A Publication of BuildingGreen, Inc. www.BuildingGreen.com Volume 21, Number 8 · August 2012
Environmental Building News
The Leading Newsletter on Environmentally Responsible Design & Construction
TMQuote of the month:
“This is the fi rst time so much energy data has been
available for any locality in the U.S. and, we believe,
in the world.” – Laurie Kerr, senior policy advisor at the NYC Mayor's
Offi ce of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability
(page 12)
Feature Article ... 1 • Energy Reporting: It’s the Law What’s Happening ... 2 • Feds: Popular Retrofi t
Program Still Too Risky • EBies Honor “Unsung
Heroes” of High-Performance Buildings
• Newsbriefs
Product Reviews ... 1 • Expanded Cork: All-Natural
Rigid Boardstock Insulation • Vinyl Flooring: Is Less Bad
Any Good?
BackPage Primer ... 16 • Basics of the Psychrometric
Chart
Energy Reporting: It’s the Law
As building owners comply with new laws to report energy use, the data may
change the industry—and the act of reporting it already has.
by Nadav Malin & Tristan Roberts
Photo: Amorim Isolamentos, S.A.
In This Issue
Read EBN | Earn CEUs Get AIA and LEED credit with
popular EBN articles, like:
What Makes a Product Green? Making Windows Work Better Cost-Effective Green Retrofi ts
BuildingGreen.com/Learn
Cork harvesting in Portugal has been done by hand
in virtually the same way for more than 2,000 years. (continued on p. 7) (continued on p. 10)
Expanded Cork: All-Natural
Rigid Boardstock Insulation
by Alex WilsonCork is natural, it sequesters carbon, and it is produced through a sustainable silvi-culture process with a 2,000-year tradition. The material regenerates itself and can be harvested every nine years. It insulates well, absorbs sound, and is durable in use but ultimately biodegradable.
In building applications, cork is best known as a fl oor-tile product and a sound-control underlayment, but it’s a good insulator as well. Rigid cork boardstock insulation has been available in Europe for several de-cades and is just being introduced into the North American market (again).
Bark of the cork oak
Cork is the outer bark of the cork oak tree (Quercus suber), which is endemic to the
L
AWS MANDATING ENERGY USE disclosure are gaining steam in the U.S. as more cities and states seek to leverage these transparency requirements to drive energy savings and job creation. Instead of heavy-handed requirements that existing buildings get system upgrades or improve operations, local governments are attracted to policies with a much lighter touch: exposing energy performance to the light of day. They hope that just disclosing energy use patterns will lead to changes in behavior, and there’s reason to believe thatthey may be right. New York City will be the fi rst among a growing list of Photo: Alex Wilson cities to disclose energy use data for all large buildings.
Environmental Building News
Executive Editor · Alex Wilson Editor · Tristan Roberts Managing Editor · Paula Melton
Products Editor · Brent Ehrlich Editorial Intern · Erin Hathway Weaver
Art Director · Amie Walter Senior Research Associate · Jennifer Atlee
Research Associate · Martin Solomon President · Nadav Malin Outreach Director · Jerelyn Wilson Marketing Director · Walter Pearce Customer Service · Charlotte Snyder
Advisory Board
Bob Berkebile, FAIA, Kansas City, MO Arlene Blum, Ph.D., Berkeley, CA John Boecker, AIA, Harrisburg, PA
Terry Brennan, Rome, NY Bill Browning, Hon. AIA, Washington, DC
Nancy Clanton, P.E., Boulder, CO Raymond Cole, Ph.D., Vancouver, BC
David Eisenberg, Tucson, AZ Drew George, P.E., San Diego, CA Harry Gordon, FAIA, Washington, DC
John L. Knott, Jr., Charleston, SC Malcolm Lewis, Ph.D., P.E., Irvine, CA Sandra Mendler, AIA, San Francisco, CA
Greg Norris, Ph.D., N. Berwick, ME Russell Perry, FAIA, Washington, DC
Peter Pfeiffer, FAIA, Austin, TX Bill Reed, AIA, Arlington, MA Jonathan Rose, Katonah, NY Marc Rosenbaum, P.E., W. Tisbury, MA John Straube, Ph.D., P.Eng., Waterloo, ON
Michael Totten, Denver, CO Gail Vittori, Austin, TX
ENVIRONMENTAL BUILDING NEWS (ISSN
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Disclaimer
Every effort has been made to ensure that the information presented in EBN is accurate and that design and construction details meet generally accepted standards. However, the infor-mation presented in EBN, by itself, should not be relied on for fi nal design, engineering, or building decisions.
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What’s Happening
What's Happening
Corrections
In the article “Passive Solar Heating” (EBN July 2012), we reported incorrect heat fl ow through two types of window. This information has been corrected in the online version of the article.
In the article “Doing Daylighting Right” (EBN Apr. 2012), we stated that Todd Reed of 7Group had worked on the Bank of America Tower in New York City; it was in fact the Bank of America Tower in Charlotte, North Carolina.
We regret the errors.
Feds: Popular Retrofi t
Program Still Too Risky
In another blow to the retrofi t loan program known as PACE, the U.S. Federal Housing Finance Admin-istration (FHFA) has proposed a new rule that could automatically disqualify a huge number of mort-gagers from participating. If the pro-posed rule is fi nalized as currently written, restrictions will be placed on mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—which together back the majority of mortgages in the U.S.—to prevent them from purchas-ing mortgages on most properties with PACE liens. States will be able to get around federal restrictions by writing their PACE regulations in a way that addresses FHFA’s concerns but could increase risk for local gov-ernments.
Who’s on fi rst?
PACE programs (“PACE” stands for “property assessed clean energy”) are authorized by states and run by local governments, which finance major improvements such as deep energy retrofi ts or renewable energy systems. The funds are paid back to the local government through property taxes over a long period, perhaps 10 or 20 years, removing the major barrier for these types of retrofi ts: the high upfront cost. At the heart of the proposed rule is a conflict about whether PACE liens should be considered property taxes (since they are associated with properties rather than individuals) or loans (since they pay back a fi xed amount of funding); if they are taxes, this means that PACE liens, rather than mortgage loans, would be re-paid first in the event of foreclo-sure—something FHFA finds un-acceptable (see “Nationally Stalled PACE Program Moves Forward in
Vermont,” EBN Aug. 2011), since it (or a private bank) could end up losing money it had never agreed to lend. But according to Alfred Pollard, gen-eral counsel at FHFA, there are also other problems.
“What subprime lending was
all about”
“There are no national underwriting standards that are uniform,” noted Pollard—and in many states, he suggested, the underwriting stan-dards are not up to snuff. PACE laws around the country tend to tie acceptable fi nancing amounts to the value of the property—this is where the “property assessed” part of the acronym comes in—so that home-owners, for example, could obligate themselves for 10% of the assessed value of their property regardless of their credit rating or income. “This is what subprime lending was all about; they looked at the value of collateral,” Pollard explained. “The Dodd-Frank Act from 2010 made it clear that the old-fashioned idea of the ‘ability to repay’ is the issue.” States wishing to implement PACE programs may need to change their underwriting standards if they want Fannie and Freddie to be able to buy loans on properties with PACE liens. Finally, Pollard continued, most PACE laws do not defi ne acceptable
What’s Happening
Bob Rueter of Thermal House in Brattleboro, Vermont, sets up a blower door as part of an energy audit. Energy audits are required in Vermont's underwriting standards for PACE; the state is the only one whose program has been accepted by FHFA so far.
