SBC staff, Author at Smart Buildings Center

The Essential Role of Smarter Buildings in the Clean Energy Transition

October 31, 2022 By SBC staff

Increasingly, across the United States and abroad, building owners are implementing comprehensive Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) programs. ESG programs provide a framework for assessing and managing risks stemming from a range of environmental, social and governance factors. This trend is fueled in part by an increasing understanding of the looming danger of climate change across a range of potential outcomes from financial risk to human health and wellbeing. In many jurisdictions, the push for ESG reporting is also coming from the regulations that are being imposed on buildings, largely driven by the urgency around climate mitigation actions. It is widely accepted that climate warming stops when Greenhouse Gas emissions stop. In the US and elsewhere, this is leading policymakers to focus on greenhouse gas mitigation through regulation of emissions. By far, the two largest sources of emissions in the United States are transportation and buildings. If we are to stop or even slow climate change, we need to lower emissions from cars and buildings.

Policies aimed at buildings take two different approaches. The first is to target buildings directly through regulation of building site emissions, such as the forthcoming commercial building performance standard from the City of Seattle. The second approach targets the energy system that provides buildings with electricity, space and water heating. Policies aimed at decarbonizing the energy system ultimately affect the availability and pricing of electricity and other energy fuels, and often come in the form of policies that regulate power sources. In Washington State, the legislature passed the Clean Energy Transformation Act, which seeks to eliminate carbon from electricity requiring electric utilities to shift to carbon free power sources. Given this plan to decarbonize electricity in Washington State, the state energy strategy recommends an overall electrification pathway (for buildings and transportation alike) as the least cost pathway to meeting the state’s greenhouse gas emissions targets. The authors of the strategy point out that such a pathway will increase the electrical load by roughly 92% over the 2020 level. You hear similar estimates from other states and even national calculations. In the climate space, there is widespread agreement that to stop climate change, we need to achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2050 and that “clean electricity” fueling our buildings and transportation is essential to success, but it will require a groundswell of innovation and new technologies to get there.

What does this mean for buildings? What role do smart buildings play in the clean energy transition? Will this all amount to increased costs in building ownership or are there financial benefits and opportunities for building owners who convert to smart technologies to support the transition? At the Smart Buildings Center (SBC), these are questions we have been asking industry leaders and will continue to explore in our programming. We believe smart buildings have an essential role to play in the transition to a carbon free economy and we believe there is great economic potential for building owners who lead this transition with grid-interactive technologies, systems that align with grid needs and clean power production, onsite battery storage, onsite EV charging and innovations around how those technologies are leveraged, and more smart technologies, approaches, and practices that will recruit high tenancy and support the social and economic goals of the community in which they reside.

We plan to continue to push these discussions through the SBC programming, stay tuned for more to come along these lines, and in the meantime, check out the recordings from some of the discussions that have already taken place—and don’t miss this blog post from our partner organization, NEEC.

2020

Smart Buildings Week – Grid-Enabled Efficient Buildings

2021

Smart Buildings Exchange 2021 – Opening Plenary Panel – Smarter Buildings and a Changing Utility – a Vision of the New World of Energy
Smart Buildings Exchange 2021 – Grid-Interactive Efficient Buildings
Smart Buildings Exchange 2021 – Buildings and Carbon
Smart Buildings Exchange 2021 – Deriving Value from Smart, Interactive Buildings

2022

SBC Executive Forum – Electrification & Grid-Interactive Efficient Buildings, part 1
SBC Executive Forum – Electrification & Grid-Interactive Efficient Buildings, part 2
Smart Buildings Exchange 2022 – Senior Executives Discuss the Future of Energy Services and the Built Environment
Smart Buildings Exchange 2022 – Building Performance Reporting – How Smart Technology Can Help
Smart Buildings Exchange 2022 – Grid-Interactive Efficient Buildings
Smart Buildings Exchange 2022 – the Role of Smart Buildings in Reducing Carbon Emissions

Online Training: Washington State Clean Buildings Performance Standard – What do installers, vendors & building operators need to know?

October 13, 2022 By SBC staff

Tuesday, November 1st
11:00 AM – 1:00 PM Pacific Time

Description
This free training will provide an introduction to the Washington State Clean Buildings Performance Standard (CBPS) and highlight tools and resources available to installers, vendors, and building operators to assist building owners with energy efficiency improvements that may be required for standard compliance.

