Building for Energy Efficiency: Insulation

Using Energy-Efficient Equipment

Energy-Efficient Design: Passive Heating, Cooling, Ventilation and Lighting

Source: http://nahbrc.com/trends_and_reports/trends/what_do_homebuyers_really_want_in_a_green_home#

Conventional wisdom among builders is that the only green feature consumers want is energy efficiency, because it’s the one that can be easily quantified. Recent research shows, however, that builders adhering to this “wisdom” are focused on the green market as we used to know it, not the green market emerging today. Consumers are becoming increasingly sophisticated in their understanding that green construction is a comprehensive and integrated set of construction practices, and they are starting to reward builders who can respond to more than just energy efficiency.

Is Energy Efficiency All that Matters to Consumers?

The short answer to this question is “no.” Energy efficiency is a very tangible benefit that consumers recognize as valuable. The energy efficiency benefit is easily measured by the operational savings that the homebuyer will realize, but consumers are looking for more than homes that are energy efficient, and a Green Certified home will deliver those benefits that consumers are seeking.

Skeptical builders may object to building and certifying green homes and note that their buyers are not asking for “green.” And, it’s true that few homebuyers march into a sales center and declare that they are looking for a green home. The problem is that green is too vague, overused, and often meaningless, but consumers do know exactly what they want. They just don’t necessarily call it “green.”

Some other consumers may assume that a home tagged as “green” will cost more than they can afford. In these markets, it doesn’t mean that select green features aren’t desirable, just that consumers may be more interested in the specific benefits as opposed to a blanket categorization of features being green. The most important step in selling a green home is to convey to the buyer what makes the home green and how its environmental impact is rated.

Homebuyers Respond to Diverse Sales Points

Builders often want to sell their homes with a single marketing message. Unfortunately, research shows that gender, geography, age, and educational level all impact which green marketing message will resonate best. Some examples:

• Energy efficiency, which results in lower operating costs, may be a difficult benefit to sell in neighborhoods where utility costs are low.
• Younger buyers typically care more about the potential environmental impact of their home and respond more favorably to information about features that reduce the home’s environmental footprint.
• Women are more influenced by green features than men and they often respond very positively to homes that have “show and tell” visual aids and interactive displays.

Sell the Benefits of Your Green Home, Not the Features

In selecting a new house, most buyers have a few simple goals in mind. They aren’t necessarily looking for specific products, technologies, or features, but instead, they are looking at the advantages they will enjoy from the features. Therefore, don’t tout a tight thermal envelope – explain how the home will be warmer in the winter and cooler in the summer because a tightly sealed building eliminates drafts and unwanted pollutants. Buyers want their families to be comfortable in their home. Likewise, don’t automatically flaunt those low-VOC finishes or the MERV 8 air filters. Instead, boast about the improved indoor air quality with reduced pollutants and better ventilation. Buyers want their families to have a healthy home.

Green homes provide many benefits to the occupants and the community. However, when surveyed, homebuyers consistently rate the following three categories of benefits as the most important:

1. A Healthy Place to Live
   Homes are healthier places to live for their occupants when they are dry, ventilated, and the contaminants within the building envelope are limited. When surveyed, these are the features that consumers said they were willing to pay a premium for even if it was difficult to quantify how fast their investment might pay them back over time. Builders should be prepared to specifically identify the practices and products that help contribute to the home being a healthier place to live.
2. Lower Operating Costs
   Energy- and water-efficient homes cost less to operate. Most consumers are willing to pay more for these features if their investment will pay them back over time. Consumers will find it useful if builders can calculate the savings a typical consumer might expect, as well as the return on investment. However, be mindful of the expectations such statements can create for consumers, and don’t unintentionally imply any guarantee of savings. Green homes include features and practices to make them more durable and require less maintenance, which also reduces operating costs.
3. A Contribution to a Sustainable Lifestyle
   Buyers are seeking homes and communities that improve their quality of life. These buyers are looking for features that increase their home’s durability and are easier to maintain. They want neighborhoods where they can walk to community resources and their children can play. They are interested in building practices that are good for the environment; however, some may not pay a premium for those features without a payback on their investment, so look to incorporate those green features that can be incorporated without significantly increasing the consumer’s bottom line. Be prepared to specifically identify the practices and products that help a home contribute to a more sustainable lifestyle. Green Certified homes are designed and built to have a smaller environmental impact than a code-minimum home. For some buyers, a reduced environmental impact is an important selling point, but your sales staff should be trained to reveal if this is a motivation of your buyers.

Train Your Sales Staff

Too often builders who construct high-performance homes rely on sales staff and realtors who are not familiar with the home’s green attributes and related benefits to make the case for buying a green home. Make sure your sales staff understands the features in the home that contribute to its performance, but also be sure that they are selling the benefits of the features and not the features themselves. Many green practices and products need explanation, such as advanced framing, thermal barriers, R-Value, Low-E windows, and air infiltration. At a minimum, sales staff should understand the basics of these practices and then know where to direct the buyer for more detailed information. The NAHB Research Center’s technical website, ToolBase.org, can be a helpful, non-commercial resource for explaining many green technologies and their benefits. Remind staff to discuss those features that increase the home’s durability, as those are often neglected in the sales pitch.