Photos: Tristan Roberts
retrofi t standards that would protect consumers and their property from weak performance or shoddy work-manship.
PACE proponents disappointed
“The language in the June 15 state-ment suggests the strong possibil-ity of an FHFA blanket refusal to participate in PACE, throwing the baby out with the bathwater,” says Leanne Tobias, managing princi-pal at Bethesda, Maryland-based real estate consultancy Malachite LLC. Tobias believes FHFA needs to take more of a leadership role in the development of PACE, which she readily admits is in its infancy and needs national standards for both fi nancing approvals and retrofi t quality control. She disagrees with FHFA, though, that the burden of de-veloping these standards should fall entirely on PACE proponents, and she also criticizes the agency for not accepting assistance from experts who are only too happy to help. “It was very disappointing that FHFA summarily dismissed a vari-ety of underwriting standards sug-gested by the Council of Environ-mental Quality, the White House, and the Department of Energy as well as a variety of private standards for energy audits and retrofi ts from ASTM, ASHRAE, and other building energy organizations,” Tobias told
EBN. “A substantial and signifi cant
body of potential underwriting, en-ergy audit, and retrofi t standards was summarily dismissed as overly complex.”
Tobias says she understands where FHFA is coming from—the agency was created in 2008 in part to over-see Fannie and Freddie after the subprime mortgage crisis—but she believes it is missing an opportunity. “What FHFA’s leadership has done is to interpret the agency’s mandate very narrowly,” she argues. “It is rejecting participation in a variety of measures that would help stabilize the housing sector and provide ad-ditional credit to the housing sector. I
think it’s extraordinarily disappoint-ing that, rather than helpdisappoint-ing to shape the market constructively, FHFA is suggesting that it prefers that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac not participate at all.”
In the proposed rule, FHFA does not refuse to participate in pilots but makes it clear that PACE pro-ponents—not the agency—need to provide the details and the data: “No document produced by PACE commenters or by any government agency has provided a fully specifi ed plan for an actual pilot program,” states the proposed rule.
Some states moving forward
Despite the delays for most of the country, FHFA has given the green light to one state. “We have already indicated to the State of Vermont that there is no problem with their pro-gram as far as Fannie Mae and Fred-die Mac are concerned,” said Pollard. Vermont’s law makes all PACE liens junior to a mortgage; three other states—Maine, New Hampshire, and Oklahoma—have also rewrit-ten their laws to address FHFA’s concerns about loan primacy in case of foreclosure, and Connecticut is considering doing the same.
“Florida did kind of the opposite,” says Susan Churuti, shareholder at Tallahassee-based law fi rm Bry-ant Miller Olive. “We specifically adopted a state law in 2010 that said PACE assessments are loans of equal dignity.” Churuti, who notes that PACE in Florida includes retrofi ts for “hurricane hardening,” doesn’t believe FHFA’s rule, if fi nalized, will cause problems for property owners there. For one thing, there is a lot of interest in PACE among commercial property owners (FHFA deals almost exclusively with residential mort-gages). “The issue is, do Fannie and Freddie want to disqualify them-selves from that market in Florida, because it’s going to be a pretty big market, we think,” Churuti said. The proposed rule gets FHFA one step closer to resolving a lawsuit, brought by the State of California, that aims to make Fannie and Fred-die recognize PACE liens as “tax as-sessments” rather than loans. Public comments will be accepted through September 13, 2012.
– Paula Melton
For more information:
Federal Housing Finance Agency www.fhfa.gov
What’s Happening – Newsbriefs
Urban Green Council's “EBies” celebrate people who work behind the scenes to make existing buildings perform at the top of their game.
Photo: Malcolm Brown
EBies Honor “Unsung
Heroes” of
High-Performance Buildings
Urban Green Council has announced the winners of the first “EBies,” which the group is humorously tout-ing as “the Oscars of sustainable building.” This year’s awards honor ten projects in six categories, with the goal of acknowledging “‘unsung heroes’ who have made great strides in improving environmental perfor-mance but whose accomplishments may otherwise go unheralded,” ac-cording to a press release. Buildings undergoing operational improve-ments or retrofi ts—but not gut reno-vations—qualifi ed owners, manag-ers, and others for nomination. The All-Rounder prize, awarded for improvement across two or more categories, went to Glen Neville, director at Deutsche Bank, for en-ergy and water conservation at the bank’s U.S. headquarters at 60 Wall Street in Manhattan. As the largest
building in the bank’s portfolio, the headquarters has reportedly become a big part of the company’s push toward carbon neutrality by 2013— and Deutsche Bank claims that its improvements, which totaled ap-proximately $8 million and included a 123 kW photovoltaic array, have been cost-effective.
The similar category Smooth
Opera-tor (combined with another category
called All Revved Up and Ready to
Go), was awarded for improvements
made solely through operations, maintenance, or retrocommissioning. Toby Barlow, chief creative offi -cer at advertising fi rm Team Detroit, received the award for reductions in energy and water use in the fi rm’s office building. Improvements in-cluded more sophisticated comfort control, sensors and timers for light-ing, and tenant engagement. Other awards:
The Reformed Drinker & Take Me to the River
• Steve Allwine, building manager and director of marketing at Seattle ar-chitecture firm Johnson Braund, for reductions in potable water use at the fi rm’s headquarters
The Reformed Gas Guzzler
• Klas Haglid, P.E., R.A., principal at Haglid Engi-neering & Associates, for the 145 Talmadge Road Industrial Complex in Edison, New Jersey • Jesse Dillard, P.E., energy
manager for the City of Dallas, for a retrofi t of the Dallas Museum of Art • Carolyn Kelty, P.E., of
CMTA Consulting Engi-neers, for reduced energy use at Rosa Parks Elemen-tary School in Lexington, Kentucky
Shine a Light on Me
• Dennis Luster, sales representa-tive at Facility Solutions Group, for a lighting retrofi t of the Foun-tainhead Business Park in San Antonio, Texas
• John Sarich, resident manager at William Beaver House in New York City, for lighting improve-ments to this multifamily building
Verdant Brainiac
• Phil Silver, treasurer of 2311 4th Street Homeowners’ Association in Santa Monica, California, for pushing past barriers in order to install an 18 kW photovoltaic ar-ray for his condominium complex • Marc Zuluaga, vice president and
director of multifamily energy services at Steven Winter Asso-ciates, for spearheading a com-prehensive ventilation retrofi t of Carlyle Towers in Caldwell, New Jersey
– Paula Melton
For more information:
Urban Green Council www.ebies.org/winners
Newsbriefs
New Study Makes Previous Cli-mate Projections Look “Rosy”—The
dire 2007 predictions of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) painted a picture that was “a bit too rosy,” according to John Reilly, Ph.D., of the Massachu-setts Institute of Technology (MIT), one of the authors of a new study suggesting that climate change is happening more rapidly than pre-dicted. It takes seven years to pro-duce an IPCC report, which makes it diffi cult to accurately assess how rapidly changes are occurring, says the group of researchers from MIT, Penn State, the Marine Biological In-stitute, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The 2007 report assumed countries would achieve
Newsbriefs
Photo: Fletcher6
their pledged reductions in green-house gas emissions, but that hasn’t been the case: 2010 emissions ex-ceeded IPCC projections by 10%. The new report forecasts a median global temperature increase of 9°F (6°C) by 2100—instead of IPCC’s predicted increase of 6.3°F (3.5°C)—along with greater sea-level rise, more extreme weather events, and up to three times greater Arctic warming. Even if countries do achieve the prom-ised emissions reductions, say the authors, the global temperature in-crease will still exceed 7.2°F (5°C) by century’s end.
