Policy Videos
So firstly, thank you to NBI for inviting me to do this. It’s you know, it’s wonderful to be part of this cohort of board advisors. And really, I think you guys have been really smart to bring in a good, diverse group of us. My goal for today is really to look at broadening the ideas of how we can do electrification. And the title I’ve picked and you guys all wanted to hear was how do we electrify with gas bands, our band? Because I think we all coming across that as a barrier in many states here in California. I know the CEC has also said they will not be able to go to an all electric code as much as we have all pressured them to do so because they really have a lot more constraints to work with. So what I’m hoping to do today is really show other opportunities. And it should be no surprise to everybody that I will be sharing the past and past framework as a big person and fan fangirl. That’s really been my core focus for the last decade. But what I really encourage you guys to do is look at it not in terms of a brand or a standard, but to look at it as a paradigm and the paradigm that can be really inserted and replicated into many other frameworks and and structures, including the code itself. So if we can look at it in that in that context and that structure, I think it will really start to make a lot more sense. So if we can now find out how do we go? So what I’ll be covering today is really looking at the sort of big picture of where we can intervene in the system just starting at the high level of what we’ve been doing and how where we intersect with code specific to electrification. Are we going and looking at these alternate pathways? And then I’m going to do this real deep nerdy spelunking dove into the back end of the Passive House framework. I’ll guide you through that, because it’s it’s going to go deep and deep down that rabbit hole that will come back up again for air at the end. And we’ll look at other places to intersect and where we can also look at other ways to move our electrification and our decarbonization goals forward. And before I get to the next side, I want you to remember this girl on the bicycle and her dad to always keep this key question in mind. And we’ll circle back to the answer at the end. But remember, why do we build buildings so big of you? Every project that gets built has to navigate quite a minefield of code overlays. And it’s really helpful to look at our electrification work in this context. Before we even get to the energy code, every project team owner and developer team has to navigate a zoning code, a local design regulatory framework. Then it gets through to the development and construction. Then we start to hit the building codes and the energy codes. And once the building is even built and occupied, we now have these benchmarking overlays that also are starting to be used as a mechanism for decarbonization. So we’ll come back to this. But I really wanted to start at that high level so that we really know where we’re interceding in this into the system. We need to start looking this as is looking at these things really in a complete holistic process. But what we’re going to dove into specifically here is the energy code and also the Passive House energy framework. So you really want to just put this in in this bigger context so that we all know where where we’re starting from. In terms of electrification and how this fits into the larger context of these codes, this is an AC triple E, a graphic of the evolution in terms of energy use, intensity of buildings against the code, regulatory structure, and looking at how over time the code, the regular code does these incremental shifts to to decrease the UI. And slowly but surely and we’re at about this between 55 and 60 for the ICC and California’s Energy Commission is is probably just slightly below that. But honestly, I don’t really think too much different. And just to put this the Passive House framework in this context, our. Notional four of you are for passive house buildings is about 30, and really the point I’m trying to make here is just to look at the idea of what we can do and support these incremental code shift changes, or we can do the high speed rail version and kind of go straight to the end and and hopefully even a little bit beyond. And it’s this little bit beyond that. I’m going to really do a quite a much deeper dove into now. So. If we think about electrification and what the real goal for electrification is, it really is to support a 100 percent renewable energy future. That’s the end goal for all of us. Right. Whether we using our code framework or a passive house framework or whichever other by any other means necessary. Right. And so if we look at that end goal. And we then work backwards to see what sort of buildings do we need to build and how do we need to design our built environment to support that? It gets to be a really interesting discussion, and this is the question that was some sort of first principles discussion and a question that was really looked at starting in about 2012 by the passengers institute and then rolled out in twenty fifteen in this complete overhaul of the House framework. And this was the big, hairy question that they really looked at. And it got to be a really fascinating overview of like how do we structure our building systems and our energy models to meet that end goal? And if we use that context of our end goal is a 100 percent renewable energy use, whether it be on the grid or at the building itself. What do we need to do to make that happen and if we look at renewable generation, we can see. The core variable in renewables is that they aren’t always regularly. You accessed renewable energy, has a much more variable delivery and time frame, so. Let’s work with that timing, and this is sort of the base of really a subtle difference between the net zero and the Passive House perspective is because of the variability of renewable energy generation. Timing is everything, and peak load reduction is the first baseline step of what we need to do to support renewable grid. Because as you can see in these, you know, we’ve got both a daily peak to account for, but we also have the seasonal peak to account for. So that’s just the the fundamentals of where where things needed to start. And then this is where I’m going really deep into the weeds, so some of you will be familiar with this if you work more at the grid grid level. For those of you who aren’t, don’t worry. I’m going to just give a quick primer on this. But really, we do need to go all the way back to power source. Energy is accounted for and how it’s incentivized in our code, our frameworks and in the energy models that support the code, analyzes and outputs. So we’re going to look at what is a utilization factor, and that’s really for those of you not really into the weeds of this, a utilization factor is really just the story about how much energy is used from where the energy is produced, to where it’s eventually used and what the losses are and the effectiveness of the the transmission is along that journey. So this is the quick drawing, it’s an old fossil, a great story of coal extracted at, you know, at the rock face, transported in transport at the general and then converted into power and then transmitted on transmission lines to where it’s eventually get used, it gets used and for the historic utilization factor for electricity. It took about three watts of energy to deliver one lot of energy to the end user. So that’s a sort of historically a pretty inefficient utilization factor. And in the US, out our grid, in our historic grid purchase utilization factor for electricity was at about three point three four. On this fossil fuel grid, but that actually wasn’t everywhere. And for those of you familiar with the grid structure. Our US grid is divided into, I think, gets five five sectors and each sector very slightly, Alaska historically kind of the dirtiest at about three point five electric utilization factor. And on the western states over here where we are, California, Washington and Oregon, where we were one of the cleaner grids at two point eight. So that number, the three point three one wasn’t everywhere. It varied slightly, but that was sort of the average. And as we know, this has changed rapidly. And as our grid has morphed and new renewable supply has come online, that historic utilization factor has really come down to. The last number I could find of the most recent of the national one is now at about two point nine for the for the the electric utilization factor. But what I really want to show you here is how regional and local this factor actually is. And this graphic really