Show Me the Money! Tax Benefits Abound for Green Developers

By Derek Newberry, Advocacy Fellow

If you couldn't make it to yesterday morning's lively and important advocacy breakfast about Green Tax Benefits, here's a brief summary of what you missed, and some of the great resources that were shared.

There was a big turnout of both regulars and newcomers, who came for the donuts—and stayed for the invaluable tips about how to save big on their energy efficiency projects. Jerome Garciano, an attorney at Robinson & Cole and one of Chapter's Advocacy Committee members, spoke about tax credits, deductions, and other financial incentives at the federal and state level. Jerome shared an very worthwhile resource for green builders with his Green Tax Incentive Compendium, an easy-to-access tax guide with federal and state-specific information about tax incentives for renewable energy and energy efficiency.

Below is the one of the slides that prompted the most questions and discussion from the audience. The chart simply illustrates the process and players in an energy investment tax credit. There are a lot of other valuable slides in Jerome's PowerPoint presentation, which you can access here


 

IRS Code 179D—Big Tax Breaks, But Surprisingly Unknown

We also heard from Jack Keleher, the Deputy General Counsel at Massachusetts' Division of Capital Asset Management (DCAMM). He explained an incentive program that surprisingly few architects, engineers, and developers in the green building industry are aware of—even though 179D could potentially bring huge tax breaks to their businesses. Check out this article from Forbes.com that clearly explains what IRS Code 179D means for project developers, or email Jack Keleher if you have questions about how you can get DCAMM to sign off on your energy-efficient projects (the IRS requires that your projects are approved by a third party).

Thank you to our engaged audience and our wonderful presenters for sharing their expertise. We're looking forward to hosting more Advocacy breakfasts like this in the near future; please email advocacy@usgbcma.org if there's a green building advocacy issue you'd like to hear about at an upcoming breakfast meeting, or if you would like to be a presenter. See you next time!

 

Here are some photos of Massachusetts' green building advocates at yesterday's breakfast:


 




Sustain Yourself: A Night of Sustainable, Upscale Dining & Networking

By Derek Newberry, Advocacy Fellow

What could be better than talking about green buildings? Talking about green buildings while eating a delicious (and sustainably-sourced) dinner!

Join us in Cambridge on Thursday, November 12 for our 6th Annual Sustainable Dinner. Hosted by the highly-rated Commonwealth Restaurant, this trendy market serves upscale, locally-sourced American fare. Participants will be treated to a sampling of these dishes from the fantastic menu created by Chef Nookie, as we discuss healthy living in buildings–the theme of this year's event.


Eating sustainably grown food is an important part of leading a green, healthy lifestyle. But our indoor environment also has a major effect on our wellbeing. Making our indoor environment greener and healthier is especially important at this time of year, as we spending increasingly more time inside as the days get colder. Jane Slade of RAB Lighting will speak to our group about one aspect of a healthier indoor environment–how proper lighting can affect your circadian rhythm. That means simply improving your lighting might be the key to feeling rested as you head to work on these dark winter mornings!

Founded nearly 70 years ago, our event sponsor RAB Lighting designs energy-efficient LED lighting and controls. Their high-quality, affordable designs ease the process from distribution to installation to in-home use, which helps more people save energy–and money. Thank you to RAB Lighting for your commitment to the green building movement, and for sponsoring our event.

Please register here for this fun night of great food and green conversations. We're excited to see you there!

  • What: USGBC MA Chapter's 6th Annual Sustainable Dinner
  • When: Thursday, November 12, 6:00-8:00PM
  • Where: Commonwealth Restaurant | 11 Broad Canal Way | Cambridge, MA 02142

Here is the group at last year's Sustainable Dinner:

 


Arlington County, VA: A Leader for Energy Efficiency Incentives

By Derek Newberry, Advocacy Fellow


An article from the USGBC National site recently highlighted Arlington County, VA, for their commitment to improving their constructed environment. Arlington got a head start by updating their Green Building Incentive Program and adopting LEEDv4 a year before the “sunset date” for LEED 2009 project registration.

Starting on October 1, developers had to begin seeking certification under “v4,” the latest version of the LEED green building rating system. Arlington implemented these higher environmental standards because they align with the County's Community Energy Plan. Their framework has set a specific milestone for the energy performance of new buildings, which notably ensures that energy efficiency is an ongoing priority.

A business-friendly option

Arlington County moved to LEEDv4's baseline with the aim to incentivize higher levels of energy efficiency. Officials pointed to the importance of incentives in overcoming barriers, such as split incentives between developers and future tenants or owners.

