Diminishing Returns and Unintended Consequences

What do you see?

Let me step back for a sec...this newsletter is inspired by an excellent presentation last week by Andrew Steingiser from RDH at the world famous 26th Westford Symposium on Building Science, or short Summer Camp, hosted every year by the great Joseph Lstiburek and the even greater (sorry Joe :) ) Betsy Pettit .

First off, let me say, Andrew did a fantastic job! This is/was the Olympics of Building Science to present at and he did choose maybe one of the hardest topics.

To give you a little background why this is critically important:

Massachusetts is one of the first States in the US, and for sure the first to this extend, to make Passive Building code. That alone should stop everyone in their tracks.

States with climate action plans are trying to make good on their promise of reducing 80% carbon emissions by 2050 or whatever their specific goals might be. For anyone who has tried to do the math what that actually means, it is a humongous undertaking that is required to de-carbonize our economy to that level. And for those in the know, it does not stop there, we really eventually need to reach Absolute Zero. This is another newsletter...

So, Kudos to Mass for its leadership and for showing the political will to require doing what needs doing.

In their search for solutions Mass identified the building sector as an absolute must to go to zero. Zero operational energy at fist, and total zero operational and embodied carbon next.

Starting on the operational side, Mass, in absence of any government programs that were going far enough to reach their decarb goals, looked at Passive Building Standards issued by Phius , the leading US non-profit educational and standard setting org in that field that has worked with the National Labs and other celebs (Joe and Betsy) in doing so. Phius's mission in a nutshell is to make zero energy and passive building mainstream for the good of people and planet.

Long story short, a couple years ago Mass policy makers decided to require in their new opt-in stretch code that all multifamily projects 12,000 sqft and greater had to now meet passive building standards. Let that sink in. Multiple municipalities including Boston, comprising in totality over 50% of Mass's citizens, adopted the opt-in stretch code swiftly.

Of course, for those professionals...architects, builders, developers...who had not been steeped already in the design principles, techniques and technologies, that was a big surprise and initially might have appeared as a big ask...but the decision to require it was actually quite well vetted. There was significant track record of projects that were being built for that building typology for an average of 2% additional cost. And a thriving, steadily growing community of practitioners grew quickly as the State made significant incentives available to train professionals to join this emerging field.

So far so good.

And in response to such significant demand, Phius is hosting the first ever Phius Pro Forum in Providence RI on October 21-23 (mark your calendars), an intensive workshop focused conference for professionals intended to deliver ready to implement proven solutions, details, techniques and business models. Phius is committed to help professionals in the North East to implement passive building and zero energy ready best practices at the lowest optimized cost. A win win for all.

Back to Andrew's presentation. He presented on the truly amazing policy progress in the multifamily sector, but then pivoted to commercial buildings.

For commercial buildings, Phius also offers a commercial zero energy ready passive building standard. the implementation of that building typology is lagging behind the multifamily category. There are fewer projects in Mass to point to and to evaluate just yet (they exist in other states). To have a second option, Mass decided to hire a consultant to create a new, second and different commercial zero energy ready standard based on passive principles. The result of this standards development effort is called TEDI and it is now also code for commercial buildings. Being completely new, this guideline was included with no testing in the field, little theoretical vetting or peer review. And it is beginning to cause problems.

This was the building science focus of Andrews talk. He presented about a school case study that chose the TEDI compliance path for code but was unable to meet the TEDI path. Then he decided to model the same project in the alternate Phius compliance path.

Both results are shown for comparison in the title image above, courtesy of Andrew. the project easily meet the Phius targets as designed. It fails the TEDI path.

I observe: While the Phius design guideline for heating and cooling load results in loads that are very low and close together, the TEDI design guideline leads to a result of heating and cooling loads that could not be further apart. And, Phius total heating and cooling loads are half the size of the TEDI total, or expressed differently, the Phius building is twice as efficient...

What do you see? (hint: the answer is in the title)

Discussion please. Thoughts.