U.S. Ranks 9th Out of 12 on Energy Effi ciency but Feels Least Guilty—
The U.S. scores low on energy ef-fi ciency among the world’s largest economies, ranking 9th out of 12 in a new report from the nonprofi t American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE). The “International Energy Efficiency Scorecard” looked at 12 nations rep-resenting 78% of global GDP, 63% of global energy consumption, and 62% of global emissions. Scoring was based on 27 metrics regarding buildings, industry, transportation, and efforts at the national level. The United Kingdom was the top-ranked country in the study, with Germany, Italy, Japan, and France also scoring high marks. The U.K. scored in the top four across all four categories, while the U.S. scored relatively well on building-related metrics but last in transportation measures—and has made “limited or little progress toward greater effi ciency at the na-tional level,” according to the report. The authors point out that the U.S. is wasting money other nations are able to reinvest, and they make a number of recommendations, including na-tional energy-savings targets; adop-tion of the most stringent building codes; increased funding for public transportation; and higher federal fuel-economy standards. Many of these nations were also included in a recent report from National
Geo-graphic indicating that people from
countries with larger environmental footprints are less likely to feel guilty about their impact. Citizens of India, with the lowest per capita footprint, feel the most environmental guilt, followed by the Chinese, Brazilians, and Russians; Americans, with the highest environmental impacts of the 17 countries surveyed, feel the least guilt.
Urban Trees Curb Shady Behav-ior—A new study suggests a strong
correlation between urban tree cover and reduced crime, especially on public lands. “The relationship be-tween tree canopy and crime rates across an urban–rural gradient in the greater Baltimore region,” pub-lished in the journal Landscape and
Urban Planning by researchers from
the University of Vermont and the U.S. Department of Agriculture For-est Service, looked at the relationship between tree cover (based on aerial photography) and crime rates in the city of Baltimore and Baltimore County, Maryland. After controlling for population density and socio-economic factors, the authors found that, on average, a 10% increase in tree canopy corresponded to a 12% decrease in crime, with the
relation-ship most pronounced on public lands such as city parks. In a few isolated patches, the relationship was reversed, especially in an area of Baltimore between industrial and residential properties where, accord-ing to the study, the plant life may be attributed to abandoned, overgrown lots rather than maintained trees. The researchers suggest that tree planting could be prioritized as a public safety matter, as the presence of trees can suggest a neighborhood is well cared for and criminal behav-ior is more likely to be noticed.
Image: ACEEE The ACEEE “International Energy Effi ciency Scorecard” ranks 12 of the world’s largest economies based on 27 energy-effi ciency metrics regarding buildings, industry, transporta-tion, and efforts at the national level. Top scorers were the U.K., Germany, Italy, and Japan; the U.S. ranked ninth.
A new study of crime patterns in the Baltimore region found that increased urban tree cover corresponded to lower crime rates.
UK Germany Italy Japan France Australia EU China US Brazil Canada Russia National Buildings Industry Transportation Untapped Opportunity 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100 Global Ec onomies Analyz ed
Newsbriefs
This home in Seattle was the fi rst prefabricated, modular home in Washington to achieve LEED Platinum certifi cation.
This graph compares the life-cycle water footprint of electricity sources in gal/MWh. Hydro-power, if included, would dwarf the others at 440,000 gal/MWh used and 9,000 gal/MWh consumed by evaporation.
New Report Says U.S. Is “Burn-ing Our Rivers”—The average U.S.
household indirectly requires nearly 40,000 gallons of water per month for the production of its electric-ity—fi ve times more than its direct residential use. A new report from the River Network, “Burning Our Rivers: The Water Footprint of Elec-tricity,” tallies the massive amounts of water used to produce electricity in the United States at approximately 42 gal/kWh, much of it for cooling purposes in thermoelectric genera-tion in coal or nuclear plants. More than half of fresh surface water with-drawn goes to electricity production; some is polluted, some is evaporated, and most of it is warmed, altering ecosystems and killing aquatic life. Coal, including mining, is the big-gest offender, followed by nuclear power: two nuclear power plants in Georgia, for example, use more wa-ter than all the residents of Atlanta, Augusta, and Savannah combined. Natural gas, which this year gener-ated as much electricity as coal in the U.S., also has a signifi cant water foot-print—even though the report does not address hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) due to lack of data. Hy-dropower, despite its green reputa-tion, causes about 9 billion gallons a day to evaporate from reservoir
sur-faces. The authors con-clude that, in addition to shifting to virtually zero-water-footprint technologies like wind and solar, modernizing “once-through” cool-ing systems in exist-ing power plants could save more water than all U.S. residential water conservation programs combined. For more information, see www. rivernetwork.org.
LEED for Homes Crosses 20K Threshold—More than 20,000 U.S.
homes have achieved certifi cation through LEED for Homes since the program’s launch in 2008, with near-ly four times that number currentnear-ly registered and working toward cer-tifi cation, according to fi gures re-leased by the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC). A recent McGraw-Hill Construction study predicts that green building will account for about one-third of the residential market by 2016. Recently certifi ed projects include eight LEED Plati-num affordable homes in Florida (more than half of LEED homes are affordable housing), two LEED Gold multifamily buildings in Texas,
and a LEED Silver home in Saudi Arabia—one of the fi rst LEED for Homes international pilot projects to achieve certification. For more information, see www.usgbc.org/ LEED/Homes.
Build Bike Lanes and They Will Ride—The city of Sydney,
Austra-lia, has increased bike ridership by 82% in just two years as part of its Sustainable Sydney 2030 plans. Two years ago, the city had bicy-cling rates below the national aver-age, with only 0.8% of work trips made by bike; Sydney 2030 calls for 10% of trips to be by bike in 2030, and this year that number reached 1.4%. Research showed residents’ likelihood of commuting by bike increased markedly based on the percentage of the commute possible in a dedicated bike lane, so the city has set out to provide 125 miles of bike lanes by 2030, with 34 miles of them separated from traffi c. The fi rst six miles of separate lanes, the “backbone” of the network, have been completed; by 2030 the network will include more than 160 Sydney suburbs. Along with separate lanes, the city has offered safety courses, biking maps, and free bike bells. Other infrastructure changes have included decreased speed limits and junction redesigns, leading to decreased accidents among all forms of transportation.
Photo: Greenfab
Source: River Network Used Consumed Wind Photovoltaic Solar Geothermal Solar Thermal Natural Gas Nuclear Coal 2,000 4,000 6,000 8,000 10,000 12,000 14,000 16,000 18,000
Life-Cycle Water Footprint
of Electricity
Product News & Reviews
Product News & Reviews
western Mediterranean region. Of the 5.4 million acres (2.2 million ha) of cork oak forest in the world, 35% is in Portugal, with lesser amounts in Spain, Algeria, Morocco, France, Tunisia, and Italy. Harvesting begins after trees reach 18–25 years of age and is strictly regulated. Trees live an average of 200 years, allowing for 15–18 harvests.