Third-Party Certification Matters

An independent, third-party green certification means that your buyers don’t have to take your word that the home is a high-performance home. In the current housing market where many buyers are fraught with anxiety, third-party certifications have never been more important to provide credibility to the builder and assurance to the buyer.

Numerous surveys and research demonstrate that independent, third-party verification and certification provide credibility and assurance that a marketer’s claims are truthful and accurate. In fact, a recent opinion survey by Cone LLC found that 80 percent of respondents believed that certification by a third-party organization is “important in providing oversight to ensure environmental messaging by companies is accurate.”

Comply with the Federal Trade Commission’s Green Guides

The FTC issued proposed revisions to its Guides for the Use of Environmental Marketing Claims (Green Guides) to help marketers avoid making deceptive marketing claims. Familiarize yourself with the Green Guides and use them so that you don’t run afoul of the FTC. In general, the FTC wants environmental claims to be specific, quantified, and substantiated. Builders should not make inflated or unsubstantiated environmental claims or deceptively use certifications and labels.

For information about having a home Green Certified to the National Green Building Standard by the NAHB Research Center and marketing that certified home, visit www.nahbgreen.org/certification.

A guest post on finding the hidden and low-hanging fruit of energy efficiency

KEN KOLKEBECK: MAY 7, 2012

America’s 120 million buildings consume a prodigious amount of energy — 42 percent of the nation’s primary energy, 72 percent of its electricity, and 34 percent of its directly used natural gas. They use more energy than any country except China and the United States as a whole.

The opportunities are great and the challenges daunting to achieve the massive potential energy savings in America’s building stock.

To businesses faced with a flood of information, concern about costs and dizzying complexity in finding the right solution for the right buildings at the right time, the challenge may seem a bit like navigating the Internet without a search engine.

Reinventing Fire, Rocky Mountain Institute’s blueprint for a 2050 U.S. economy powered by efficiency and renewables, outlines opportunities for building owners, service providers and investors to grasp the enormous potential for savings and business opportunities to be gained from transforming the nation’s buildings.

Much of this can be done with today’s commercially available technology and several emerging trends point toward how to crack the code. A key challenge is to dramatically accelerate these nascent trends. That will take both leadership and a leap in awareness of the potential for efficiency gains.

Businesses can start now to seize their piece of a $1.4-trillion-net opportunity, first, by starting at home and then by finding ways to expand.

Starting at Home

Improving the efficiency of buildings isn’t easy. One reason: there’s just too much information. Google “energy efficiency” and you’ll see questions surrounding everything from building science to greenhouse gas reduction targets to green rating systems. As a leader at your organization, you can focus the efficiency efforts — and maximize returns — with three key tactics:

1. Know your short- and long-term goals. “I want to cut my energy use by more than 40 percent. How do I achieve that?” Setting clear goals is an important first step. Then, to develop an execution plan, you can ask engineers, consultants, utilities and other providers for:

• An integrated package of energy efficiency measures that maximizes net present value over a number of years.
• Implementation advice and ways to engage the operating staff and other employees at your organization to leverage the behavioral upside from energy consciousness.
• Guidance for how to clearly communicate the plan to senior management, track progress and make it visible to employees, and enlist their knowledge, imagination and enthusiasm.

2. Understand that timing is the biggest driver of the capital cost of efficiency. If right-timed, efficiency projects often end up as only an incremental cost. Every time businesses sell buildings or tenants turn over creates an opportunity to save energy and add value. Working in harmony and synchrony with long-term building capital investment plans provides an opportunity to grab energy benefits much more cheaply, and in fact to build them into plans and projected building value.

3. Reward best practice design. Design professionals should be paid for what they save, not what they spend. This proven way of rewarding for efficiency savings (“performance-based design fees”) can greatly improve design, both new and retrofit — and help distinguish good designers in a crowded market. Designers should offer bids that way (at least as an alternative) and educate their clients to demand performance-based bids.

Early leaders in adoption of energy efficiency span the gamut, from sustainable design firms to global corporations such as Cisco and Skanska to government agencies including the General Services Administration, Department of Defense and FDIC.

Yet they share something important — recognition of the value of energy efficiency beyond just cutting energy costs. Whether it’s brand value, employee retention, shareholder demand, compliance, mission effectiveness or just doing the right thing, these entities are motivated to look at energy efficiency based on far more than a simple payback period.

Expanding your Business

These in-house strategies for large buildings or portfolios don’t make sense for smaller, leased office spaces or a single-family home. These businesses and homeowners may lack the expertise or time to develop energy strategies, hire the right contractors and oversee the work. This is where the larger opportunity for business lies: selling energy efficiency services and products to the masses, which may or may not yet understand efficiency’s many rewards.