“Arlington's voluntary green building incentive program is a business-friendly option designed to speed the transformation to green and energy efficient construction,” said Arlington’s Green Building Program Manager, Joan Kelsch. “Arlington’s move to LEED v4, with a specific focus on energy efficient design and performance, is the newest tool available to guide that transformation.”

These laudable green building benchmarks established by Arlington County raise the bar for energy efficiency expectations across the nation. Towns & cities in Massachusetts should follow Arlington's lead, and lead the charge of raising the green building standard for the US and the world.


Vote for your favorite MIT Green Buildings Solution!

By Celis Brisbin, Programs Manager

Green Building Community, 

 

I hope that you all are enjoying a well deserved Labor Day weekend! If you have not heard, the MIT Climate Colab is in its final week of public voting and the buildings category has a few ideas which could be a catalyst to the green building mission. One of the final ideas, Open Control Building, has been a project that I have been working on with Alec Danaher and Scott Balboni, both members of the USGBC MA! The idea is to use a third party to temporarily turn off your smart electric device for a period of time, while power plants rev up. This is called demand response and there is a commercial market for this and rate payer can make money this way. The idea allows residential home energy management systems like the Nest, and EV chargers to tie into the program and increase impact/revenue. 
There is a more robust explanation below via link. Your support would really help. Please forward to your network if you would like to share the idea and support. Please vote!

http://climatecolab.org/web/guest/plans/-/plans/contestId/1301412/planId…

Thanks and have a nice weekend,
Celis

 

Description

Summary

 

Buildings consume more than 39% of all energy consumed in the U.S. each year. More stringent building energy codes and advances in lighting and HVAC technologies have reduced the energy use intensity of buildings. A study by the EIA indicated that new homes built after the year 2000 are on average 30% larger than homes built before the year 2000, but use only about 2% more energy (EIA, 2013). Energy Used in Buildings

As construction standards improve and more efficient equipment is installed in homes, additional savings must come from improving the way we control the energy-consuming equipment in the home. Home Energy Management Systems (HEMS) can optimize the energy use within a home by coordinating the timing of lighting and HVAC systems, as well as an increasing number of “smart” devices. Additionally, HEMS systems can benefit both homeowners and grid operators by increasing the ease and compliance with demand response events.

One of the primary challenges of implementing a HEMS system is the upfront cost to purchase and install the equipment. Additionally, the large variety of technologies on the market can create choice paralysis that makes it difficult for consumers to select and implement a system for fear that they are betting on a system that will not integrate with future technologies.

We propose promoting the widespread implementation of Home Energy Management Systems by providing simple systems at no cost to homeowners in exchange for their participation in automated demand response events. We will install a smart thermostat and a few simple controls in homes and provide homeowners with a secure platform to integrate our controls with other smart devices they may have in their home. Homeowners will then have the nucleus of a HEMS system – provided free of charge – to which they can then add additional components to outfit their smart home. 

 

 

 

Road To Greenbuild!

By Celis Brisbin, Programs Manager

 

The Greenbuild International Conference and Expo is coming to Washington, DC, this November. In recognition of Washington's status as a world leader in green building and to showcase the city as a premiere location for Greenbuild, we present a multimedia tour through some of DC's most iconic locations and LEED certified spaces.

Starting in Ward 8, we spotlight the new William O. Lockridge/Bellevue Neighborhood Library, which was certified LEED Gold for New Construction in January 2013. After that we move north to showcase an educational non-profit, a 363,000 square foot LEED Platinum government agency headquarters, and a building in the heart of Chinatown whose tenants serve the community and beyond. The tour continues with one of the greenest schools in the nation, the first LEED certified embassy, an iconic capital hill landmark and more.

We hope you enjoy this journey through our nation's capital and hope to see you at Greenbuild 2015.

Learn more about Greenbuild

Everyone is thinking Showcase

By Celis Brisbin, Programs Manager


We know that you have been working on green buildings all year. We realize that your team is setting precedents for the most advanced and cost-effective designs. We acknowledge that you deserve the recognition of your industry and peers. 

We know that you belong at Showcase!

Come join your community of practioneers and share your project while learning about others. This year the Showcase will be at the Harvard Art Museums, recently certified LEED Gold. 

 


Join us at the 2015 Green Building Showcase, the Chapter’s premier fall event to showcase and celebrate exceptional green buildings conceived, designed, built & operated by our community of practitioners over the past year.  Over 75 projects will be on display. More than 250 leaders in our industry will be in attendance for this open bar reception and entertaining collection of green buildings (submit projects here).

