As we near the end of 2010, budgeting for 2011 is in full swing. Although I plan to skip several of the trade shows and conferences I have regularly attended for years, there is one event I refuse to miss: BuildingEnergy, which is hosted by the Northeast Sustainable Energy Association.

I attended my first BuildingEnergy, or BE, conference in 2008 and was completely blown away by the content and enthusiasm of attendees and presenters. By that time, I had been working in the green-building industry for five years as editor of a nationally circulated green-building magazine and had only met fragmented groups of people discussing the issues that were the main focus of BE’s program. NESEA’s members are passionate about building smarter buildings, being accountable for their work and wiping out greenwashing. I immediately was a fan of NESEA and began telling everyone I knew about BE’s merits.

In 2009 and this year (BE is held annually in March in Boston), I attended the opening Public Forum and both days of the conference and took copious notes during every session, keynote, presentation and networking event I attended. I’d like to share a few words of wisdom I heard at this year’s BE that have inspired me to keep forging ahead to improve our nation’s buildings:

“Treat the future like we do death; just prepare the best you can.” –Author Sharon Astyk during the Public Forum, Case Studies of the Way Forward: Creative Solutions to Global Crises

“We are meant to be connected. Our community has been taken from us, and we’ve been told we can do everything alone.” –Transition Towns Activist Tina Clarke during the Public Forum

“Offshore oil drilling will not make a big difference, nor will ethanol.” –Dr. Samuel Baldwin, chief technology officer and member of the board of directors Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, U.S. Department of Energy, keynote address during the Opening Plenary

“’Scorekeeping’ is the first step but then you need to figure out what a winning score is. This helps you get your clients somewhere important. Run the numbers and show that they’re here and open the conversation to getting there.” –Paul Eldenkamp of Byggmeister Inc. during Counting, Measuring, Reporting: What’s Important?

“I did a show and tell at my son’s school and explained to the kids that old doesn’t mean throw away.” –John Seekircher during Upgrading Windows in Historic and Non-Historic Buildings

“Spiders are indicators of airflow; they build webs where there’s wind, so they can easily go for food. Go up into the plenum above the ceiling; you shouldn’t see light at the roof-to-wall connection.” –Larry Harmon of Air Barrier Solutions LLC during What’s Up with the Gaps, Cracks and Holes?

“One calculation to figure out dewpoint is dumb because that doesn’t figure how the wall acts during the entire year.” –Joe Lstiburek of Building Science Corp. during How to: Vapor Barriers, Insulating Sheathing and Drying Potential

“In a conventional wall, 25 percent of the wall is framing, which kills us on insulation. Eliminate wood and add more insulation.” –Chet Pascho of Preferred Building Systems during Alternative Framing Systems: Advanced Framing, Prefab, Modular

Would you like to read more? Larry Harmon wrote “Simple Steps,” which you can read on Eco-Logic. The article compares your home to a child in winter and goes through a systematic approach to keep it warm. As you can see from this article, much of what NESEA’s members speak and write about can be adopted throughout the country. I hope to provide more articles from NESEA’s members and BE’s presenters on Eco-Logic, so you can tap into their collective genius.

To get even more BE content, I highly recommend you attend BE11 at the Seaport World Trade Center, Boston, March 8-10, 2011. The planning committee has been in full swing for months, thinking about how to keep the conference informative and considering how the current world should affect the way NESEA’s members and BE’s conference attendees think as they take their businesses into an uncertain future.

At the recent U.S. Green Building Council’s Greenbuild Conference in Phoenix, I attended a session that dealt with energy modeling and how well energy is analyzed during the design process.

What a lively discussion it was! One panelist commented, “Energy modeling makes architects do dumb things.” Someone else exclaimed, “Energy modeling is based on perfect assumptions, and modeling as we know it deals with mechanical systems quite well but not the people and occupancy schedules in buildings.”