The bark is stripped from the trees by hand in large slabs, from which bottle stoppers are punched. These bottle stoppers consume 25%–30% of the cork, according to Francisco Simões, of Amorim Isolamentos, S.A., a business group of the leading Portuguese cork producer, Amorim. The waste left over from producing bottle stoppers is used for all other cork products.
Most of Amorim’s cork forests are certifi ed according to the standards of the Forest Stewardship Coun-cil (FSC), and most of its products, including cork board insulation, are chain-of-custody FSC-certifi ed. Amorim, one of Portugal’s major promoters of FSC, has chain-of-cus-tody certifi cations for 30 operations.
The discovery of expanded cork
The reemergence of expanded cork insulation comes more than 100 years after its accidental invention in New York City in 1893 by boat builder John T. Smith. As chronicled in the 1928 book Cork Insulation, Smith used a large cast-iron kettle with a fi rebox under it to steam and bend oak framing members for the rowboats he built there. His opera-tion also produced boat fenders, life preservers, and ring buoys that were made by fi lling canvas sleeves with cork granules for fl otation.
One of the tin forms used to fill the canvas sleeves became clogged
and was set aside. Apparently, the clogged tin form rolled into the dy-ing embers when workers closed up shop that night. The next morn-ing, Smith discovered that the cork granules had expanded and fused together in a chocolate-colored mass. After repeating the experiment to understand the process, Smith pat-ented it in the U.S., Germany, France, and England, calling the material “Smith’s Consolidated Cork.” Build-ing product manufacturer Arm-strong began marketing it as an insulation material, and I have actu-ally come across it in a Victorian-era home in Brattleboro, Vermont.
Manufacturing expanded cork
insulation
Amorim manufactures expanded cork insulation by putting cork gran-ules in an autoclave and exposing them to superheated steam at 660°– 700°F (350°–370°C) for 20 minutes. The heating of the cork granules un-der pressure expands them by about 20% and activates a natural binder in the cork, suberin, that binds the material together. The large billets of cork are cooled and cut into slabs of varying thicknesses.
In addition to producing 100% cork board, the company also laminates the cork with coconut fi ber to pro-duce a Cork-Coco board that offers even better sound control than stan-dard cork board insulation.
Impressive performance
The insulating value is listed as R-3.6 per inch. Test data reviewed by EBN showed slightly better performance of samples, even after removal from a building after 45 years. Cork board achieves the same European Class E fi re designation (based on EN 13501 standards) as other rigid insulation materials. However, simple tests con-ducted by Amorim show that a 40
mm sample will resist burn-through for 60 to 90 minutes, compared with 5 seconds for expanded polystyrene (EPS) of the same thickness. No fl ame retardants are added to cork to achieve its fi re resistance.
Insulating cork board has a den-sity of 7.0–7.5 lbs/ft3 (110–120 kg/
m3), compressive strength at 10%
compression of 15 psi (100 Kpa), and maximum moisture content of 8%. The material also exhibits excellent sound transmission control and vi-bration control. The average vapor permeance of 40 mm test samples was 2.2 perms (and the test report indicates conditions equivalent to a dry-cup test).
Indoor air quality emissions
EBN examined an in-depth 2011
re-port from the Portuguese laboratory LQAI (Laboratorio da Qualidade do Ar Interior) profi ling a wide range of emissions from Amorim’s expanded cork board insulation. Reporting needed for compliance with French indoor air quality regulations (in which a material is exposed for 28 days at a ventilation rate of 1.25 m3
hr–1m–2) shows that emissions of
11 constituents are far lower than
(continued from page 1)
With this fi re testing, expanded cork insulation lasts more than an hour before burn-through, compared with 5 seconds for polystyrene.
Product News & Reviews
required for the most stringent A+ class by more than an order of mag-nitude for most.
The good test results notwithstand-ing, the expanded cork board in-sulation does give off a distinctive, smoky odor—something like toast-ed autumn leaves. Some individu-als may have sensitivity to vola-tile chemicals that are clearly being emitted.
Equivalent to other rigid
insulation
Amorim’s insulating cork board is appropriate for most wall and roof applications where other rigid in-sulation materials would be used. On walls, installing cork insulation over a dedicated air barrier provided by taped sheathing provides an ap-propriate detail, with a housewrap, strapping (to provide a rainscreen), and cladding outside of that.
In Europe, it is not uncommon to insulate walls with 200–250 mm (8"–10") and roofs with 250–300 mm (10"–12") of cork board insulation, ac-cording to Simões. Even thicker lay-ers have been used in some Passive House-certifi ed projects. Austria’s fi rst Passive House, built in 1995, was i nsulated with 350 mm (13.9") of the product.
The material has even been used
as an exterior insulative cladding on a number of buildings—usually for demonstration pur-poses. The fi rst such in-stallation was a Portugal Pavilion at the Hanover World Expo in 2000. That building was de-constructed and brought back to Portugal, where it was re-erected in 2002 and has been holding up just fi ne ever since, says Simões.
Cost, dimensions,
and availability
Distribution in North America is just being estab-lished, so costs and availability are not clear. Until such distribu-tion channels are set up, inqui-ries should go directly to Amorim Isolamentos in Portugal.
Both metric and I-P dimensions will be available, though metric sizes are more readily available. Standard metric sizes are 500 mm x 1,000 mm (19.7" x 39.4"), with thicknesses from 10 mm to 320 mm in a wide range of increments. In I-P units, the standard panels are 36" x 24" or 36" x 12" in thicknesses from 1/2" to 12".
According to Simões, the cost to a distributor is expected to be about $0.70 per board foot. This does not include shipping and mark-ups, and it depends on the exchange rate. If distribution mark-ups total 50%, the cost would be about $5.50/ft2 to
pro-vide R-19, or nearly three times that of polyiso ($1.90/ft2 for R-19).
Other applications and
materials
While the high cost of expanded insulation cork board may make it a tough sell as building insulation, it may be a more marketable option for products like core material for doors, where good acoustic perfor-mance, light weight, and reasonable strength are needed.
Granular cork is also available from the company for cavity-fi ll and loose-fill wall and ceiling applications. This material is used in Europe and may be marketed here, but Simões told EBN that the rigid boardstock product is a higher priority for the company.
– Alex Wilson
For more information:
Amorim Isolamentos, S.A. +351 227 419 100
www.bcork.amorim.com/en [email protected]
Vinyl Flooring: Is Less Bad
Any Good?
Vinyl may be the most common resilient fl ooring used in buildings due to its low upfront cost and dura-bility, but green builders have tried to steer clear of it because of toxicity concerns throughout its life cycle. Now Johnsonite’s homogeneous iQ fl ooring line, available in both sheet and tile, is getting some notice as the only vinyl fl ooring to achieve Plati-num certifi cation under the NSF-332 standard for resilient fl ooring. To get there, Johnsonite has made strides in addressing many of the health and environmental issues associated with vinyl fl ooring. Do Johnsonite’s efforts, and the Platinum certifi ca-tion, allow the iQ (for “intelligent quality”) line to transcend the “vi-nyl” label? We have some doubts. A huge issue with most vinyl fl ooring is the use of petroleum-based phthal-ate plasticizers. Commonly used phthalates are endocrine disruptors and reproductive and developmen-tal toxicants. Emerging evidence also links phthalates to respiratory problems, such as asthma. Earlier this year, Tarkett (the international parent of Johnsonite) announced that phthalates will be removed from all of Johnsonite’s vinyl flooring (see “Phthalate-Free Vinyl Flooring One Step Closer to Mainstream,”
EBN March 2012). In most of the iQ Photo: Amorim Isolamentos, S.A.