Today, improving buildings’ energy efficiency is a rapidly growing industry blossoming with new business ideas and models. Here are some ways business can profit:

• Barrier-busting via products: Imagine cheap wireless energy stickers that, when placed on a device, a pipe or a duct, will measure energy flow and report it back to a central hub where it joins other data and pops up instant diagnostics. Information technology as well as sensor, materials, software and installation advances have not yet been applied to the energy efficiency industry with as much rigor as they’ve been applied elsewhere.
• High-tech surveys and analyses: Energy efficiency is most challenging in existing buildings, especially homes. Cheap, new information technologies allow companies to cut the time and cost for surveying a building. As one engineer says of previous practice: “We’ve made it such an art to just identify improvements, we’ve limited it to people who are interested in high art.” Improving the speed of adoption and increasing the scale (while not losing too much accuracy or depth) of energy audits and modeling will be critical to driving down costs.
• Energy monitoring and feedback systems: To span the huge gap between energy use and energy awareness, companies are helping homeowners and businesses learn and cut their energy use. For the average homeowner, these systems aren’t cost-effective based on the merits of information alone. But there’s another party clearly interested in improving building intelligence — utilities. Integrating monitoring and feedback systems with communication systems is the next big step. This not only helps with cost (utilities will probably pay for a big chunk), but also helps ease the transition to a smarter grid.

Looking forward, new types of efficiency service providers are needed. Those companies will combine the operational efficiency of Toyota, the sales approach of Avon, the scientific approach of Google, the product design of IDEO, the social engagement within Facebook and the hassle-free transactions of Amazon to drive up demand and drive down costs. Those who figure it out are most likely to capture the largest share of the $1.4 trillion net opportunity.

Katherine Tweed – February 16, 2012

Energy benchmarking of public and private buildings is on the verge of a boom. From California and Seattle to Austin and New York City, states and cities are requiring benchmarking in various forms to get everyone thinking about energy use — and then, hopefully, to do something about it.

For the cities of New York and Washington, D.C., the thinking and doing is already happening. Both municipalities have released reports recently with the results of their benchmarking efforts and, to some extent, have outlined what the next steps will be.

“If you look at the bigger picture, governments are looking hard at measuring in their facilities — that’s accountability to their tax payers,” said Andrew Burr, Director of the Building Energy Rating Program for the Institute for Market Transformation, a nonprofit that works to promote energy efficiency and green building. “These portfolios are much bigger than many, even the largest privately held real estate portfolios.”

The results from the two cities are both basic and instructive. Both cities used the Energy Star Portfolio Manager, which uses utility bills as a proxy for efficiency. It’s an affordable and good place to start, but as the cities found out, it only gives a relative snapshot.

In New York, the 2,730 buildings studied fell directly down the middle, with 51 percent better than their national average by building type, and 49.9 percent doing worse. In particular, the libraries and schools were performing on or above average compared to other similar buildings nationwide.

Fire and police stations did not fare so well. Most fire stations are less than 10,000 square feet in size, so instead of using Energy Star, the city measured the buildings using the Energy Utilization Index. For the EUI, the lower score corresponds with better energy efficiency. For fire stations, the picture was particularly grim. Only eight percent performed better than the national average, and the majority had more than double the energy use per kBtu/sq. ft.

If it sounds like a grim picture for the buildings that house New York’s Bravest, it could just be an accounting issue. “I take the comparison with a grain of salt,” said Tony Liou, principal engineer with Partner Energy, an energy efficiency consulting firm that is doing some of the benchmarking for city buildings in Los Angeles.

Liou, who has worked with building owners across the country, said that the process of benchmarking may not lead to a boom in retrofits, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t significant energy savings to be had. “It’s just basic oversight and troubleshooting,” he noted, adding that “simple awareness drives action.”

But with the proper data, retrofits are easier to justify. The report noted that fire stations and police precincts will probably be a focus on the city’s Small Buildings Program, which has already issued an RFP for energy efficiency projects in buildings between 5,000 and 50,000 square feet.

Full-scale energy audits are also underway in New York’s schools, which make up 56 percent of the city’s municipal building stock by floor area. New York has done audits in 65 schools in the past three years, and that is expected to increase to include another 120 schools in the coming year.

Schools are also the bulk of the public building stock in Washington, D.C. But instead of being a focus of audits and upgrades, the city described it as “the District’s most challenging buildings group.” Compared to New York, which performed slightly above average, Washington, D.C. came in at the 29th percentile nationally.

Energy use in the District’s schools is costing about $30 million annually, but there is $11 million in federal stimulus funds going to retrofit schools with energy and water conservation improvements.

Although the findings, especially in the District, would seem to suggest the city is squandering tax dollars with lax energy usage in public buildings, it can also be seen as quite the opposite.

Baselines like the one Washington, D.C. and New York are building will allow for year-over-year improvements. “It’s like losing weight,” said Liou. “You need to get on the scale once a week to know if you’re making progress.”

Liou noted that he has heard from politicians in places that are not pursuing benchmarking (either for municipal or commercial buildings) and they cite that low Energy Star scores could hurt not only the perception of the city, but also the tax rate. But for cities that are measuring in — and making strides with — their building stock, it could also be seen as a selling point for sustainability-conscious corporations.

