time. By analyzing building data, forecasting demand, and adapting system operation to actual conditions Trane AI overrides control’s preprogrammed sequences, setpoints, and schedules. Using Trane AI Control, facilities can improve energy efficiency, reduce waste, support grid responsiveness, and enhance occupant wellness through better indoor air quality and thermal comfort. The approach also advances financial equity by lowering lifecycle costs and making high-performance operations more accessible. By connecting decarbonization, resource stewardship, and healthier spaces, AI-enabled HVAC optimization supports net positive outcomes for both people and the planet.

Monique Owens & Tia Metzger

Zero Waste = Real Savings: The Business Case for TRUE Certification

Zero waste is often viewed as an environmental aspiration, but it is increasingly proving to be a smart financial and operational strategy. This presentation will explore how TRUE Certification enables organizations to reduce waste related costs, improve operational efficiency, and create long-term value through better materials management. Attendees will gain insight into the tangible economic benefits of waste diversion, including reduced hauling expenses, optimized purchasing practices, and increased engagement from tenants and building occupants. As TRUE evolves, the upcoming TRUE v2 rating system will further strengthen impact by emphasizing decarbonization, circular materials management, and business transformation, while enhancing measurement, accessibility, and real-world applicability. The session will highlight real-world examples and outline practical, scalable approaches for launching or advancing zero waste programs demonstrating how organizations can align waste reduction with broader ESG and decarbonization goals while driving measurable business value.

Phil Gaspar

How electrifying the Boston and Cambridge district energy system will rapidly decarbonize urban buildings and campuses

This session will provide a comprehensive overview of Vicinity’s groundbreaking efforts to transform our Cambridge, MA facility by electrifying our operations to deliver carbon-free eSteam™ to prominent institutions such as Emerson College. We will share insights into the detailed process and steps involved in implementing Vicinity’s electrification strategy, highlighting the integration of innovative technologies such as an industrial-scale 42MW electric boiler, and the planned installation of an industrial-scale heat pump complex and thermal storage. A significant problem solved by this project is that by leveraging existing district energy infrastructure to electrify operations and utilizing a lower-cost, transmission-level electrical supply, Vicinity can mitigate the financial barriers to electrification for our customers.

Roselin Osser

Rockefeller Center UTEN (Utility Thermal Energy Network) Pilot

The Rockefeller Center UTEN Pilot, planned in the heart of Midtown Manhattan, will be a groundbreaking thermal energy network (TEN) project capturing waste heat from the central chilled water plant at 30 Rockefeller Plaza to distribute it via an ultra-low temperature hot water network to three existing large commercial office buildings. This project will displace over 57,000 MMBtu of annual steam consumption. Our presentation will discuss key thermal sizing elements and overcoming major infrastructure hurdles.