Presenter’s bio
Rebecca Sheppard is a Senior Project Manager at the Northwest Energy Efficiency Council and Smart Buildings Center. She holds an MBA, is a Building Operator Certification (BOC) Level II graduate and has a certificate in Construction Management from the University of Washington. Throughout her career including her time as a Resource Conservation Manager, she has worked on various building retrofit projects, energy management and analysis, project management, and capital projects.

Successful completion of the training provides 2 points towards maintaining your Building Operator Certification (BOC) Credential and .20 IACET CEU’s towards the renewal of other industry certifications, certificates and licenses.

Register Here

This training is funded and supported by:

Webinar: Draft Emissions Targets for Seattle Building Performance Standards, October 25th at 12pm

October 13, 2022 By SBC staff

Join the Office of Sustainability & Environment (OSE) for a technical webinar at which OSE and SBW Consulting will share the draft greenhouse gas intensity targets under consideration and the analysis conducted to inform the targets. Presentations will be followed by the opportunity for comments and questions. OSE will also provide a brief overview of the proposed policy and the updated timeline.

This webinar is a follow-up to open houses in April and June that provided detailed background and the draft policy framework. Recordings and slides from those events are available at www.seattle.gov/building-performance-standards.

Date: October 25, 2022 from 12:00pm to 1:00pm
Location: Online via Zoom
Pre-register here: https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_3nqYS-oWSo-v6_dCnCagNg

This webinar will be recorded and posted on the OSE website afterwards.

About the Policy: Performance standards are a powerful tool to reduce climate pollution and transition toward cleaner, healthier buildings where we live and work. This policy is projected to reduce emissions from Seattle’s buildings (in total) 27% by 2050. This policy would gradually phase out carbon pollution from existing nonresidential and multifamily buildings over 20,000 sq. ft. through mandatory greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions targets beginning 2026 for the largest nonresidential buildings. Targets would become more stringent over time, to net-zero GHG emissions by 2050. Visit www.seattle.gov/building-performance-standards for more information and timeline.

Job Opportunity: Building Climate Policy Advisor, City of Seattle

October 13, 2022 By SBC staff

THE DEPARTMENT
The Office of Sustainability & Environment (OSE) develops and implements citywide environmental policies and programs that propel our city toward a sustainable, equitable, and carbon neutral future.

THE JOB
We are recruiting for a Building Climate Policy Advisor to implement and develop successful building energy climate policies to reduce emissions and energy use to meet Seattle’s climate goals of carbon neutrality by 2050. This is a job with enduring impact.

In this job, you will:

Ensure programs and policies are equitably, efficiently, and effectively crafted, implemented, measured, and improved to gain the greatest impact in the near term
Lead all data, database, and analysis work to maximize resources, measure success, identify impact lags and emerging barriers to progress
Oversee and direct the work of staff supporting Benchmarking, Building Tune-Ups, and Building Emissions Performance Standards, three of Seattle’s largest climate policies
Share information and recommendations with OSE teammates, citywide colleagues, elected officials, and community members with differing levels of technical understanding
Coordinate and lead multiple ongoing IT projects with IT department and consultants

The position application recruitment process closes on Tuesday, November 1^st promptly at 4:00 PM. View the full job description and application requirements here.

Washington Building Electrification Grant Program

September 29, 2022 By SBC staff

The Washington State Department of Commerce is preparing to make $9.7 million of total funding available under the Clean Energy Fund Building Electrification grant program. The program will award funding to eligible projects that advance all-electric buildings by deploying smart technologies to demonstrate grid-interactive efficient buildings, or installing high-efficiency electric equipment to reduce the use of fossil equipment. Eligible applicants include for-profit companies, non-profit organizations, state and local governments, Tribal governments, retail electric utilities, and individual owners of multifamily residential or commercial buildings. Applicants are eligible for reduced match requirements based on the percent of total project costs dedicated to reducing energy burdens and meaningfully engaging priority communities, and providing workforce development and partnership opportunities.

Commerce anticipates opening the grant for applications in October 2022.

Please visit the Clean Energy Fund Building Electrification website for more information on the program and announcements on the release of the solicitation.

Q&A Series: The Future of Intelligent Lighting

September 29, 2022 By SBC staff

This resource is brought to you by BetterBricks

As the commercial lighting industry continues it steady move towards more advanced controls and lighting solutions, for many experts, all signs point to networked lighting controls. And when it comes to truly intelligent, flexible lighting with non-energy benefits—such as cost savings and utility incentives—the future may be Luminaire Level Lighting Controls (LLLC). Read this Q&A series where industry experts break down the technology, and provide informative use cases and advice for architects and building owners considering LLLC for their next project.

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