In New York, the benchmarking is already informing the city’s operations and maintenance program. Recently, the Department of Citywide Administrative Services established an energy efficiency operations and maintenance plan after doing a year-long study.

According to the report, the new plan “focuses on repairing, maintaining, and operating existing equipment efficiently; increasing training and outreach to improve skills and raise awareness; and providing management oversight, accountability, and transparency.” Overall, it emphasizes bringing energy efficiency into day-to-day operations. The program, which has nothing to do with retrofits, is expected to cut citywide energy use 10 percent to 15 percent per year, a cost savings of at least $51 million.

It’s not easy work. Liou noted that for departments like Parks and Recreation in Los Angeles, there are a lot of odd buildings that have to be benchmarked. It’s extremely time consuming. New York noted that a lack of sub-metering also made it difficult to get accurate data for some buildings.

Cities like Seattle, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Washington, D.C, which have comprehensive benchmarking data, are still in the minority of localities. It’s early days, and once energy use has been measured, upgrades can be made.

With political gridlock in Washington, money for energy efficiency could be one of the bright areas in President Obama’s 2013 budget proposal. Obama has called for $2.33 billion for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, which is an increase over 2012 levels. Although some areas of renewable energy have become hot-button political issues, the funds would support the administration’s goal of increasing building energy efficiency by 50 percent by 2030 and decreasing federal energy demand.

A government drive to increase efficiency will eventually trickle down to other businesses, even the small ones. “For the first time, local governments are being accountable for their energy use,” said Burr. “And local governments should not be asking the private sector to do things with its buildings that the government wouldn’t do.

By: By Lisa Kopochinski (01/25/2012)

Green building in all U.S. construction sectors will continue its rebound this year as the economy struggles to return to pre-recession levels. While the slowdown in commercial real estate projects and funding has definitely put a crimp in many green building projects, interest does remain high for green school construction.

Jerry Yudelson, principal at Yudelson Associates, a Tucson, Ariz.-based green building consulting company and the author of 12 books on green buildings, sustainable development and water conservation, says the latest green trend remains going through the process of becoming LEED certified.

“It doesn’t sound like a big deal, but K-12 has been lagging particularly in that area,” he says. “Higher education has pretty much been on board for quite some time. In the university arena, everyone wants to do LEED gold or platinum building going forward. And we’re finding that many universities are doing sustainability master plans that cover residential, foodservice, operations, transportation and more.”

For K-12 schools, green building has been slower, largely because it can take five or more years for a school to be built after the budget has been approved, he says. Many school districts are also in cost-cutting modes making it difficult for school architects to design good green projects without spending extra money.

“And, there’s always a retired contractor on the budget committee who is convinced the school is spending too much money,” Yudelson adds. “You should be building a school for a lifespan of 50 to 75 years that’s worth an extra investment.”

He also says that it wasn’t until a few years ago that the United States Green Building Council put together a green schools initiative that things started to move.

“The key has been leadership at the national level that has been pushed down to the local level. This was the extra boost that got people to realize that we are building these schools for the most vulnerable population — kids — in terms of asthma and air quality. So why can’t we put solar on the roof, measure our energy use and make it part of the energy instruction?”

The USGBC, a nonprofit trade organization that promotes sustainability in how buildings are designed, built and operated, developed the LEED green building rating systems nearly 20 years ago. In 2009, changes were made that were primarily foundational, such as rating system content alignment and adjustments to the professional credentials and certification process. For this year, LEED 2012 builds on LEED 2009 by continuing to improve the clarity, usability, functionality and interconnectedness of the ratings systems through future version development.

And when it comes to school construction, the USGBC reports that green schools can save an average of $100,000 per year on operating costs — enough to hire two new teachers, buy 200 new computers or purchase 5,000 textbooks. Green schools — on average — use 33 percent less energy and 32 percent less water than conventionally constructed schools. If all new U.S. school construction and renovation went green today, the USGBC says the total energy savings alone would be $20 billion over the next decade.

As LEED continues to grow in popularity, so has the whole area of high performance schools. According to CalRecycle, a leading authority on recycling, waste reduction and product reuse in California, high performance schools join together the best design and building strategies while providing a healthy indoor environment; conserving energy, resources and water; functioning as a teaching tool; serving as a community resource for neighborhood functions; ensuring easy maintenance and operations; and creating a safe and secure educational atmosphere.

Net Zero Energy

Net zero energy schools is another area of school construction that is gaining momentum. A term used to describe a building with zero net energy consumption and zero carbon emissions on an annual basis, these buildings can be independent from the energy grid supply or energy can be harvested onsite, usually through technologies like solar and wind.

Yudelson says there are basically four kinds of net zero. “Type A is what most schools are doing. You make a really energy efficient building and then you top it off with, typically, solar panels on the rooftop. Because schools tend to be low rise — they have a lot of roof area relative to their floor area — you can do that. On an annual basis, as much energy is produced as is consumed.”