There seemed to be general agreement that energy modeling was designed to do trade-offs of equipment efficiencies for code compliance, not be a predictor of absolute or relative energy efficiency. Another recurring point was architects seldom have clearly defined energy-performance goals to use during the design process.

What Are We Measuring?

The nation’s buildings use $200 billion worth of electricity and natural gas each year. And the energy consumed by U.S. commercial and industrial buildings is responsible for nearly 50 percent of our national greenhouse-gas emissions. As our industry moves forward in designing, constructing and operating greener buildings, we must deliver on the promise that these buildings will indeed save energy, benefit the owner’s bottom line and reduce carbon-dioxide emissions.

What exactly should designers be measuring and how can we set and achieve the goal of saving energy and shrinking the carbon footprint of the built environment?

Let’s start with how energy performance is assessed during the design process. Energy modeling for code compliance, documented in study after study, indicates modeling to code is not a good predictor of performance. Meeting code requires evaluating equipment and system efficiencies but does not account for the entire energy use in buildings. That involves people. This may be a little unnerving for modelers who want to have complete control over their energy-load assumptions, but the reality is people occupy buildings and engage in multiple activities that affect energy use.

Process and plug loads are considered “unregulated” loads in most energy codes but need to be factored into the design team’s equation. All those little energy-sucking gadgets people plug in at their desks consume energy! Real-world scenarios require our attention if we are ever going to design buildings with the potential to save energy as modeled or predicted.

From now on, the energy metrics for design should account for all the variables required to put a building into service. These variables include computers, process loads for cooking, and equipment and system loads for keeping people comfortable. Whole-building energy analysis includes all systems, schedules, and plug and process loads; it defines the parameters for a comprehensive energy model.

The second part of the equation is having something to compare the modeled assumption against—a baseline of actual performance, not just a reference specified by the energy code where all variables are tightly controlled. Such a baseline can be derived from similar buildings in similar climate zones with similar operating characteristics. Energy consumption from a group of similar elementary schools is a better indicator of performance for a similar K-12 project than trade-offs for equipment and systems mandated for code compliance.

In a study at the University of California, Merced, engineers developed what was termed “benchmark-based performance targets” for a series of new buildings. They measured the energy use of existing buildings over time, evaluated building materials and systems, observed occupancy patterns and used the information to develop targets for future building projects. The methodology used in the UC Merced study was a thoughtful means to designing buildings with the intent to achieve energy-performance goals once they are operating. The objective was not to merely meet code nor achieve accolades; the UC engineers were seeking to design buildings to an efficiency level beyond what was typical or average for their campus facilities.

From Designing to Operating the Building

In 2004, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency launched Designed to Earn the ENERGY STAR, a companion program to EPA’s successful existing buildings program. The name implies the goal of the initiative. A design project that meets the criteria established by EPA achieves this distinction. EPA’s energy-performance rating, which was initially developed to compare an existing building to a group of its peers, was retooled to help architects establish targets for design projects based on actual energy-consumption data (the baseline mentioned earlier).

Then as the design is developed and energy modeling is performed, the total estimated energy use can be plugged into EPA’s tool, and the design receives an estimated rating from 1 to 100. This rating provides a relative performance score of how well the design compares to a group of its peers. The rating is predicated on whole-building energy use.

For architects and building owners committed to helping our nation “green” future buildings, the easy-to-use, online EPA energy-performance rating system provides a relative performance goal, rating for design projects and existing buildings, and consistent metrics for the life-cycle of the building.

These metrics provide the design team with realistic energy intent to pass on to the building owner who, in turn, can measure the energy consumption of the operating building using the same efficiency rating. The metrics associated with the rating are typical of those found on utility bills and familiar to all involved in designing and operating commercial buildings. The rating system developed by EPA’s ENERGY STAR program provides a feedback loop between architects and owners that can close the performance gap between building design and operations. And it helps address the issues posed by the participants at the energy modeling session during Greenbuild!

Karen P. Butler manages Commercial Building Design for the U.S. EPA’s ENERGY STAR Program.