Amorim's expanded cork insulation is available in a wide range of thicknesses. The material is 100% natural cork with no fl ame retardants, synthetic binders, or pigments.
Product News & Reviews
The color schemes of iQ vinyl fl ooring are designed to match those of Ecolibrium, Johnsonite's NSF-332 Platinum certifi ed wall base. Photo: Johnsonite
lines, the phthalate plasticiz-ers have been replaced by a synthetic stand-in, but in iQ Natural the replacement is a plant-based plasticizer formulated by Tarkett from castor oil. As a result, 15% of iQ Natural is biobased content. Although stepping away from petroleum-based products is a good move, biobased products are not a panacea, and they come with their own issues (see “Bio-based Materials: Not Always Greener,” EBN May 2012). Johnsonite didn’t provide
EBN with more specifi cs on
the chemicals involved in these plasticizers, so we can’t say anything about their rel-ative safety.
Chemical emissions are another issue with vinyl flooring that Johnsonite is attempting to address. All
lines of Johnsonite’s iQ fl ooring are Floor Score-certifi ed to meet strin-gent CDPH Standard Method emis-sion levels for VOCs. According to Diane Martel, vice president of sus-tainable strategies and planning at Tarkett, the company aims to reduce total VOC emissions to 100 mcg/L3,
and ultimately to 20 mcg/L3, for all
its fl ooring products.
Johnsonite has also addressed the toxic emissions typically associated with maintenance of vinyl fling. Most commercial vinyl fl oor-ing products have a wear layer on top that needs to be stripped and reapplied on a regular basis. This maintenance routine releases VOCs into indoor air and costs the facility time and money. Johnsonite’s iQ, on the other hand, has no wear layer, and the company claims that no regular stripping and waxing are needed; instead, the regular main-tenance routine for iQ flooring is cleaning with an agent that works by emulsifying built-up oils, followed by dry-buffi ng to smooth the
sur-face of the fl ooring and prevent dirt from collecting. As part of the NSF-332 certifi cation process, Johnsonite submitted ASTM testing to prove iQ’s durability, but a case study dis-tributed by Johnsonite provides ad-ditional insight about an aesthetic tradeoff. The fl ooring doesn’t have the same shine as a freshly waxed vinyl fl oor, so doctors and nurses at the Alliance Community Hospital in Ohio initially thought that the iQ vinyl fl ooring looked dirty.
The major environmental issue that iQ fl ooring doesn’t address is poly-vinyl chloride (PVC) and its impacts. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the manufacture of PVC is one of the largest sources of dioxin. Dioxins are persistent, bioac-cumulative toxic chemicals as well as carcinogens and endocrine disrupt-ers. Dioxins, along with other PBTs, heavy metals, and carcinogens, are released not only during manufac-ture but also in landfi lls at the end of the fl ooring’s life, where landfi ll fi res can release huge amounts of toxic chemicals into the earth, air, and
water. While Johnsonite has addressed several concerns with vinyl flooring, until these issues are resolved, a major environmental draw-back to vinyl flooring will remain.
Most iQ styles are available in sheet or tile, though iQ Natural is only available in sheets. Sheets are 6'-6" wide and 82'-7" long, and tiles are 24" square. The overall thick-ness of the fl ooring is 0.080" (2 mm), and it is available in dozens of color options. One of the recommended adhe-sives, Johnsonite’s #925 resil-ient fl ooring adhesive, is CRI Green Label Plus-certifi ed to be low-emitting.
Certification to NSF-332 requires compliance with several prerequisites; most signifi cantly, these prerequi-sites require full disclosure of reci-pes and processes used in manufac-turing, and points are offered based on avoidance and reduction of toxic ingredients.
Johnsonite, like most companies, does not share its NSF-332 score-cards—making it impossible to know how Johnsonite exceeded the minimum requirements to earn Plat-inum for iQ. Using biobased materi-als and avoiding phthalates certainly helped, but NSF-332 also places a lot of emphasis on corporate practices. While laudable, these don’t neces-sarily affect what is a top concern for many: the content of the fl ooring rolling off the production line. John-sonite has made signifi cant strides in reducing the environmental impact of vinyl fl ooring, but it is still work-ing around the edges of the problem instead of solving it directly.
– Martin Solomon
For more information:
Johnsonite
Feature Article – Energy Reporting: It’s the Law
Energy Reporting: It’s the Law
(from page 1)Benefi ts of Benchmarking
and Disclosure
Energy reporting mandates pick up where codes leave off. While energy codes mandate increasingly stringent levels of energy effi ciency in new buildings and major renova-tions, they don’t address existing buildings that are not otherwise being renovated, they don’t ensure that the properties are managed for efficiency, and they don’t encour-age performance beyond the code minimum.
Disclosure laws in the U.S. either require regular reporting to the gov-ernment or make energy perfor-mance data available when a prop-erty is sold or leased. Most govern-ment reporting programs include a provision for that information to be made public at some point—and it is these public disclosure mandates that really get the attention of prop-erty owners and managers.
Fear of a scarlet letter
That disclosure can bring a lot of benefi ts to high-performing build-ings that win bragging rights, but owners and managers of other build-ings might not appreciate them. The public disclosure component of the new energy reporting law in Phila-delphia passed over the objection of the Building Owners and Managers Association (BOMA) of Philadel-phia, whose president testifi ed that a building could be unfairly branded with a “scarlet letter” due to the ac-tions of an energy-intensive tenant, according to a report in the
Philadel-phia Inquirer.
In the age of Facebook, that “scarlet letter” fear might not be too far off the mark. Although data like these in the past might have been buried in a fi le cabinet somewhere, websites like HonestBuildings.com are mak-ing data public and easy to fi nd (see “No More Secrets—‘Facebook’ for
Buildings Tells All,” EBN July 2012). As data gets released from New York City this fall, and from other cities in years ahead, we can expect to learn that a lot of prominent buildings— some of them new, “green” build-ings—use a lot of energy.
Concerned that the Energy Star benchmarking algorithm doesn’t account for certain high-energy de-mands in a building, a number of New York owners lobbied to have certain buildings excluded from the scoring entirely. New York’s Local Law 84, which mandates bench-marking and disclosure, exempts buildings that have at least 10% of their floorspace devoted to data centers, trading fl oors, or broadcast studios from receiving an Energy Star score. These “high-intensity buildings” will still have their en-ergy use intensity (EUI) disclosed publicly, but they won’t have the embarrassment of a low Energy Star score derived by comparing them to standard offi ce buildings.
Empowering the real estate
market
Advocates of disclosure laws, such as the Institute for Market Transfor-mation (IMT), emphasize the fi nan-cial benefi ts for the real estate mar-ket. Cliff Majersik, director of IMT, points out that energy effi ciency has historically been undervalued in real estate transactions because apprais-ers have not been well equipped to assess it or understand its impact. IMT recently published a report with the Appraisal Institute describing how appraisers can use energy data when assessing comparable proper-ties.