Type B, he says, is where you have a low energy building, but solar is placed elsewhere on the site — not on the building. Type C, meanwhile, is when energy from a green power source, perhaps a wind farm, is purchased for a low energy building.

“And Type D is more common in northern states and Europe,” Yudelson adds. “You might do all the heating with biomass boilers with wood pellets since wood is a zero carbon source. Which route a school chooses is really done on a case-by-case basis.”

Beyond LEED and Net Zero

For those interested in going beyond LEED and net zero-architects, engineers and building can challenge themselves with the Living Building Challenge, a philosophy, advocacy tool and certification program that promotes the most advanced measurement of sustainability. It can be applied to development at all scales, from buildings — both new construction and renovation — to infrastructure, landscapes and neighborhoods.

The Living Building Challenge (LBC) was endorsed by the USGBC and the Canada Green Building Council (CaGBC) in 2006 and is not meant to compete with LEED, the Green Building Rating System, the USGBC or the CaGBC.

Initially launched by the Cascadia Building Council, a chapter of the USGBC and the CaGBC, the LBC comprises seven performance areas: site, water, energy, health, materials, equity and beauty, which are further divided into 20 imperatives, each focusing on a specific sphere of influence. It is a rigorous performance standard that aims to certify top-performing green buildings. Unlike other rating systems that rely on the selection of green building traits from a menu of choices, the LBC requires the attainment of all performance criteria.

In order to achieve the Living Building Challenge, designers must do without using materials on the Materials Red List, which includes chemicals and materials considered harmful to both humans and the environment. The list, which can be found on the International Living Building Institute’s website was www.ilbi.org, is intended to identify and eliminate the worst in class chemicals and materials from a human and ecological standpoint from the built environment. Projects can be certified as “living” if they prove to meet all program requirements after 12 months of continued operation and full occupancy.

“Most projects that we know of decide to pursue the Living Building Challenge certification very early in the design process — some even before the entire team is known,” says Eden Brukman, vice president of the ILBI, a nongovernmental organization with a mission to offer a global vision for lasting sustainability.

“We recommend that the project is registered as early as possible, so that it can benefit from a truly comprehensive and integrated design. In addition, the Institute offers a number of support mechanisms for projects as they get started.”

Brukman adds materials are probably the most complicated aspect of the LBC. “They depend on manufacturing, and some of the things we just don’t have currently. Manufacturers don’t want to make something people don’t want to buy.”

Even though the LBC is still so new and primarily shared via word of mouth, she fully expects to see more schools in the United States certified under the program.

“There are already about a dozen registered education projects in the U.S. in design or construction and additional projects in other countries, too. The Hawaii Preparatory Academy Energy Lab in Kamuela, Hawaii, is the first school to be certified “Living,” and the Bertschi School Science Wing in Seattle, Wash. is in the middle of their mandatory 12-month minimum operation before they are eligible for an audit. Additionally, we had quite a few student teams enter our Living City Design Competition last year — some with great success.”

The bulb will first appear in India at the end of the year, but will go global in 2012. The bulb is similar to the $30 60-watt equivalent bulb released by Lighting Science in the U.S. earlier this year (pictured). The new bulb, however, will consume even less power — only 8.5 watts — and, of course, will cost less.

Lowering the power consumption will also help make the bulb easier to use (or at least improve customer satisfaction) in India, where blackouts and brownouts remain daily occurrences.

The lower price derives from three factors that make the lighting business look almost like the PC industry circa 1987. First, chip improvements are leading to lower prices in the same way that advances in processors and memory led to cheaper, better computers. LED manufacturers are increasing the output of lumens per watt in their light-emitting diodes, the little chips inside the bulbs that produce light. In turn, that lets LED bulb makers insert fewer chips into their final products to produce the same amount of light. The chips themselves account for around 60 percent of the cost of a bulb, and a 60-watt equivalent LED typically contains around 18 LEDs. Cutting that down to 15 or even 10 LEDs will thus have an impact on the retail price of the bulb. Haitzs Law, the Moores Law of LED, predicts how performance will improve and costs will decline over time.

Second, new types of heat sinks will also help lower the price, in the same way that the hard drive industry helped cut computer prices. Although the light from LED chips is not hot, the chip itself gets hot. Right now, most home LED bulbs use hefty aluminum heat sinks to dissipate that heat. Some of the newer bulbs, however, come with heat sinks that require far less aluminum: better air channeling helps reduce the bulk.

Other companies, meanwhile, are thinking about heat sinks that can supplement or replace aluminum components. Switch Lighting, for instance, fills the bulb cavity in its bulb with a liquid. That allows the company to cut the number of LEDs inside its bulb — which will sell for around $25 by the end of the year — by half. (Lighting Science is also working on a liquid bulb.)

Startup Ventiva, by contrast, has developed an ionizer. A mesh of wires near the LED chip creates an electric field with a small electric charge. The ions create a breeze, which in turn eliminates heat. Similarly, Nuventix has created a tiny device that creates a vortex of wind near the chip to dissipate heat.