shows why each of those grids is quite different and how even in 100 per cent renewable scenario. Will still be quite different because of just geographic and climate specific factors, so if we look up in the Northwest, we’ve got tons of great hydro, all those blue dots, really all the big dam dams and hydro. And obviously the Southwest doesn’t have a lot of water. So having hydro is just really not not a realistic possibility. But Southwest, we’ve got tons of solar. We still have lots of gas. The Midwest has this fantastic natural resource of wind and then the historic Rust Belt, the coal of the Midwest, that’s phasing out pretty quickly. And up in the north northeast, they have lots of solar. They actually will have lots of nuclear. But we also know from more recent updates to this. Lots of great wind and lots of great renewables coming online in the northeast. So remember this just for this context of how we actually can get to 100 percent renewable and it’s local and it’s regional and it’s grid specific. So if we go back to this, these factors, these utilization factors and look at where this real shift started to happen, in how we account for what source energies get incentivized in our models and our codes, we could see even on the old framework onsite solar and wind still had a really good utilization factor. Right? Won anything lower than three is much better, right? It’s much more efficient from production to for to where it gets used, but. In the old framework and in many of our codes and models that get used to. Support compliance with our energy codes. Fossil fuels still receive more favorable utilization factors, so natural gas, diesel, oil, coal, propane have historically been given much better utilization factors, which means that building designers were incentivized and still are to a large extent much more incentivized to use these dirty source energy appliances and equipment. So this is where overhauling that framework and what your primary energy factors are and what fuel gets given better source energy factors was completely revised and revamped with the end goal of one hundred percent renewable future grid scenario. And this illustration is sort of a really good high level review of how this really got restructured. And you can see the inputs were all assumed to be all solar, wind, hydro as the as the primary inputs with the direct use at the building being prioritized, which if any of you familiar with the Passive House framework, historically onsite renewable, was not given any credit prior to 20 50. And that got completely thrown out the window because of what I’ve explained earlier here, that they looked at storage because as you could see, some climates, not all climates were really good and not all buildings are actually going to be able to utilize renewable directly on the site. So accommodations and account evaluations were made that looked at, OK, well, this is going to be short term storage and we know already this is happening, big Tesla storage facilities being installed in Australia, Hawaii and now in California. And there’s lots of great innovation happening in these short term storage facilities and equipment that’s that’s really happening in this area. And then long term seasonal storage. This is another big sort of really interesting area of of innovation and development. I know it’s sort of a very hot debate, but we’re not really going to go into this, really, but really wanted to still put this on the map, that long term seasonal storage, using renewable sources is being developed. Some of it’s going to not really painful right now with hydrogen or methane, whatever is going to convert renewable energy into a storable a long term storable capacity solution is something that. I think is a fascinating discussion. I’m not really going to go into it here, but I wanted to just also put it onto the big picture map of what got considered, because it’s really relevant for for this renewable energy future. And this is sort of what we what the the the Passive House framework really reviewed and included in this complete analysis of the primary energy factors, because the storage is part of the conversation that we will have to have for electrification. So. I don’t really want to go into the nitty gritty of this, but I really wanted to just again frame it in the context. The Passive House standard got totally overhauled in 2015, the peak heating and cooling requirements in the air tightness. None of that specifically changed, but the big bucket of primary energy, which in in normal circles gets gets really sort of talked about is as energy use intensity, the total overall building, the amount of energy that can be used to meet the certification criteria that was really completely revamped and revised. And the focus for that was looking at this renewable energy end goal. But it also really connected very directly to a carbon emission carbon emissions focus. And that’s sort of the interesting part where I think that paradigm shift in the restructuring, I think is is something that can be readily used and and looked at by by every other framework and code code revamping. Three tiers, we don’t need to go again into the nitty gritty of this, other than to say the the structure used to they used to only be one certification level. They are now three. And it was a it’s a sort of a sliding scale function of the basic classic is your basic passive half building does not require renewable energy on the building because we recognized that it wasn’t possible for every building. So there’s still this allocation. It’s still an incredibly super efficient building. It does require electrification. And we’ll get a little bit further into that in a little in a little while. The sliding scale is really interesting, though, because it’s a function of the ratio of you can you can get up to the next level of certification by either reducing your demand. So this this building, this X is a project. This is sort of where it currently sits. And if these designers wanted to get up into the plus or premium certification, they could just drop the demand to bring it down to the ten or nine p r the CB2 square foot number would just get them into the plus or they could increase the onsite generation, which would shift it up into the next year. So a little more flexibility for how folks could choose to level up, so to speak. And then. Rather, we’ve kind of down the big picture overview, but I want to sort of get into the real back end of how these factors were structured and evaluated, because I think this, again, goes back to the bigger structural framework that can be replicated and inserted into any other certification or even code revamping. And the basic premise of these primary energy factors. We’re still starting with total demand reduction. As I say, those the passive house. Criteria still has a very rigorous it’s always envelope focused and really using your envelope as your first call, first opportunity to just drastically reduce loads has still remained in place. Then what the institute did was say they look at the remaining energy that is used by buildings. And they divide that up into five categories and these five categories, electricity is sort of the big bucket of like roads, lighting, appliances and all stuff that every building has and gets used generally. This would be considered like your base load stuff that, you know, the usage that is pretty consistent throughout the year by the occupants then is the hot water load, which could be easily used, monitored and extricated and and categorized differently. Then these bottom three heating, cooling and the humidification. These are what really needed to be accounted for very distinctly because of them being very variable based on. Local climate and your local grid capacity for renewable generation. And so and obviously some places have peak like a higher cooling demand and heating and other places don’t need a humidification. So they could could certainly just these to really be quite climate and regional specific. The next thing they factored in was this roof area availability. And this is, again, something that I think should really be looked at by code frameworks because. Dense urban buildings currently get penalized for renewable generation because your ratio of your roof area to your floor area drastically changes as your buildings get sort of taller. So zero net zero going out a skyscraper is just really a physical impossibility. So creating a mechanism that allowed dense urban buildings to still be equally credited on the same scale was something that I think was quite a genius move and could easily be incorporated into every other framework. And