Residential Green Building Committee Meeting

The Residential Green Building Committee is focused on improving the housing stock of the Commonwealth by championing green building practices in our communities. Join us on the second Monday of each month to be a part of the movement.

About Residential Green Building Committee
The committee’s objectives are to work to raise the awareness of the benefits of residential green building and remodeling and to increase the number of projects registering for LEED for Homes. The committee, through education and outreach, will focus on the following:

• Hold across MA, Lunch and LEED, education sessions and tours on topics such as Zero Net Energy, Deep Energy Retrofits and REGREEN
• Help the community understand and implement LEED for Homes and residential green building, remodeling and retrofits
• Ensure that our target markets are aware of available green building tools and resources
  Partner with other Green Building Programs
• Establish a collaborative relationship with a professional and/or community organizations
  Develop case studies and green residential building content for the USGBC MA website

Committee Meetings
Please contact Bill Womeldorf (williamwomeldorf@gmail.com) if you are interested in joining this committee or plan on attending an upcoming meeting.
http://usgbcma.org/residential-green-building

Introduction
Our RGBC meeting on August 13th will include a presentation from Joy Conway and Matt Coogan focusing on climate change and renewable energy impacts for several residential communities north of Boston. Joy will talk about sea rise and the significant costs (very significant real estate costs) every community will incur from today through 2100. Matt will talk about his experience’s working with communities developing infrastructure and residential areas that will be impacted by flooding in the Cape Ann region. Matt will describe how his communities have reduced fossil fuel requirements by using renewable energy sources. Bill W., Joy and Matt will look forward to an engaging discussion with all of you about community design in era of Climate Change in the 21st Century.

About the Presenters

Joy Conway
Joy is a Climate Reality Leader, trained by Al Gore and The Climate Reality Project to speak about the impacts of climate change and the need to shift from fossil fuels to clean renewable energy. The Project began in 2006 in response to the landmark film, An Inconvenient Truth. Today, the Project provides research and scientific data to a corps of 14,000 Leaders organized in a worldwide network. This year, training programs for new Leaders were held in Mexico City, Berlin, and Los Angeles.

Joy began work on renewable energy policy and programs in the 1990s in her position as Senior Vice President for Government and Industry Affairs for the Greater Boston Real Estate Board. She represented the real estate industry on many environmental projects, including the Green Building Advisory Committee of the Renewable Energy Trust, Massachusetts Technology Collaborative. Among its various policy initiatives, the Committee recommended proposals to incorporate renewable energy into affordable housing.

Matt Coogan
Matt helped make the Gloucester one of the leading municipalities in clean energy and energy efficiency. Under his leadership, the City completed over $3 million of energy projects that significantly reduce the municipality’s energy consumption and reduced CO2 emissions by 35 percent. This includes lighting upgrades in 17 municipal facilities, HVAC upgrades in several facilities, a city-wide LED streetlight conversion, and the creation of the City’s Electric Vehicle (EV) fleet by and publicly accessible electric vehicle charging stations. Gloucester received a Fast Fleet Award in 2017 from the Center for Sustainable Energy for having one of the top performing EV fleets in the nation. Matt also led efforts to help the community reduce energy consumption and costs and invest in local renewable energy, launching Gloucester Green to help residents and collaborating with the Cape Ann Chamber of Commerce to create Cape Ann Saves Energy (CASE) to help local businesses. In addition to his focus on reducing carbon emissions, Matt was part of the Gloucester Climate Vulnerability Study that helped the City identify areas vulnerable to storm surges and flooding, factoring in climate change in future time horizons. Matt received the 2016 Massachusetts Leading by Example Award from the Baker-Polito administration in recognition of his efforts to implement policies and programs that have led to significant and measurable environmental and energy benefits.