A third factor in lowering prices is arguably an emerging trend toward horizontalization (sic) in solid state lighting. While the major LED and lighting companies such as Philips, Osram and Cree are coming out with their own bulbs and fixtures, they also sell components to less-heralded companies like Lighting Science, MSI and LEDnovation, who then incorporate design and technology nuances of their own to stand out in the market. Look at this announcement: Lighting Science designs the bulbs, harvests components from others, and Dixon assembles it.

Lighting Science is also developing a bulb with Google that can be controlled through an Android phone. The underlying network protocol is 6LowPAN.

Vizio, the largest TV maker in the U.S., told us back in June that it will soon come out with LED bulbs. Vizio has strong ties to Costco and relies heavily on contract manufacturers.

There is no guarantee that solid state lighting will become horizontal. PCs and cell phones get replaced every four years or less. That relatively rapid turnover rate allows multinational manufacturers to act as background suppliers of components and technology and still make a profit. LED lifetimes stretch into decades. Some believe that the best way to survive will be to become an vertically integrated manufacturer that produces the chips, the bulbs and even the fixtures.

But some, such as Mayfield partner Navin Chaddha, which invested in LED component maker ShineOn, think horizontal will be the way to go.

And here is the bonus fourth factor: creativity in the sales and distribution channel. An LED bulb can cut your power bills by around $10 a year. Alan Salzman of VantagePoint Venture partners told us in 2010 that when LED bulbs hit the $20 price point, you could start to see utilities give them away to consumers for free as a way to curb power consumption. (VantagePoint has investments in a few LED companies, but not Lighting Science.) Bill Watkins, CEO of LED manufacturer Bridgelux, has noted that CFL shipments began to take off after they crossed the $20 barrier.

The availability of $15 bulbs from a variety of manufacturers could prove to become a tipping point. Consumers will still blanch at the price tag, but if utilities start giving them away for free, and the benefits can be documented, sales could grow on their own. In Thailand and other emerging nations, some cities are moving toward LED streetlights to relieve stress on the grid and cut municipal power bills.

The quality of modern LED bulbs is pretty good, by the way. Weve been testing the $30 60-watt equivalent LED bulb for a while. Its actually brighter than most 60-watt incandescents. Heres a video of Lighting Sciences 40-watt equivalent — perhaps the best bulb we tested last year. A video of the new bulb should be on the site soon./h3

Let’s start with a basic fact: a green home can be sold to anyone. However, home buyers are a diverse group of individuals, and there is no single way to sell green successfully. For this reason, builders and their sales teams need to identify what green home benefits are most compelling to their potential buyers.

Below are some of the “tricks from the trenches” from builders and remodelers participating in the NAHB Research Center’s National Green Building Certification Program and selling third-party certified green homes. While some of the basic techniques are relevant to new-home marketing in general, each has its own twist on how to specifically hone in on what makes a green home different, special, and marketable.

What do buyers really want?

Over the past few years, there have been numerous surveys of potential home buyers to ascertain what green features buyers want and, more importantly, which ones they are willing to pay extra for. Most surveys conclude that home buyers are interested in energy-efficiency features.

Is energy efficiency all that matters to consumers?

The short answer to this question is no. Energy efficiency is a very tangible benefit that consumers recognize as valuable. The energy-efficiency benefit is easily measured by the operational savings that the buyer will realize, but consumers are looking for more than homes that are efficient, and a green-certified home will deliver those benefits that consumers are seeking.

Skeptical builders may object and note that their buyers are not asking for “green.” It’s true, few home buyers march into a sales center and declare that they are looking for a green home. The problem is that green is too vague, overused, and often meaningless, and consumers know exactly what they want. They just don’t necessarily call it green.

That’s why honing your sales pitch and the language you use is critical.
Other consumers may assume that a home tagged as green will cost more than they can afford. It doesn’t mean that select green features aren’t desirable, just that consumers may be more interested in the specific benefits as opposed to a blanket categorization of features being green. The most important step in selling a green home is to convey to the buyer what makes your home green and how its environmental impact is rated.

Home buyers respond to diverse sales points

Builders often want to sell their homes with a single marketing message. Unfortunately, research shows that gender, geography, age, and educational level all impact which green marketing message will resonate best. Some examples:

• Energy efficiency, which results in lower operating costs, may be a difficult benefit to sell in neighborhoods where utility costs are low.

• Younger buyers typically care more about the potential environmental impact of their home and respond more favorably to information about features that reduce the home’s environmental footprint.

• Women are more influenced by green features than men, and they often respond very positively to homes that have “show and tell” visual aids and interactive displays.

Sell the benefits of your green home, not the features

In selecting a new house, most buyers have a few simple goals in mind. They aren’t necessarily looking for specific products, technologies, or features, but instead the advantages they will enjoy from the features. Therefore, don’t tout a tight thermal envelope. Instead, explain how the home will be warmer in the winter and cooler in the summer because a tightly sealed building eliminates drafts and unwanted pollutants.