then, as I showed earlier, this this regional grid supply capacity was factored in. We looked at that earlier. And and so you understand that not every region has hydro, not every region has great solar and wind and or wind. So all of those were factored in to see what made the most sense for each region. The peak load, the regional peak load was also factored in, so obviously southwest, southeast, much higher cooling peaks, then deadheading peak opposite up in the north and Alaska. That was considered this capacity and the requirement oops, sorry. This capacity for storage was also considered because clearly Alaska is going to need a lot more long term seasonal storage capacity than the Southwest region. And then finally, sorry, I’m having trouble saying I’ve got a small screen and I got all of your mugshots on my screen as well. So I hope you’re not in my screen is being blocked by that, too. And so bear with me here. We’re almost out of the weeds here and we’re going to get back up for air. So hang in there a second. If you’re ear kind of this is this is blurring for you. But really, I’m getting to that storage was also a very core part of this. And then finally, what we’ve been really honing in on this electrification, what type of appliances can really accelerate a decarbonization electrification for a renewable grid? And this whole heat pumps are see heavily incentivized in this framework and in the back end down in that in the weeds of the Passive House energy model. So coming back up a little bit here. This is just a quick overview to show the extent of how this was really analyzed. So all of those factors were looked at for a global, you know, a global application of this framework. And we can the the links to the back end. They published a lot of this information on their website. And I’m not going to go into this, really. But it was it was quite a feat to sort of really do this analysis for a huge variation of climates across the globe. But where the rubber hits the road is how does this work here? And honestly, I really only started to appreciate this myself once I started to put it into context that I am much more familiar with, and this is the primary energy renewable, the factors for California. I’ve extracted these out of the back end of the energy model and then started to put them next to each other, because then it really starts to tell a fascinating story about how this works, as the kids say, I IRL in real life. So if we look at these PR factors and I’m going to start with San Francisco and gosh, Sacramento and I got San Diego, I’ve got all the other ones in here, too. But let’s just for the sake of not having our eyeballs cross too badly, let’s look at these big ones, because I think most people sort of have a sense of the San Francisco sort of. Northern California, Sacramento’s inland, lot hotter, San Diego is all the way down the south on that on the Mexican border. So you you get a sense of how those climates vary slightly. And then let’s look at what factors were assigned to heating, cooling and humidification, domestic hot water and basic electric. You know, the other bucket of basically it’s called baseload plain-clothes. And when we start to compare, you start to see the subtle nuances between some relaxed Sacramento, which the electric and source energy factor, if you remember the big historic grid one was three point three and it’s now come down to about two point eight. And I think California is probably at about two point six percent. Health framework says, nope, we think that on a renewable grid, this is where we will be. Our electric loads for our renewable grid will be at about one point seven percent San Francisco and about one point eight for Sacramento and one point three for San Diego for heating electric use cooling one one and one point to five. So it’s actually slightly panov penalizing slammed San Diego compared to Sacramento and San Francisco. And that’s because they want San Diego to make sure that they’re not doing stupid things like driving up cooling loads, because you’ve got lots of parks of opportunity in San Diego to use shading to drive your cooling loads down domestic hot water heat pumps. So this specifically is allocated to heat pump hot water at one point to five. So that’s a really favorable source, energy factor for electric heat pumps. And then the other the rest of the plug loads at one point to one point two five at one point two. And if we look at what did they do for natural gas? So domestic hot water, they said, OK, it used to be one for gas. We’re bumping that up to one point seventy five, which effectively penalizes any natural gas, hot water heaters and favors electric heat pumps because one point two five is lower, but not a lot lower, but it’s still much better than one point seventy five. So the mechanism at play here is. In terms of electrification, it doesn’t say you cannot use gas. It says we are going to make incentivizing electric heat pump equipment much better for you and we’re going to slightly penalize gas appliances, which is a very different thing than our gas band approach. And I want to just quickly, I don’t really need to go too deep into the weeds. But again, what’s what’s instructive here is this is the same of factors, but this is for the East Coast. And I’ve extracted the big cities there. I’ve got Pittsburgh, I’ve got New York and I’ve got Rochester. So we know Rochester is right up here, north north in New York state, Pennsylvania, all the way over the west, in New York City. In the middle here, I’m really looking at the subtlety of this utilization factor structure where, again, these very poor cities. So it’s very regional and localized based on how I explained it, the structure of it. And again, the natural gas troxel gas is given a much more a higher utilization factor to subtly penalize it and say, OK, we’re not going to say you can’t use it, but we’re just going to make it much harder for you to comply with the standard if you specify that equipment. And so run out the back Speaker 4 [00:40:06] Bronwyn, if I may interrupt here I was looking at smud and the smud is a tiny bit higher than one point eight on the electricity for heating versus the one percent for gas. Is that a factor of a solar heavy grid, just not having that much production on those cold winter mornings? Is that what’s going on there? Speaker 2 [00:40:28] Yes, and it’s colder inland. Sacramento gets a lot colder in the winter. So there really also trying to it’s sort of another mechanism to make sure that designers really reduce demand. And you could do that with the envelope measures. You drive down your demand by by changing the factors as well you can comply with. That’s sort of the Bakhtin flexibility. But does that does that answer your question? Speaker 4 [00:41:01] Yeah, so the grid factors are driving it, but it’s also they’re both relatively high, sort of on account of the climate. Speaker 2 [00:41:10] Exactly. Yeah, and just context, again, remember the the the national grid, the historic utilization factor was at three point three. It’s back down to two point six. So this is still very much more favorable than is is utilized in a lot of a lot of standard energy code compliance models. So, again, real world application, because this is the space that I think we we as passive house advocates really love is implementation and how do we really get buildings built to support a totally renewable grid and really drive decarbonization? And I wanted to use this example. It’s a building that’s been completed in New Jersey. I think it was finished a couple of years ago with like twenty nineteen, twenty nineteen. This was using the old Passive House framework, and it was designed and modeled, and you didn’t get completed prior to 20, 15, but the old grid, the old framework was still in operation and actually still allowed to be used, which I’m pushing very hard to have that removed. But the the new one has been been out since twenty fifteen and is widely, much more widely used now. And the point I’m making here, though, under the old framework, this had gas appliances that had a gas domestic hot water unit, and it’s still complied under the old framework. But when I put this into the new framework here with the PR sliding scale, it no longer met the basic classic certification requirement. You could see here that they know. And that was because and I literally didn’t change anything in this building design and and that was exactly because of this, the switch in these utilization factors where gas appliances now are way more heavily favored. And and I mean, gas lines were penalized, which put this building out of compliance. It would only be a low