 

What is this event?

The Green Building Showcase is a gathering for exceptional green buildings completed in the New England region between October, 2013 and October, 2015. Project teams are given the opportunity to display information about their buildings, highlighting the project team members and their successes.  Attendees are invited to critically browse the projects and review the displays while networking over cocktails and appetizers.

The hall will be full of display boards of awesome green buildings!

This year, the Showcase will also host our annual Green Building Awards. In the past, these were announced during our Earth Day event. This year we have matched the Green Building Awards with the Green Building Showcase happening in the fall season.

You do not have to enter the awards contest to participate in the Showcase – we encourage project teams to show off their building(s) in the Showcase, and optionally enter the awards competition. 

How to get involved:


If You Missed Today's Green Breakfast: Architecture + the Human Subconscious Response

By Celis Brisbin, Programs Manager


The Massachusetts Chapter would like to thank Ann Sussman for sharing her presentation, Architecture + the Human Subconscious Response, for today's Green Breakfast. We had a full room of architects and professionals who enjoyed the presentation and contributed to a robust discussion following the presentation. 

The presentation covered four learning objectives:

1. Understand how our responses to the environment reflect human evolution. 

2. Explain how our brain has built-in responses to edges, specific patterns and shapes. 

3. Explore how considering human perception will gain importance in building design. 

4. Identify connections between new findings in cognitive science and the future of Green Building.

Next Month!

Next month, we will be welcoming Carrie Havey from The Green Engineer, for our next Green Breakfast. Carrie will be presenting on the intersection of Transportation and Green Buildings and LEED. Carrie is involved with many LEED projects in the Commonwealth and is also a very active volunteer with the Chapter. Keep an eye out for more information on this in the next few days. Don't forget to reserve your seat!

More about today's presentation

Ann Sussman, AIA, is interested in how buildings influence our behavior. Her new book, Cognitive Architecture, written with Justin B. Hollander, an urban planning professor at Tufts, reveals the subconscious tendencies at work when we navigate the world around us. Her studio is in Concord, MA, at ArtScape in the Bradford Mill, an art and business center.


The 21st Century has already been labeled “The Age of Biology” where new findings in the life sciences are reframing our understanding of how we function and came to be.  They also offer insight into our behavior in the built environment, from why we head down some streets and avoid others to how it is older cities maintain their charm. This talk reviews recent scientific findings relevant to our behavior in and around buildings. The slideshow will look at our innate responses to edges, patterns, and shapes and discusses how all these tendencies came to be for one very good reason: they helped us survive. The most successful green buildings in the 21st century, the author maintains, will use this new science to good advantage; for the more we build buildings people like to look at and ‘attach to' – the more likely the new constructions wilI last.

In case you missed, The Seven Secrets of How Nature Designs with Eric Corey Freed

By Celis Brisbin, Programs Manager

The Seven Secrets of How Nature Designs: how to apply the lessons of biomimicry to your business


Eric Corey Freed joined us from Portland Oregon on Thursday morning to talk about how nature can inform and improve our efforts to design the buildings of our communities.

He described how twenty years ago no one would have believed that any company without a website would not be in business in the future. Not everyone recognized how communications patterns were changing, rapidly. You soon realized you had to have a website. Today, you may not believe that a company not taking charge of their environmental footprint or their approach to sustainability will also not be in business.

In the talk we discovered how the threat of climate change is already affecting business. We uncovered how to take a leadership position in one's industry by leveraging the challenges of environmental responsibility. We are motivated to uncover new opportunities, inspire the upsell of new services, and tap into our lifecycle to uncover new product lines. Instead of being a depressing talk on the environment, it was a hilarious talk that inspired and transformed how we look at business.

 

 

 

 

Key Takeaways


  • how to reduce the future liability and risks of climate change to lower operational costs and increase product profitability

  • examine the lifecycle of your products to uncover ways to increase profit margins and lower costs
  • learn how to explain your environmental mission statement to your customers to engage them and attract new ones
  • how to set a “Mission Zero” for your company and use it to transform how you do business

 

 

 

 


Living Building Challenge 3.0

Eric explained the The Living Building Challenge™ as a building certification program, advocacy tool and philosophy that defines the most advanced measure of sustainability in the built environment possible today and acts to rapidly diminish the gap between current limits and the end-game positive solutions we seek. 

The creators sought to structure a system to spur fundamental transformation in the building sector. Rather than evaluate the features of a building that make it “less bad,” the Living Building Challenge starts from what sustainability advocates want in the first place – building that make the world better. It is rigorous and no shortcuts are allowed. 