The new laws also have the potential to bring the benefi ts of green build-ing to a wider group of owners. Chris Cayten, managing director for CodeGreen, an energy consulting fi rm in New York City, argues that while the Energy Star program has
long been available as a voluntary label (with particular appeal to high-performing buildings), reporting mandates have “brought the idea of energy effi ciency and Energy Star scores into classes of buildings that were not historically looking at these issues.”
Programs like LEED and Energy Star have given some owners goals to stretch for, but to cut fossil fuel use and carbon emissions for the entire building stock, we need more tools to raise the bar for all buildings. It’s too soon to tell just how effective public disclosure laws will be at driving energy savings, but in New York City they have already done a lot to raise awareness of energy use, according to energy consul-tant Adam Hinge. “There are many senior managers and owners who are now aware of their Energy Star scores and EUIs that didn’t know about them before,” Hinge reports. Hinge has noticed that the pre-dawn skyline in New York is noticeably darker than it used to be, suggesting that building managers are starting to take steps to save energy.
Hinge is also seeing “a new level of cooperation between landlords and tenants,” who share a concern about the potential for bad publicity if their building is exposed as being an energy hog. These are all indica-tions that the disclosure mandate is having a real impact.
Lessons from Europe
The European Union is often per-ceived as being ahead of North America in energy-effi ciency mea-sures, and its 2002 Energy Perfor-mance of Buildings Directive would seem to corroborate that view. The impact of that directive in the U.K. “is not turning out to be as great as I had hoped,” reports Bill Bordass of Usable Buildings Trust in London. In the Netherlands, on the other hand, researchers Nils Kok and Maarten Jennen have found that buildings with lower ratings achieve 6.5% low-er rents than their bettlow-er-plow-erforming
Feature Article – Energy Reporting: It’s the Law
counterparts (as published in April 2012 in the journal Energy Policy). Europeans use both “asset labels,” which rate the predicted perfor-mance of a building based on how it’s designed and built, and “op-erational labels,” which are based on actual energy use. Most European countries require operational labels only for publicly owned buildings, while private buildings only have to offer asset labels. That focus has led Europeans to underestimate the importance of plug loads and other energy uses driven by occupant ac-tivities—which supports the choice in the U.S. to focus on actual energy use, supported by robust bench-marking.
A virtuous cycle
With the release of its LEED 2009 family of rating systems, the U.S. Green Building Council introduced a reporting requirement for all LEED-certifi ed buildings. (Previously such reporting was only used in estab-lishing LEED for Existing Buildings certifi cation.) Even though the new reporting requirement involved nei-ther public disclosure nor any threat of action if the use exceeds predic-tions, it raised signifi cant concerns among some building owners. Now that municipalities are mandating reporting and, in some cases, public disclosure, those concerns are dis-sipating, and owners are gaining valuable feedback from their par-ticipation in the reporting program. The spread of energy reporting is also creating “building blocks,” in which cities and states can build on each other’s programs and munici-palities can learn from each other, says Rebecca Baker, energy bench-marking program manager for the City of Seattle. The State of Wash-ington fi rst enacted a transactional disclosure-based law (with disclo-sure required only when selling or renting the building), says Baker, which Seattle was able to build on with its annual reporting law. The laws have spurred the development
of a vendor community competing to gain customers for benchmarking; the vendors then can offer broader energy-effi ciency and building man-agement services. These develop-ments also contributed to the 2030 District springing up in Seattle (see “Building Owners Embrace Sharing Economy with 2030 Districts,” EBN Apr. 2012) as a voluntary, private initiative providing real-time en-ergy and water data for 25 million ft2 of building space within Seattle’s
core, and aiming for a 50% reduc-tion in energy use, water use, and transportation-related carbon emis-sions by 2030.
For those reviewing building per-formance data for insights, there are new troves of data just waiting for analysis. For example, Cayten cites new confi rmation of the long-held idea that older buildings can perform really well. “We’ve found a lot of Class B offi ce buildings that score well with Energy Star,” he says. “Some of these great old buildings that are solidly built, with simple systems, are pretty energy-effi cient, and [their owners] didn’t know that.”
What Is Required
Requirements typically vary based on building size and ownership type. How information is disclosed also varies.
Which buildings are covered
As cities roll out disclosure laws, public buildings often pilot report-ing and disclosure systems and dem-onstrate to the private sector that the public sector walks the walk. In Washington, D.C., for example, the law applied fi rst to government buildings over 10,000 ft2, which had
their (rather embarrassing) energy use disclosed to the public for the fi rst time in 2011 (see “D.C. Energy Performance Ratings Set National Precedent,” EBN Feb. 2011). With the exception of certain laws applying to homes, disclosure laws apply mostly to large buildings; at least 10,000 ft2
in some cases, 50,000 ft2 in others.
Public disclosure vs.
transactional disclosure
Laws differ as to how publicly in-formation about specifi c buildings is trumpeted.
Public Disclosure
Beginning in the fall of 2012, data on nearly 3,000 individual buildings will be released in New York City, revealing the following metrics from Portfolio Manager reports:
• site energy use intensity;
• source EUI, weather normalized; • carbon emissions;
• Energy Star score, for building types that Energy Star supports.
Source: Institute for Market Transformation These projections estimate the impact of commercial benchmarking mandates based on the size of the market, the nature of the mandate, and which types of buildings are included.
Benchmarking Policy Impact Projections
Feature Article – Energy Reporting: It’s the Law
In 2013, the disclosure will include more than 12,000 buildings, includ-ing apartment buildinclud-ings and condo-miniums. It will also include water use data.
More than 10,000 buildings, includ-ing multifamily properties, have al-ready reported their data to the City; a report due out this summer will aggregate the fi ndings. Laurie Kerr, senior policy advisor at the Mayor’s Offi ce of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability, told EBN, “This is the fi rst time so much energy data has been available for any locality in the U.S. and, we believe, in the world.” Washington, D.C., San Francisco, and Philadelphia have similar plans to release their data. Seattle won’t make the data it collects public other than by releasing it to tenants and buyers, though some have suggested that it could be forced to make data public under freedom-of-informa-tion laws.
Transaction-triggered disclosure
In California, Washington State, and Austin, Texas, the law only requires that energy data be made avail-able to counter-parties in real-estate transactions. “If you don’t want to sell a building, if you’re not leasing the whole thing to a single tenant, and if you’re not refi nancing, you have no obligation,” explains Justin Regnier, P.E., mechanical engineer at the California Energy Commis-sion’s High Performance Buildings and Standards Development Offi ce. The California disclosure require-ment takes effect in stages, be-ginning on January 1, 2013, with transactions involving commercial buildings over 50,000 ft2. Outputs
from Energy Star Portfolio Manager, which are shared with a potential buyer or lease-holder, must also be made available to the California Energy Commission, but there is no provision for making that informa-tion public—a factor that has made the law more palatable to real estate interests.
While public disclosure is not part of the plan for these transaction-based information exchanges, the data may still become publicly available over time, because it can be collected and aggregated by CoStar and other real estate data services, which currently track sale and lease prices and oc-cupancy data.
Although Seattle requires disclo-sure only around a transaction, all building owners must report their numbers to the City, and the City will release aggregate fi gures for the building stock. Rebecca Baker, ener-gy benchmarking program manager there, told EBN, “We’re not into pub-lic shaming. We want the building owner to be having that conversation with people who are engaged in the transaction” at a time when they can converse about the particulars of the building and why the energy use intensity (EUI) is what it is.