Buyers want their families to be comfortable in their home. Likewise, don’t automatically flaunt those low-VOC finishes or the MERV 8 air filters. Instead, boast about the improved indoor air quality with reduced pollutants and better ventilation. Buyers want their families to have a healthy home.

Green homes provide many benefits to the occupants and the community. However, when surveyed, buyers consistently rate the following three categories of benefits as the most important:

1. A healthy place to live — Homes are healthier places to live for their occupants when they are dry, ventilated, and the contaminants within the building envelope are limited. When surveyed, these are the features that consumers said they were willing to pay a premium for even if it was difficult to quantify how fast their investment might pay them back over time. Builders should be prepared to specifically identify the practices and products that help contribute to the home being a healthier place to live.

2. Lower operating costs — Energy- and water-efficient homes cost less to operate. Most consumers are willing to pay more for these features if their investment will pay them back over time. Consumers will find it useful if builders can calculate the savings a typical consumer might expect, as well as the return on investment. However, be mindful of the expectations such statements can create for consumers, and don’t unintentionally imply any guarantee of savings. Green homes include features and practices to make them more durable and require less maintenance, which also reduces operating costs.

3. Contributes to a sustainable lifestyle — Buyers are seeking homes and communities that improve their quality of life. These buyers are looking for features that increase their home’s durability and make it easier to maintain. They want neighborhoods where they can walk to community resources. They’re interested in building practices that are good for the environment. However, some may not be willing to pay a premium for those features without a payback on their investment, so look to incorporate those green features that do not significantly increase the consumer’s bottom line. Be prepared to specifically identify the practices and products that help a home contribute to a more sustainable lifestyle. Green-certified homes are designed and built to have a smaller environmental impact than a code-minimum home. For some buyers, a reduced environmental impact is an important selling point, but your sales staff should be trained to reveal if this is a motivation of your buyers.

Train your sales staff

Too often, builders who construct high-performance homes rely on sales staff and Realtors who are not familiar with the home’s green attributes and related benefits to make the case for buying a green home. Make sure your sales staff understands the features in the home that contribute to its performance, but also be sure that they are selling the benefits of the features and not the features themselves.
Many green practices and products need explanation, such as advanced framing, thermal barriers, R-value, low-e windows, and air infiltration.

At a minimum, the sales staff should understand the basics of these practices and then know where to direct the buyer for more detailed information. The NAHB Research Center’s technical website, ToolBase.org, can be a helpful, non-commercial resource for explaining many green technologies and their benefits. Remind staff to discuss those features that increase the home’s durability, as those are often neglected in the sales pitch.

Why third-party certification matters

An independent, third-party green certification means that your buyers do not have to take your word that the home is a high-performance home. In the current housing market, where many buyers are fraught with anxiety, third-party certifications have never been more important to provide credibility to the builder and assurance to the buyer.

Numerous surveys and research studies demonstrate that independent, third-party verification and certification provides credibility and assurance that a marketer’s claims are truthful and accurate. In fact, a recent opinion survey by Cone LLC found that 80 percent of respondents believed that certification by a third-party organization is “important in providing oversight to ensure environmental messaging by companies is accurate.”

Comply with the Federal Trade Commission’s Green Guides

The FTC recently issued proposed revisions to its Guides for the Use of Environmental Marketing Claims (Green Guides) to help marketers avoid making deceptive marketing claims. Familiarize yourself with the Green Guides and use them so that you don’t run afoul of the FTC.

In general, the FTC wants environmental claims to be specific, quantified, and substantiated. Builders should not make inflated or unsubstantiated environmental claims or deceptively use certifications and labels.

For information about having a home Green Certified to the National Green Building Standard by the NAHB Research Center and marketing that certified home, visit www.nahbgreen.org/certification.

Created in 1964, the NAHB Research Center (www.nahbrc.com) is a full-service product commercialization company that strives to make housing more durable, affordable, and efficient. The Research Center provides public and private clients with an unrivaled depth of understanding of the housing industry and access to its business leaders.

Source: http://www.housingzone.com/sales/how-sell-certified-green-home

For the first time in the five years since the scorecard has been released, California was not in the top spot, falling behind Massachusetts in the rankings.

The spending was not just in a few states, but spread across the entire nation, with states such as Michigan and Tennessee making strong gains in efficiency measures. Twenty-four states have adopted Energy Efficiency Resource Standards and the ones that have had the standards for a few years are already seeing gains, according to the report.

The rankings are based on six areas of criteria: utility and public benefit programs, transportation policies, building codes, combined heat and power, state government initiatives, and appliance efficiency standards.

The top 10 was almost entirely unchanged from the previous year, with just one new addition.

1.     Massachusetts

2.     California

3.     New York

4.     Oregon

5.     Vermont, Washington, Rhode Island, Minnesota, Connecticut (tie)

10.   Maryland

The report noted that although the political environment these days is bitterly divisive, Republican-controlled states such as Colorado and Maine passed energy efficiency measures through their legislatures, as did Democratic states such as New York.