The Challenge is comprised of seven performance categories called Petals: Place, Water, Energy, Health & Happiness, Materials, Equity and Beauty. Petals are subdivided into a total of twenty Imperatives, each of which focuses on a specific sphere of influence. This compilation


 of Imperatives can be applied to almost every conceivable building project, of any scale and any location—be it a new building or an existing structure. Download the Living Building Challenge 3.0 Standard document below.

For more information,

Learn what's new in version 3.0 and Read the FAQ.

The SHOWCASE is Back!

By Grey Lee


Yes, Ladies and Gentlemen, the Green Building Showcase is BACK! You can get your tickets today!

 

October 1, 2015, in Cambridge at the Harvard Art Museums on Quincy St.

 

The fabulous Calderwood Courtyard: our 2015 Green Buidling Showcase venue.

 

Get ready to show off your recent green building project – we are soliciting boards for any building completed between Oct 2013 and this October (2015). In the past, projects were required to be LEED certified, but this year, you can submit LEED, Living Buildings Certified (whole and petal), Passive House Certified and Net Zero Certified buildings.

 

We are also hosting the Green Building Awards at the Showcase this year – although in the past it was during our Earth Day Celebration. The awards are in two main categories – the Exemplary Building Performance Award (for existing buildings) and the Green Innovation Award (for new whole building and features of new buildings). 

 

Sponsors are sought – there are speaking roles, a bar sponsorship, and other packages!

 

Last year's awards were very well received:

And the 2014 Showcase had a lot of happy people attending:

We look forward to seeing you at the 2015 Showcase. Thanks go to the organizing group – our Events Committee: Alana Spencer, Tiffany King, Carrie Havey, Chris Meier, and John Picard. Celis Brisbin, our Programs Manager, is providing staff support.

Connecting with Students in Green Academia

By Cherie Ching, Advocacy Fellow


Article contribution made by Renan C. Mingrone

Renan (far right) diligently taking notes during Zapotec's presentation on net metering, one of the Chapter's priorities

August 8, 2015

Our Chapter is constantly creating opportunities for our members to stay up-to-date on their green education and informed about the news affecting the green community and our state. From Webinars to Green Breakfast Forums and BBQs, there are always exciting events available for our members of all professions to enjoy! Through our website, we also offer educational resources for all to know about our Chapter's priorities and engagements. From professionals to emerging professionals and university students, our website is a useful resource for all to browse and indulge in. A fifth year civil engineering student at the Federal Technological University of Paraná, Brazil, Renan Mingrone contacted our Chapter searching for information on Sustainable Development and its Certifications and Technologies, the topic of his final thesis. We were able to arrange his participation in our Summer BBQ Picnic and Webinar session in July! Below is his reflection of his experience with USGBC MA:

 

Regarding my visit to Boston and the USGBC MA Chapter events I've attended, I can say they made my long trip from São Paulo more than worthwhile and rewarding. The first was on July 22nd, Fun in the Sun, a picnic at the North Point Park with some members of the green community of Boston. In this reunion, I learned a lot about the Chapter activities in progress and some of their accomplishments. This helped me situate myself in the subject as a future civil engineer on Green Buildings. It was very enriching to talk with professionals of the community and make valuable connections with Chapter members such as with David Bliss, Matthew Smith, James Jones and Paul Lyons. The event was very casual and pleasant and we had delicious drinks and food. The weather was very nice, even with a refreshing light rain. Some members made important announcements about issues like the Net Metering by Zapotec, issues I was able to be aware of and bring back to Brazil with other general acquired knowledges. 

The second event was the Webinar about The Critical Juncture Where Sustainability Meets Building Structure & Commissioning and Integrative Design hosted by the SMMA Sustainability Coordinator, Steven Burke who was very kind and attentive to me. At this event I was able to better understand and learn some specific concepts of green buildings and sustainability like the relation between embodied carbon and structural materials, commissioning in the civil construction and its importance, and the hole of a commissioning agent.

Summarizing my experience, everything was extremely positive and I'm very grateful to all the USGBC MA Chapter crew, specially to Cherie with whom I had the first contact and who made possible my participation in those events. Also, Celis who helped me situate myself and was very kind to me by making my time in Boston more pleasant. I'm definitely going back to Brazil with valuable knowledge and connections and a huge amount of information and references for my thesis. This experience has been priceless.

We hope to welcome Renan back to Boston in the near future, as well as more students interested in taking advantage of our Chapter's exciting and educational events and resources!