energy building. The same for this is an 80 you designed in Palo Alto here. And under the old framework, it was all it’s an all electric one under the old framework. This would not comply. So all electric appliances, because of the more penalized utilization factor for electricity, doesn’t comply under the old framework. But luckily, I was using the new framework and it does quite easily comply with the new. And in fact, we are looking it’s not it’s not built yet. The plants put this on hold and we can easily add a small bit more solar and get this into plus energy. And so just two quick examples. I’m coming up to twelve forty eight. I’m sure you guys also want to get to the the meaty part of like how do we bring this into the regular code. So we’re just a quick sort of summary of the primary energy renewable framework and essentially it’s demand reduction and prioritizes this renewable source energy. It also gives credit. It gives credit now to onsite generation. It does allow offsite generation, but actually only in the premium category. So that’s a subtle. Nuance to it and really the take away that we need to look at is it’s really it’s the whole framework is completely designed to be ready and supporting this 100 percent renewable energy grid, which is, as I say, the end goal and where we’re all going for decarbonization. Another little nuance factors in there that aren’t really. That important, we could get further in the weeds, so I’m coming back up to that big picture of how do we now look at. Intervening into our regular code and all these other overlays that that government building development and maybe start to look at other places, we can intervene in the system because our energy code isn’t the only game in town. And I’m looking really I’ve highlighted here a bunch of other places where various policies are incentivizing this high speed rail compliance pathway that the passive health framework utilizes to drive decarbonization and really incentivize electrification. And within these code frameworks, I just wanted I did have a few. Zoning code is being used as a carrot up in Vancouver, up zoning, increased flow area ratios, increase height incentives. Any developer who builds too passive house in Vancouver can submit their project as long as they also. Develop and commit to pass pass certification, they can get those zoning incentives, which is a very big carrot, and it effectively also, as it’s shown, is a is an electrification mechanism to drive and building decarbonization. The other carrot that can be used is accelerated approvals, ministerial review. Lots of projects get bogged down in very heavy design, regulatory roadblocks, any any developer who wants to. Yeah. You know, short circuit that horrible derailer cities can say build to passive house or build to zero energy. They can put in incentives to say if it’s all electric, you can bypass, you can do a ministerial approval. So different places to intervene in the system. B.C. Energy Step code is a mechanism being used to have alternate pathways embedded in it that go around the regular code structure. A passive house is one of them. But the top step, if if building developers say we design to that, it’s sort of a way to to fast track electrification. Washington state has an alternate compliant path, will pass both houses already embedded in the code, and then this fascinating option, New York City. I’m sure you guys are familiar with local law. Ninety seven that’s setting benchmark requirements for existing large building at a greenhouse gas emission target. This is another fantastic accelerator that is outside of the energy code that is really focused on accelerating decarbonization with this greenhouse gas emissions metric. And then there’s another whole pathway outside the code. These are mechanisms that our Passive House community is getting really good at using subsidize training, workforce training and development. It is not an electrification mechanism that’s on many people’s radars. But every passive House consultant who gets why electrification is really important and the more people we train to do that and understand that, the more buildings will be built in a manner that actually really supports a renewable outcome scenario. Low income housing tax credits is another fabulous mechanism that’s really driven the entire Pennsylvania affordable housing landscape or really great projects, or maybe not all of them, but really since twenty fifteen, a huge portion of those all electric financing mechanisms, indirect, both direct and indirect subsidies. I saw it as really using these quite brilliantly. And so is Massachusetts. Connecticut is also coming online and we’re also seeing a lot of the utilities now in California. We’re working with PG&E, SoCal Edison, CPAC and some of the rains here to also really utilize these mechanisms to drive decarbonization and electrification. So I’m coming up to the end here summary, really. We know that our energy code is the slow train. It’s the old stops train. It is required to be that way. It is just how it is. The baseline for old buildings, the high speed rail opportunities like Passive House should be much more closely looked at and incentivized. It’s an opportunity that I think we have not done enough work in making sure that the top end, the the overachiever folks get all the assistance and support that they need because that is where we need to go. And the faster we get there, the better for everybody. So that’s the end of my presentation, these tons of source material that I could recommend, happy to share these slides with everybody. And yeah, I think the clothes are really is to to go back to that young woman and her dad on the bicycle. Why do we build buildings, Dad? And we build them for people. I really want to close with that, because I think sometimes as decarbonization advocates, we get a little distracted by all these lovely buzzwords like we’re building for grid optimized buildings and we’re building for decarbonized future and really just go back to remembering we built for people. So let’s make sure that those buildings really work well for all the other things that are just essential. Think of it as really put that in in a really stark reality for all of us. Health comfort. So that’s my, uh, my presentation, and I would just be very happy to hear from you and take take questions if anybody has them.
Hello, everybody. Thank you for inviting me to present to you. It’s a great honor to share further wisdom with you at the South Pacific for the South Pacific Passive House conference. I’m both honored to be able to do this and simultaneously devastated that I cannot be there in person to present this information to you. So today, I’ve been asked to share my experience and trials and tribulations with helping to accelerate Passive House policy, and I will be looking at how to do this and what experiences we have found here in North America that have been helpful to us. And hopefully those will be equally helpful to you. So I will start by telling you all that pretty much everything I’m going to cover in today’s presentation is contained in this policy resource guide that we developed for last year’s North American Passive House Network conference. All of that is online in digital form. So I encourage you to go back and find that I will share links to that and I will hopefully be able to send some print versions to you for distribution at your conference. So where do we start and how do we tackle this big challenge for transforming our built environment from this inefficient fossil fuel dependent structure to this more efficient, fully renewable, decarbonized framework? And of course, there’s been plenty of literature and information shared on this, and this is one of the early ones by a fellow South African architect, Denise Scott Brown, who collaborated with her rather infamous husband and another. Person who didn’t receive any much, very much credit as Steven Eisenhower and wrote this book, Learning from Las Vegas, and what I would like to say is. Absolutely, the idea of learning from a city built in a desert with no water and no access to really good, reliable water source based on gambling may not be such a great example for us to learn from. So what I’m going to recommend is that we choose a very different city and that we use Vancouver as a much better example and place to learn from. And I will be covering a lot more information about Vancouver’s policies and how they’ve really accelerated not only the adoption of Passive House, but a really fantastic transformation of the built environment using Passive House as one of the tools. And I have this quote from Shawn Pander that I highlight