The weak real-estate market means
that relatively few transactions are taking place right now, giving the transaction-based approach less of an impact. Even allowing for that ef-fect, however, it’s apparent from the differences between New York and Seattle that a plan for highly visible public disclosure of the information is far more effective at getting the at-tention of building owners and man-agers than is a transaction-triggered disclosure.
Carrot or stick
When owners don’t comply, cities and states have to choose whether to use a “carrot” or a “stick” ap-proach to bring the market along. In Seattle, Baker told EBN, “In the fi rst few years of the program, we have taken the approach that we want to educate building owners as to the benefi ts” of energy benchmarking, “as opposed to coming out with a full-fl edged enforcement program.” So far, Seattle’s compliance rate with the new law has been around 30%– 40%, according to Baker. The law stipulates a structure of fi nes, but she says that they’re unreasonably high. Some vendors there offer compliance services for free; others charge any-where from $100 to $2,000, depend-ing on the builddepend-ing scale, so usdepend-ing a vendor to comply is likely to be cheaper than paying a fi ne.
Silliker+Partners is one of those ven-dors, and principal Jared Silliker feels that clearer penalties and strict enforcement deadlines would in-crease compliance. “The very fi rst question I get all the time is ‘what happens if I don’t do this?’” he re-ports, noting that some recalcitrant owners have concluded that they can safely ignore the requirement.
Reporting: The Government
Is Here to Help
All mandates in the U.S. that require reporting of data to local government entities rely on Portfolio Manager as their data repository and collection tool. In New York City, for example,
Disclosure for Homes
Energy reporting laws have tended to focus on large commercial buildings, public and private, but in some locations they extend to single-family homes. New York State has had a Truth in Heating Law in effect since 1981, requiring dis-closure of two years of utility bills to any potential buyer or renter who makes the request. Others requiring such disclosure include Alaska, Nevada, and Montgom-ery County, Maryland, according to IMT. Organizations like IMT see the next step for single-family homes in the SAVE Act, a proposed federal law that would account for energy effi ciency in appraisals and in the underwriting process—potentially benefi ting buyers and sellers of energy-effi cient homes and encouraging energy upgrades as well as data collection. That legislation has a powerful enemy, though, in the National Association of Realtors (NAR). NAR’s environmental policy representative, Austin Perez, told EBN, “There is no need for any kind of a federal mandate for that; it will just slow down home sales and create other kinds of property value reductions. If that information is relevant, the market will provide it.”
Feature Article – Energy Reporting: It’s the Law
building owners or their hired con-sultants log into Portfolio Manager, enter defi ning characteristics for a building, and provide data from a calendar year’s worth of energy bills. New York and other cities have also been working with the U.S. Depart-ment of Energy (DOE) and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory on a new interface that automates some steps. Called the Standard Energy Efficiency Data (SEED) Platform, the software will offer local govern-ments a low-cost way to create their own access points for users to enter data into Portfolio Manager as well as their own reporting tools for get-ting their data out. SEED is also tied into DOE’s Building Performance Database, which contains data for thousands of buildings in a way that allows users to learn from trends in the data while protecting the ano-nymity of individual buildings. SEED should also make things easier for third-party, private-sector tools that hope to benefi t from the newly emerging streams of data on building energy use. Websites including Hon-estBuildings.com and the U.S. Green Building Council’s Green Building Information Gateway (GBIG) are
expected to absorb and distribute the data on New York’s buildings as soon as it becomes available.
Consultants heavily involved
New York City offered training and education programs on its new en-ergy reporting requirements, ex-pecting that building owners would want their staff to take on this new task. Some did, but a surprising number of owners chose to rely on third-party consultants to do their reporting instead. “Over half the buildings were benchmarked by consultants,” Beber reports, adding, “In New York, we shop everything out.”
Owners in Seattle have the advan-tage of automated data reporting ser-vices available from all three energy utilities. That means that owners or consultants just have to enter build-ing information and authorize the data transfer. That service has made support from consultants less need-ed than it is in New York, although some expertise is still helpful to navigate the different protocols that each utility uses for data transfer. In both cities, consultants offered to do the reporting for very reasonable fees because they saw this service as a foot in the door that they could leverage to win additional work from the owner, including energy
audits, retrocommissioning, and energy upgrades. In New York, each consulting group handled a lot of properties: 20 fi rms were responsible for 80% of the third-party reporting. City staff met with one consultant whose portfolio had an unusual-ly high percentage of low-scoring buildings, assuming that the consul-tant was making a reporting error. It turned out the consultant had in-tentionally targeted buildings that performed poorly in the hope of generating more retrofi t work.
The multi-tenant quagmire
The simple concept of providing energy and water data for “a build-ing” can turn out to be quite com-plicated. Utility companies track their customers based on meters and accounts, not buildings, and municipal property lists are based on tax lots. Multi-tenant buildings often have multiple meters, while campus buildings may share a meter with others.
California has strict data privacy laws. One of the reasons that imple-mentation of California’s law has
The LEED-NC Gold Comcast Center in Philadelphia, offi ces across Manhattan, and the LEED-EBOM Gold Vance Building in Seattle are all subject to energy disclosure laws enacted within the last few years. Owned by Jonathan Rose Companies and managed by Kidder Mathews,
the Vance Building has an Energy Star score of 98—a fact that has to be reported to the City. Numerous energy-effi ciency features include a Web-based dashboard system used by tenants and management.
Photo: Nadav Malin Photo: Kidder Mathews
Feature Article – Energy Reporting: It’s the Law
been delayed twice is the question of how to get owners access to their tenants’ energy data so they can dis-close it without violating the ratepay-ers’ right to privacy.
The problem became more man-ageable after the California Public Utilities Commission ruled in July 2011 on data privacy issues related to smart meters. That ruling clarifi ed when and how this kind of data can be used, and who can have access to it. A technological solution is now in place that requires utilities to pro-vide whole-building data to owners for benchmarking purposes but only after taking steps to aggregate and anonymize the data so owners can’t use it to determine how much comes from each tenant’s meter.
In the rest of the country, data pri-vacy is less regulated, so it has been a relatively simple matter for Con Edison, the main utility in New York, to offer owners an aggregated report for multi-tenant properties. The utility charges a nominal fee of $102.50 for that report. Common-wealth Edison in Chicago makes it even easier, with an online portal where owners can get that informa-tion for free—even though Chicago has yet to require energy reporting.
There is evidence that the simple act of having building owners gather energy data for the whole building, including tenants’ data, is leading to some benefi ts. According to Cayten of CodeGreen, in many cases those bills “get rolled into operating ex-penses of the building and are never scrutinized by owners directly.” In some cases, owners “actually make money on re-selling energy to ten-ants, so they have no incentive to reduce tenant consumption.” Now, he says, “Many owners are saying that’s the way of the past; we will have to fi nd ways to help tenants reduce energy.”
Portfolio Manager
improvements
The reliance of cities on Energy Star Portfolio Manager as the tool of choice for buildings to enter and report data is increasing use and put-ting a new focus on the tool, which now contains more than 250,000 building records covering nearly 27 billion ft2—or 40% of the U.S.
commercial buildings market. In response, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is currently revamping Portfolio Manager and plans to launch a new version in June 2013.
The updates affect everything from underlying data structures to the user interface, which EPA says will be modeled on that of TurboTax. Users will benefi t from automated “dashboard” views of data across their portfolios and a much more in-tuitive data-entry process. The new version also includes a provision for benchmarking the performance of projects before they’re built—a feature that is currently handled via EPA’s separate Target Finder tool.