Maryland got itself into the top 10 (up from a ranking of 16 one year ago) by offering financial incentives for high-efficiency vehicles and from reaping the benefits of its EERS, adopted in 2008. The biggest mover of the year was Michigan, which went from number 27 to the number 17 spot. The Midwestern state has retooled its manufacturing sector, according to the report, with a newfound focus on efficiency and research and development of energy-efficient technologies.

Massachusetts overtook California with its aggressive Green Communities Act, which was passed in 2008. The initiative, which ACEEE called “the most aggressive EERS in the nation,” calls for a 2.4 percent savings in electricity sales and 1.5 percent for natural gas in 2012. The plan operates on three-year cycles. In most other categories Massachusetts and California earned similar points, although California still leads in transportation and appliance efficiency.

In the center of the country, where cheap energy abounds, states generally don’t rank high for efficiency. Nebraska, however, was one of the movers and shakers in this year’s report, shooting up the rankings from a dismal 47 to 40. Although it is still in the bottom quartile of the listings, with a total score of 10 points to Massachusetts’ 45.5 (out of a possible 50), there is evidence that efficiency can be a priority even in regions where energy is cheap and abundant. One factor was an update to the state’s building codes, which hadn’t been touched since 2004. Another feather in Nebraska’s cap is the state-run Dollar and Energy Saving Loan Program, which offers low-interest loans to a wide variety of customers.

In the case of California (and the 24 other states that lost ground in this year’s rankings), declines were more attributable to other states catching up rather than a particular state falling behind. Most states didn’t receive any points for appliance efficiency, but that is because they are waiting for new federal guidelines on dozens of appliances that will be released sometime in the next few years. But overall, states are ramping up rather than sitting idle waiting for the feds to act. Even states near the bottom of the Scorecard, such as Georgia and Oklahoma, have new initiatives that are expected to help them gain ground in the rankings in 2012.

The top states are unlikely to be completely dethroned, which means the real gains will come in the middle and bottom of the pack. What other states do you think will jump up the rankings in 2012?

Sources:

http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/how-energy-efficient-is-your-state/

http://www.aceee.org/sector/state-policy/scorecard

What do demand response and carpeting have in common? They’ll both score you LEED credits, if you pick the right flavor.

Demand response recently joined the likes of low-flow faucets, bike racks, recycled carpeting and daylight harvesting as an item that can earn LEED credits under the U.S. Green Building Council rating scheme.

It’s currently a work in progress, with the second version of the pilot credit released earlier this summer. “In a nutshell, the credit is available,” said Brendan Owens, vice president of LEED Technical Development at USGBC. Although the early iteration is available for use by existing buildings, there will be changes, perhaps many, by the time demand response is available as a base credit starting in 2012.

In its current state, the trend has already shifted to reward higher levels of engagement by offering more credits for companies that offer up more megawatts, said Owens. “We’re trying to differentiate between the flavors of demand response in the market and get engagement at the auto or semi-auto level,” he explained.

Here are some details of the credit as it stands now:

-       Enroll in minimum of one-year manual demand response program with an ISO, utility or curtailment service provider for 10 percent of estimated peak demand or a minimum of 20kW.

-       If demand response isn’t available, you can simply put a plan in place to take advantage of it, or dynamic pricing plans, when it becomes available, although it is unclear whether this can score any actual credit.

-       The second option is to have semi- or fully automated demand response for at least 10kW or 5 percent of peak electricity, although it still must meet a 10 percent load shed requirement overall.

The evolution of the demand response credit mirrors the evolution of the larger industry. Semi-automated demand response — which is defined by USGBC as a real person implementing an automated, pre-programmed DR plan (rather than someone shutting stuff off manually) — was specified as being separate from a fully automated system.

Demand response is moving toward automation, and it will take full automation, where a system can react to a signal from a utility without any human interaction for more uptake in the market. The pre-programmed response will also have to take into account the needs of the occupants or business at the given time of day.

“That vision [of utilities tapping the full capacity of buildings] can only be realized when loads can be dispatched in coordination with the grid,” he said. Currently, independent system operators like PJM Interconnection can’t even verify how much load was dropped in their emergency DR programs until weeks after it was dispatched.

The pilot credit has already made some clarifications. Onsite generation will not count towards demand response (as it did in the first version) and it also recommends that buildings be designed for demand response in the design process — including lighting management, battery storage, hot water storage or integrating IT design with demand response strategies.

Owens estimates that USGBC has already awarded points to about a dozen projects for participating in demand response. As the credit gets refined, projects will be pushed toward automated demand response.

Although OpenADR is the most prominent standard for automated demand response today, and was developed at Lawrence Berkley National Laboratory, where the DR credit for LEED was also studied, Owen said that USGBC is not into picking standards. “We want projects to align themselves with the best available products that are available,” he said.

The pilot has been running for five months and is still ongoing. Owens said that by the time the base credit is issued in 2012, it could have evolved to the fourth or even fifth version. “Manual demand response provides some level of engagement,” he said. “But we see the sweet spot as being in auto. That’s the direction you’ll see the credit evolve.”

By: KATHERINE TWEED

http://bit.ly/oZZLD2