here, and I’m not going to read it to you, but if there was one thing I would wish for every city is that they would have a Shawn Pander as the green building manager. If he could be cloned, I would say send him or his equivalent to every city on the globe. We would have a really successful market transformation with somebody who is able to clearly think holistically and in an integrated, both vertical and horizontal manner. So to tackle this subject, I thought it very important for us to really grapple with how decarbonization policy is structured. So I’ve really spent some time trying to create an illustrated framework for how the policy frameworks that affect building decarbonization are overlaid with how buildings are typically developed. So I’m going to create this framework illustrating the various milestones that happen in building design and development. And then I’m going to look at the overlays of where these policies actually intersect in this development timeline, because it really is becoming apparent that those intersections have actually much bigger levers and can present much bigger opportunities for us, for our decarbonization policies. And seeing how they intersect is really helpful to help make decisions about what levers are the most effective for us to pull for implementing better policy. So the code overlays for these three phases of building development are really quite interesting to look at separately, obviously entitlement and preliminary design phase, zoning and local design regulations in my region play an enormous part in how buildings are designed, where they’re located and how efficient they actually are given allowed to be simply by virtue of where they are, how big and how how they’re allowed to be designed. And then during the development and the construction phase, obviously all the other building codes come into play. And I’m back at those all under this building codes title. And every region has slight variations on those. I’m not going to go too deeply into that. And then we have our energy codes and some regions have more rigorous ones than others. Some are developed slightly differently than others, but for the most part that the time frame of where they intersect with our building development cycle. And then finally, occupation and operation is something that, for the most part, our codes don’t particularly govern, but I do include them here because benchmarking is really a regulatory framework that does start to impact occupation and operations. So I I placed it here because it should be considered and be placed on this framework. So if we look at the typical code compliant building progression, it’s everything that any architect or owner and developer and and policymaker is familiar with the typical phases of project development. And what I’m really wanting to point out is where the energy codes and these policies actually intervene in this development timeline. And for typical code compliant buildings, the most, most bioregions, the energy code really only affects a building right before a building permit is pulled. Some projects might push this a little bit further up the the development time frame. But for the most part, we know that energy codes really are only required to be developed and and calculated right before a building permit is pulled. And if we then look at how passive house buildings are developed and where the Passive House energy model intervenes in the system and the time scale for how projects are developed, we see a little variation. So what I’m really trying to point out here that. Energy modeling is done a little further upstream in Passive House buildings, and the certification is also actually typically happens right after the final. It doesn’t all happen right before a building is occupied. So really just showing that the difference between a code compliant framework overlay and the passive house overlay. And what I’m really trying to point out here is passive house intervention a little further upstream gives it a lot more leverage because teams are allowed to actually make much better design decisions when they’re informed further upstream in the schematic design. So right there, that’s a huge opportunity for policymakers to potentially intervene by transforming their code and just literally shifting when the energy model is required for submittal. The other upstream intervention that we absolutely have to review and should not be left off out of this discussion. Is the zoning code overlay any decarbonization policy that does not look at how buildings are, how land use is distributed and regulated, is missing a huge opportunity to decarbonize their built environment simply by allowing more density to be developed? And this is a really simple function of the more disjointed and disconnected your buildings are from each other, the more insulation they require. So your detached single family homes, forms that are broken up and have a lot more surface to volume ratio actually require much more energy to operate and they require more insulation. So a very simple lever for decarbonization that can have a huge impact on your built environment would be to simply allow higher density, more compact buildings and for them to be ganged up together, as in multifamily buildings. So and just to illustrate the point, this is my city, San Francisco and San Francisco is one of the best cities in North America, and yet we still only allow multifamily buildings to be built in less than 30 percent of the area of our city. So this drastically alters the opportunity for us to decarbonize. And in our policy resource guide, Matt Hutchins wrote a fantastic article about this exact topic, and although it may not be specific to Passive House, it greatly affects how efficient and cost effective passive house buildings can be. So start always with zoning. This graphic that he included in his article shows how not only can you double the savings if you double the density for your housing, but you actually can also halve the transportation footprint. So the emissions, the CO2 emissions from transport actually also benefit. And it is this doubling and coupling of efficiencies. That, again, is something I will touch on a little further in this presentation. So the other upstream policy intervention that absolutely cannot be left of this conversation are local design regulations. Many of you will have seen very similar illustrations to this one, which comes out of a local city near me here in California. Where the building design regulations are encouraging architects to build these absolutely disjointed, cobbled together, crazy, crazily articulated structures in order to conform to what they are perceiving as neighborhood character, this is an overlay, a policy overlay that every city has here in California. And I am always amazed that this is never required to be reviewed through a carbon emissions lens. And for the most part, what I see is these local design regulations that give guidelines for creating these completely disjointed, overly articulated boxes are actually sabotaging all the other good work that you are attempting to achieve in your building energy codes. So make sure that you aren’t killing your carbon action plans by having your well-intentioned planning and local design guidelines, folks really requiring all of this ridiculous articulation. [00:15:56] And again, this is what’s required in San Francisco. The design guidelines show this subject building as the, um, you know, unsupported version. But the version that they are encouraging architects to deliver are also actually horrendous. If you recall the slide I showed with how complexity and additional surface to volume ratio really increases the amount of insulation required and the amount of energy used, this is really not a good idea. So I encourage you and I urge you to make sure you educate your planning departments on the cost and the carbon impact of excess articulation. And perhaps there is a third way that can be found that still does create a unified, integrated neighborhood character. But really, this may not be the particularly best design that I can create with the PowerPoint shapes tools. But really the point I’m trying to make here is find a third way. Keep it simple and make sure we design review. Guidelines are also viewed through a carbon emissions lens. [00:17:28] So as I’m at the point and the structure I’m trying to build here is to really start to look at our policies in a completely holistic and integrated way. And so not just in a vertical way, from the time frame, from start to finish of of a typical project, development milestones matter. But I would also like to look at our codes