Limits of scoring
Using actual energy consumption data, Portfolio Manager rates build-ings on a scale of 1–100, with higher scores being better. A rating of 75 means that a building performs bet-ter than 75% of similar buildings na-tionwide and that it is eligible for the Energy Star label. Portfolio Manager provides its ratings using data from similar buildings in the Commercial Buildings Energy Consumption Sur-vey (CBECS), employing statistical models to smooth over the gaps in CBECS data. Energy Star scores are based on source energy use intensity (EUI) in kBtu per square foot. Once energy reporting and bench-marking become routine, cities and states will have enormous databases that could make CBECS obsolete. (Portfolio Manager may eventually take advantage of these databases, but the 2013 revamp does not include changes to the scoring protocols.) Nagging questions remain about how useful the Portfolio Manager score is, however. “It’s most useful in having buildings compare with themselves over time,” argues Jen-ny Carney, a principal with YR&G Sustainability. Several of the many inputs to Portfolio Manager, like square footage, the number of oc-cupants, and the number of personal computers, have a signifi cant impact on the Energy Star score. That’s by design: larger buildings, or build-ings with more intensive occupancy patterns, are expected to use more energy. But, Carney says, “The extent
Source: Institute for Market Transformation (IMT)
U.S. Building Rating and Disclosure Policies
Feature Article – Energy Reporting: It’s the Law
to which those inputs are known accurately is pretty dubious.” While Portfolio Manager has specifi c rules for determining those inputs, they are rarely followed to the letter. Car-ney believes that occupancy and other numbers could easily vary by plus or minus 10% in how they are measured—enough to throw off scores by quite a bit. “If you’re do-ing cross-builddo-ing comparisons and half of those variables are inaccurate, you’re creating this impression of a fair comparison that may not be fair.”
Energy Reporting: City by City
Using the site and source EUIs from Portfolio Manager instead of the Energy Star score doesn’t offer as much by way of benchmarking; the user has to compare them to na-tional averages, past performance, or other reference points. But it does remove the uncertainty introduced by most of those variables, leaving only square footage. Even that isn’t always measured consistently, how-ever. Owners and property manag-ers are more familiar with metrics such as rentable square feet than the gross square feet (GSF) that Portfolio
Manager requires. Hinge reports that anomalies of 3%–5% in GSF are typical, but Carney has seen this measure vary by 10% or more. The new version of Portfolio Manager coming in 2013 should help to reduce that inconsistency by asking for the building’s gross fl oor area directly, as opposed to just summing up the gross floor area of the individual spaces as the tool currently does.
Building Momentum
The nonprofi t Institute for Market Transformation has been a leading champion of energy disclosure and benchmarking as a driver for energy effi ciency in buildings, tracking gov-ernment initiatives around the world on its BuildingRating.org website, and partnering with real estate orga-nizations and the U.S. Green Build-ing Council to create the Data Access and Transparency Alliance (DATA), which seeks to promote electronic access to building energy data. DATA got some wind in its sails when the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners (NARUC) approved a resolution in July 2011 encouraging utilities to give commercial building owners access to whole-building energy consumption data to support en-ergy benchmarking efforts. As the offi cials who oversee regulation of electric utilities, NARUC’s position is infl uential in promoting utility com-pany investments in changes that would allow them to draw connec-tions between meters and buildings. The U.S. has never seen widespread energy reporting on the scale cur-rently being implemented in the cit-ies and states profi led here. It’s an ex-citing time to be watching the fi eld, and EBN will continue to report on developments. Stay tuned, and let us know how energy reporting is affecting you in the online forum ac-companying this article at Building Green.com/energyreporting.
City or State Effective Date Scope Building Size Disclosure
Austin, TX June 2011 Gov’t, commercial, and multifamily (audits only)
>10,000 ft2 for
commercial
Reporting to the city and during transactions The Energy Conservation Audit and Disclosure (ECAD), passed in November 2008, has a broad scope, requiring audits for single-family homes upon sale, and audits and upgrades for multifamily.
Boston In development Commercial, multifamily >50,000 ft2 Public disclosure
In June 2012, Mayor Thomas Menino announced a Next Generation Green Building Policy, including a Building Energy Disclosure Ordinance to be introduced in Fall 2012 and modeled on NYC’s.
Philadelphia Starting in June 2013 Commercial >50,000 ft2 Public disclosure
Owners will have to annually report their building’s energy usage (electric, gas, steam, and oil), water usage, and building characteristics to the City through Portfolio Manager.
New York City 2010–2013 Commercial, multifamily
>10,000 ft2 (gov’t),
>50,000 ft2
(commercial)
Public disclosure A suite of laws goes beyond the energy-reporting mandate enacted by Local Law 84. Local Law 85 established NYC’s own energy code, which matches New York State’s code except that it includes all renovations and repairs that are subject to the City’s construction permits. Local Law 87 requires energy audits and retrocommissioning (including envelope commissioning) every ten years for all build-ings over 50,000 ft2 unless the buildings have demonstrated good energy performance. Local Law 88
requires lighting upgrades and submetering for tenant spaces over 10,000 ft2.
San Francisco 2011–2013 Commercial >10,000 ft2 Public disclosure
The Existing Commercial Building Energy Performance Ordinance requires annual disclosure of energy usage by commercial owners, and buildings over 10,000 ft2 will have to undergo periodic audits.
Seattle 2011–2013 Commercial;
multi-family over fi ve units >10,000 ft2
Report to City and during transactions The Energy Benchmarking and Reporting Program, requiring disclosing energy data to the City through Portfolio Manager, builds on a state law requiring reporting during transactions.
Washington, D.C. 2009–2014 Commercial, multifamily >50,000 ft2 Public disclosure
Public building Energy Star benchmarking (>10,000 ft2) and public reporting of scores began in
2009, with data available online. Private building benchmarking (>50,000 ft2) is being phased in
by building size starting in fall 2012 for buildings over 150,000 ft2, with public reporting of scores
beginning in 2013 with the second year of data (buildings over 200,000 ft2 will report two years’
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Basics of the Psychrometric Chart
In high-performance buildings, we have to manage en-ergy and moisture with equal intensity. The psychrometric chart helps us understand how they are linked and gives us key data points for managing moisture. Using just the vertical temperature lines, the horizontal humidity lines, and the curved relative humidity lines, we can do two important things.Determine the dew point. Every point on the
psychro-metric chart has coordinates that give us the dry-bulb temperature and the relative humidity (RH). By moving leftward in a straight line from any coordinate, we can travel all the way to the saturation curve and from there
Illustration: Peter Harris straight down to determine the dew point of that air. At 68°F and 60% RH, the dew point is around 53°F; at 70% RH, the dewpoint is 58°F—a temperature that surfaces like windows or HVAC ducts could easily reach, resulting in condensation. The relationship between temperature and relative humidity is important for design of both HVAC systems and the building envelope .
Determine the mass of water in any volume of air. By
moving rightward in a straight line from any point on the chart, we can determine the weight of the water in a given volume of air. This helps determine how well a building space can accommodate expected increases in the water content of the air, which affects HVAC system design and specifi cations.
RH lines are approximate; for precise calculations, refer to a technical source such as ASHRAE Fundamentals.