horizontally. So did a little bit deeper. And today I’m really going to focus specifically on the energy code development structure because it’s instructive and actually reveals quite a lot of additional potential barriers and hazards. So I’m going to be using California’s own energy code, which is is called Title twenty four, part six, and it falls under the framework of of the California Energy Commission, who have been fantastic in really keeping California’s energy consumption at a pretty excellent level in comparison to many other regions here in North America. And the framework I’ll be looking at also actually is is pretty similar to what is used by the International Code Council. And for the most part, the same structure applies to the ashtray ninety point one energy code, which is used for most commercial buildings here in North America. And this may vary slightly from your own policy and energy code framework, but I think for the most part, they all are structured fairly similarly. So how code is developed in California is each of the elements that are included in our energy code review are reviewed in a specific framework meetings and they are focused on separately. So workshops are held over the course of a three year code development cycle, focusing on the specific elements of each of these elements of buildings. And each is, for the most part, reviewed separately. So for somebody like myself, that has been sort of really looking at how to intervene in the code and use the energy code cycle to include passive house elements, it’s been a real challenge because I have and we’ll look at why that that may be further down the line. California doesn’t specifically deal with air sealing, it does assume a three air changes per hour on the air leakage for residential and seven air changes per hour leakage rate for multifamily, but no air seal air leakage testing is required and some bridges have also been discussed in the code development process, but are still also not accounted for. So I leave these on the page. [00:21:19] They have been toyed with and reviewed, but they are not included in California’s Title Twenty four energy code. [00:21:30] And the code is then all of the elements, once they’ve been reviewed and modified and improvements to each of these categories have been determined, they are all then plugged into the energy model. And each three year cycle, the code, the improvement for the energy efficiency is ratcheted up slightly. And the goal of the California is Title 20 for energy code and for most of these other codes, the goal is cost effective energy efficiency and this is important to remember. So keep that in mind what the goal is. [00:22:15] And if we summarize how the code is structured, the other elements that we also should consider is the California energy code uses a benchmark building as its baseline. [00:22:31] So your building is always compared to this benchmark building and your building is required to achieve a percentage better than this benchmark building. [00:22:46] So it’s never really looked at for its own specific efficiency, but simply as a in a comparison framework against this, how shall we say, fantastical building that is sort of that has been determined as the sort of baseline conventional building common to your building type. [00:23:17] As I mentioned earlier, the code is also updated every three years. So it is a three year code cycle with the codes issued and released and adopted. The last iteration that we are currently working on was issued in 2019 and formally implemented in January of 2020. And the next code cycle that is already being developed and reviewed is the 2022 code cycle. And really a very determining and defining feature of our code is it actually has no finite end goal. So this has been going on since the 70s and we really have no idea when we will ever meet a reach nirvana in terms of energy code efficiency. [00:24:17] So in comparison, the passive has a standard structure, is a completely different animal and at its core. Is this goal for hygiene, ventilation, and it’s really important to see how the Passive House standard structure works completely differently to our standard energy code framework and Passive House is defined by the end goal and quite interesting. Interestingly, during this pandemic, coming back to the original definition of the Passive House standard as one of requiring and meeting this hygiene ventilation target is extremely pertinent during this covid pandemic time. And really what I’m trying to illustrate here is passive. The standard works backwards where it is actually defined this in Target and then everything else that all the other elements in a passive house building, all are then are reviewed and work backwards in service of meeting this hygiene ventilation target. And lighting plug loads, domestic hot water are also included in the passive half standard, but not as specifically as they are in typical code framework. They are bucketed underneath the the primary energy target. [00:26:06] So they’re more peripherally reviewed than they are in our standard code structure. And really, again, what I am trying to really graphically illustrate here is Passive House has a very fixed target. [00:26:27] And it the model is specific to each building, so there’s no benchmark comparison to and percentage improvement over each building is modeled to the exact specific design that it is built to. It is revised periodically. And this is typically when the new version of the FTP is issued. Updates to the algorithms are typically then issued. But again, really the point I’m trying to show and illustrate here is the very different structure and framework for passive house development process. And it’s really distinguished very clearly by these defined targets and very clear end goal. So the million dollar question I am always asked by policymakers is, how can we integrate Passive House into our code framework? And I have really struggled with this particular question about how to merge these, how to harmonize these, and looked very deeply into many of the specific elements included in our code. But the conclusion that I have reached is. Perhaps that is the wrong question to ask because and as I’ve showed and tried to illustrate graphically, these are two very different animals. Trying to merge them and integrate them may not be the best pathway forward. And to be honest, because the end goals are also so different, really, the outcomes and the structure of them really may not be merging them may not be the best pathway forward. [00:28:46] So. [00:28:48] How do we harness the power of Passive House and how can we utilize its unique framework to help drive conventional code and transform our built environment? And I’ve been enjoying using this particular slide quite a bit lately because I want to show that all of us, every single one of us has seen the power and the efficiency that we can achieve by combining and integrating elements. And what I’m seeing here, particularly in California, when we apply this to our built environment, we have all our disparate components in our buildings. So our hot water systems, our ventilation and energy recovery systems and our heating and cooling systems. So this is a heat pump furnace. And unfortunately, we all these all get put together in very separate categories. They’re reviewed by our code as separate systems all together. But in Passive House, we are able to actually achieve these amazing efficiencies by being able to look at all those systems and figure out how to combine them. So really, this is something that I think our conventional code development people and policymakers really need to look at carefully, because this is the essence of Passive House, is this ability to combine and integrate systems to create these magnitude order of magnitude, better products that actually utilize all the disparate elements and integrate them in ways that actually can leapfrog over the conventional efficiencies about now still routinely available on that market. So my point I’m trying to make here is why if we can utilize the integrated holistic approach embedded in the Passive House framework for building products, why can we also not do that for our policy? So to recap where we have got to so far, what I’ve really tried to illustrate so far is that Passive House is an upstream intervention. And this upstream intervention actually can also be leveraged in many other of our code overlays and may really be the secret sauce of Passive House’s success. I’m also showing that zoning codes have the possibility to completely derail decarbonization policies if they are not also holistically reviewed and integrated into a decarbonization policy framework. [00:32:36] And the same flawed design, local design regulations and guidelines, so I’m really urging you as policy advocates and policy makers to make sure that you don’t forget those two huge levers available available to you to transform your built environment. They cannot be looked at in isolation. And I was also showing how your energy codes may not necessarily align with passive House’s holistic approach and trying to merge and integrate them may not be your best path forward. [00:33:22] So what are the opportunities for us to utilize Passive House and how can you leverage its holistic framework to help transform your built environment? [00:33:37] And I would like to use examples, specific examples where this has been successful and break down the specific policies that they that they have utilized to transform the built environment. [00:33:56] And, of course, Brussels has been for now, since early 2004, the poster child of this transition from this graph here that I’m including the the Brussels Environment Department of Environment, really did a remarkable transformation with engagement with this within a seven year time frame. To where they actually reduced the energy use per capita by 18 percent, so they didn’t just flat line it like we’ve done in California, they actually started to make this trajectory trend downwards. And this is the CO2 emissions per capita. Is this a T-Online, the yellow line? Is their economy a big part of their population and the blue line is their economic growth. So without harming both economic growth or being impacted by a growth in population, they still were able to bring both the energy consumption and the greenhouse gas emissions down by a fairly impressive 18 percent. And this framework that they used is the template that has been replicated now here in North America. And it was a very simple strategy that they articulated very clearly and really identifying the clear and goal, providing training and support to industry leaders, people already going beyond code like your Passive House advocates and professionals. They promoted these front runners with wonderful books, exhibitions and prizes, and only after the industry became comfortable with and felt confident that they could deliver at these high performance numbers, only then did they change the code. So this, in fact, is the exact same pathway that Vancouver has followed. And they have really been exemplary in being able to replicate that same framework in a really vertical and horizontal integrated manner. So the article from Chris Higgins in our Policy Resource Guide really outlined these specific first steps that the city of Vancouver took to help transform the building industry. And they did the whole remove the barriers to passive house. They added incentives to increase passive house uptake and they use their own buildings as pilot projects. So fire stations and city community buildings and their own housing and development projects to serve as catalysts to spur the transformation of their local city building stock. They went further once the early pilot projects were underway and they adopted this zero emissions building plan, which is quite remarkable in its scope and its depth. And I encourage you to dig deeper and take a look at how that structured. The link I’m sharing on the sauce tab here will allow you to really find that policy and really see how it’s structured. They also train the city’s office, so not only the planning department, but the building department also went through the Passive House training so that everybody was on the same page and could understand this holistic, integrated building approach. And then they further subsidize the trainings for building industry professionals in the region because they realized that in order to allow this to flourish and to thrive, they need to reach a critical mass for professionals who knew how to implement. And this is exactly the same pathway that Brussels did. Vancouver and the province of British Columbia are actually then went a step further and they transformed their code framework. The B.C. Energy Step Code is a framework that I am particularly excited about. They use their reach code framework as the starting point for this completely new code structure. And really, if we look at it a little bit more carefully, what they did was they identified an end goal. They set the timeline set for twenty seventeen to twenty thirty two. That’s the time frame where people in the built environment and cities would get to decide for themselves which of these levels, these energy improvement and efficiency levels they wanted to start on. And of course, the bottom step was the standard B.C. buildings code. And then each step ratcheted up incrementally to the final step, which included Passive House. And this really clear direction and clear end goal has been enormously successful in not only providing really clear information to the built environment, but manufacturers have also stepped up. And interestingly, manufacturers, because it is much more cost effective, have actually started to build to meet the performance targets of the end goal destination rather than determining, well, every few years we will have to improve the efficiency of our products. They went straight to the end goal. So very simple, clear instructions and very clear messaging to the market of where the energy code needs to go. And this same framework is now being replicated in other parts across North America here extremely successfully. So British Columbia event with Vancouver being the catalyst, was the first and the same framework. And the step code is now sort of being replicated and rolling out across the entire all the other provinces in Canada. Toronto is going doing amazing things with Passive House that I’m sure hopefully other presenters in your conference here were able to share details with you about New York State is also an incredibly savvy front runner with nice sort of really leading the charge and utilizing this the same framework principles that brought in that were implemented in Brussels and more recently, the state of Massachusetts with a massive program is doing all the same, pulling all the same levers as Brussels did and replicating this same industry transformation framework. And I suppose early workforce training and development funding grant was really particularly successful, and I wrote about this in the policy resource guide identifying what were the successful elements of that funding program that was actually a very small amount of money allocated over two years, a year and a half, really, and distributed to professionals at not only taking passive house training, but other high performance training programs. And you can see from this graph showing the number of certified passive house designers and consultants in New York City, New York City skyrocketed with the number of professionals able to design to pass passive health standards with Vancouver, British Columbia, fairly close to behind. And these numbers have taken from 2017, so are quite outdated already. I’m sure this is transformed again quite radically. But really what this did was it enabled the city of New York to include passive house certification in their request for proposal for it’s city owned affordable housing project. And now that same requirement is being replicating, replicated in many other places across New York State. And it is transforming the professional industry to where training is now becoming required and professionals are signing up themselves and they are no longer receiving a subsidy. So really, they only need to fund and subsidize the front runners to be able to then create a critical mass that is transforming those markets. An interesting program that it was not specifically code overlay related, has been very successfully implemented by the Pennsylvania Housing Finance Agency, which leveraged the low income housing tax credit structure, which allocates points for projects applying for this financing support by granting Passive House projects an additional 10 points. So projects that were pursuing Passive House would move further up in the the stakes for being able to be given this financing allocation, which is huge, a huge carrot and obviously has made it transformed the multifamily housing in the PA., the state of Pennsylvania. [00:45:24] And what was even more interesting about this particular program was that over three years, the the Pennsylvania Housing Finance Agency tracked the cost per square foot of the projects, utilizing both a code compliant pathway and passive house. And after three years, they found that the average building using passive house pathway actually cost less than the buildings being built to code that the conventional code standard so massively transformative program that really leveraged financing for affordable multifamily housing that didn’t have anything to do with any of the code specific overnight, but simply made Passive House more attractive to pursue. [00:46:28] New York City’s program, liver, that is also another outlier and again, incredibly innovative that I’m really fascinated to see how this progresses is actually utilizing benchmarking. So the code overlay that affects specifically affects buildings that are already built and occupied. And what this local law, 97, has done in New York City is set benchmark targets for greenhouse gas emissions that ratchet down over a 20 year period. So starting now and first being required for implementation in twenty twenty four, this is the the CO2 emissions per square foot per year, maximum allowed for buildings and also starting with the bigger buildings. So utilizing larger buildings as the pilot projects, because, of course, we saw from the the earlier overlay, it’s easier for them to be cost to to become more cost effective. And it usually costs a lot less. And they also usually have more budget available. So using the bigger buildings to drive your energy from your industry transformation. And so what Stasch Zakuski, who wrote the article in our policy resource guide on this local law ninety seven found was that his Passive House projects that he had InDesign in his office at the time, all three of them met the final end goal destination for carbon emissions for that building type. But the project that was not targeting Passive House did not, which means effectively that as soon as this building is built, once it meets the 20 30 for a limit for this building, tech will have to be retrofitted. So this is a fascinating energy code program or actually legislation program. It’s not nothing to do with the energy code, but using benchmarking to drive building performance retroactively, which any developer is looking at, this would actually then be forced to go further upstream and ensure that he’s building his or her building was built to the most efficient standards ahead of time in order to avoid the penalties and the fines further down the road that are clearly inevitable if it’s only if the building is only built to energy code compliance standards. [00:49:57] And then the last policy attempt that I’m going to cover is the one that I was quite involved with here in California, where we attempted to utilize our existing reach code structure to develop a passive house, which code for low rise multifamily buildings. We specifically targeted low rise multifamily buildings for all the reasons I have already illustrated and shared with you here previously. [00:50:38] And we developed this reach code in partnership with the city of Santa Monica, who was the initiator initiator of this breach code, because they came to us and said, hey, you know, if you want if we do want to see how we can incorporate pesthouse into our codes and what we found as a result, once our initial study was vetted, was that in every single one of California’s 16 climate zones, with the exception of Oakland, which was quite interesting. [00:51:23] Our passive house, low rise multifamily building performed exponentially better than even the reach code targets required for that building type here in California. [00:51:39] So we really confirmed that Passive House is still quite significantly way above what our current reach codes require of buildings and buildings here in California, revealing to us that maybe our Title 24 code framework really isn’t as rigorous as it could be. And there’s still a lot of headroom left in the performance and the efficiencies available to multifamily developers here in California. But unfortunately, the city of Santa Monica had still not adopted this reach code and it has been sitting like Cinderella at the ball waiting for the prince to come and invite her to dance. So I have to say, it’s with much sadness that I say really from the experience of policy, adoption and programs that are being used successfully here in North America, these interventions and attempts to work within the conventional code frameworks and structures have been the least successful. And so therefore I would sadly say, don’t bother, see if you can find other ways to work around your code for all the reasons that I have outlined here in this presentation. So to summarize what I have shared with you, really best practices and opportunities for utilizing Passive House in your advocacy and policy efforts, it’s really pretty simple formula which the Brussels and Vancouver, New York State and Massachusetts are all utilizing. This exact same formula is start by identifying the leaders. And these will always include passive House proponents and professionals. But most certainly there are others out there who are not utilizing Passive House that are also being similarly innovative and should be included. [00:54:25] Then set a clear target, as we’ve seen, and what I’m coming to see more and more is perhaps that is really the secret sauce of passive house is it just makes it very clear what you are asking of your project teams to deliver, whereas our current code framework really is very nebulous in that regard and doesn’t set a very clear end goal and in fact, doesn’t have one. [00:55:03] And then the third key is just to promote and celebrate successes. [00:55:10] This is extremely obvious, and yet we still don’t do this often enough and with enough resources and rigor to really make these projects visible and to show very clearly how fantastic and successful they really are. And the Percival’s plus magazine in the U.K. has been just fantastically successful. And there have been other publications we hear and North America have had the one wonderful support of Mary Jameses Low Carbon Productions books to also do the same. So I hope you have a similar framework for your local community building to house. [00:56:05] So very the other sort of super basics, how to promote on ramps to Passive House adoption start not with incentives, but with education. It’s really important. I see education gets missed all the time and policy policymakers always go straight for the carrots, leaving the education and the books behind. And the books really are where we have to start. That is the foundation. [00:56:39] So your training should start with yourself planning and building departments, if policymakers really are sincere and serious about transforming your built environment. [00:56:54] You cannot keep doing the same thing as you’ve been doing for the last 50 years. And clearly, it hasn’t been working or we wouldn’t be in the predicament that we are already finding ourselves in today. And of course, if you can subsidize these trainings for others, that is a fantastic investment in your local environment and pays dividends over and over again. [00:57:28] The incentives structuring them very carefully is also another thing to be very cognizant of, and they are plenty of them that are cost neutral. [00:57:42] Vancouver has some fantastic examples. I would recommend that you go and dig into their website, look at how they’ve structured incentives for policy. I think they are really the best example with the most clear vertical throughline for how they are really promoting specifically passive house projects in the region. Very easy to add floor area ratio, benefits, height allowances, zoning, all sorts of easy cost-neutral incentives. And then if you do have a budget, the finance ones that actually are meaningful are also readily available. So don’t forget to think about them very creatively and laterally. And then, of course, once you have done your education and your incentives, removing the barriers, really look to your code frameworks and think about what it is you really want to be incentivizing and how do you want to structure your energy and your zoning and your design review codes. Do you want to keep doing what we have been doing for a long time now? Business as usual, or do you want to go straight to the end goal? So with that, I thank you for your kind attention. I, again, am so grateful for this opportunity. I wish you great success in your policy advocacy and I look forward to seeing some fantastic work coming out of that and some even more innovative and exemplary policy frameworks that you can utilize all of the elements and the ideas and the examples that I have shared with you today to come up with things, with policies and codes that work for your specific market. Thank you and have a great evening.