Urban Green Council is a proud supporter of the Good Jobs, Green Jobs Eastern Conference being held in Philadelphia on April 3^rd and 4^th.

I will have the honor of moderating a panel discussion entitled Building Trade Unions Take a Leadership Role in Green Training. The speakers are part of the GPRO dream team – the union leaders who helped us develop and implement GPRO, our green professional building skills training program.  Included on the panel will be:

• Howard Styles, Training Director, I.U.O.E Local 94 Operating Engineers NYC
• Bob Muldoon, the Director of the Green Building Initiative for the Local 32BJ Training Fund, 1000 Supers program
• John Sullivan, U.A. Plumbers Local Union No.1 Trade Education Fund
• Michael Yee, Director of the Educational and Cultural Trust Fund of the Electrical Industry, Local 3 Electricians

The theory behind GPRO is that green buildings will only perform as designed if the people who build, renovate, operate and maintain those buildings have a thorough working knowledge of green practices.

We are gratified to work with the labor unions who are taking a leadership role in accelerating the construction industry’s transition to green building by providing trained workers and collaborating with environmental groups to create comprehensive green worker training.

This panel will address labor unions’ critical role in transforming the green building workforce and how labor unions and Urban Green Council successfully collaborated to create GPRO, a national green building certificate program for contractors, trades, operators and building service workers.

Please let us know if you will be attending the conference.  This will be a chance for all of us to meet with community leaders, union members, environmentalists, business leaders and elected officials together to discuss how our region is, city by city and block by block, building the foundation for a green economy.

Photo Credit: US Army Corps of Engineers

A question for all you design professionals out there: When was the last time a project you designed was built exactly as shown on your drawings?

The answer, I imagine is “never.”

There’s a myth outside of the construction industry that the architectural team hands over a giant set of blueprints and specifications to the contractor and then a team of construction workers execute those plans with nary a glitch.  The misconception is that the construction team “just follows plans” when in fact there is a very entrenched but varying culture on construction sites that determines how workers behave and how projects gets built.

To improve the performance of our buildings, much higher levels of coordination is required between the construction, design and operations teams as well as among the trades working on the project.  To build green, it’s critical to get all of these individuals on the same page and change the culture of the job site to include sustainable work practices.

To help the construction industry teach the workforce about sustainability and green work practices, Urban Green Council developed GPRO, a national training program to teach the people who build, renovate and maintain buildings the principles of sustainability combined with trade-specific green construction knowledge.

We’d like to share an excerpt from Trades Going Green in  the January 2012 issue of GreenSource magazine. Bruce Buckley features GPRO prominently as he writes about the importance of training and collaboration when building sustainable buildings.

“Changing the culture is an important first step in training trade contractors to think green, says Steve Lehtonen, senior director of environmental education with the International Association of Plumbing and Mechanical Officials (IAPMO). “The most important thing to me is the psychology of what we’re doing,” says Lehtonen, who runs IAPMO’s Green Plumbers training program. “We want them to buy into green practices.”

Green Roofs for Healthy Cities (GRHC) launched its Green Roof Professional (GRP) designation program to improve the delivery of green roofs. Jordan Richie, manager of education and accreditation at GRHC, says the program sees a mix of designers and contractors in roofing and landscaping. “We want to stress a collaborative design and installation approach to any green roof,”

Knowledge of green systems and techniques should be a skill set that all contractors have, not one reserved for accredited professionals, says Mike Callanan, executive director of the National Joint Apprenticeship Training Committee (NJATC) of the National Electrical Contractors Association and International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers.“

The takeaway is that properly trained construction teams who understand green work practices and concepts will build better, higher-performing buildings.  As we bring GPRO nationwide, it is our goal to make all buildings be greener as workers become trained in green practices and behavioral norms change.

I was pretty impressed with the sustainable design elements in the recently unveiled plans for the new Cornell technology campus on Roosevelt Island. SOM has proposed systems like under-floor air distribution, radiant heating panels, operable windows and a roofscape of PV panels.  There are rainwater cisterns, a cogen plant and a geothermal system. Most striking, though, is the site planning of the structures- which are laid out almost entirely in relation to the sun. As such, the orientation and massing of many of the buildings naturally provide access to useful north light, easily deal with the high southern sun, and present limited exposure to the harsh, low angled rays of sunrise and sunset. Though wrapped in the cool glass of fashionable contemporary design, the SOM proposal is a model of solar architecture- minus earth berms and banana tree greenhouses.

Interestingly, there is a remarkably illuminating counter-example right across the water from the Cornell site–the United Nations building. The UN project is designed not to ignore the sun- but to boldly and aggressively court the most debilitating aspects of it. The UN building shows its massive glass façades to the east and west horizons, and a narrow, completely solid stone façade to the south and north. If rotated 90 degrees in plan and if some simple exterior shades and interior light shelves were provided the project would be a model of contextual sensitivity. Instead, it is a nightmare. Low-angled sun slams into the east façade in the morning and the west façade in the afternoon- requiring the deployment of interior blinds, blinds that are rarely raised when the sun isn’t present, effectively eliminating the one positive aspect of this design, the view. In addition to the glare problems, the morning and afternoon sun heats up the respective facades creating a situation where the building is cooling one side of the building while it heats the other, and then vice versa, throughout the entire day. It’s a grim situation that could easily have been avoided by rotating the plan 90 degrees.

So it’s inspiring to see SOM, the heirs to the high modernism practiced at the UN, proposing a design so sensitive to its site, a design that won’t be fighting against the sun but working with it, in perpetuity.

Ellen Honigstock, a member of the Urban Green Council Chapter Task Force for LEED Regionalization 2012, shares their initial findings on recommendations for LEED RPC 2012:

The USGBC recognizes the importance of projects that address region-specific environmental issues in their design; these Regional Priority credits were first introduced in the LEED 2009 rating systems.

Urban Green Council, along with all the other chapters of the USGBC, is currently evaluating which credits to prioritize in LEED 2012 for the five boroughs in New York City and Rockland and Westchester Counties.

Starting in late summer 2011, the Urban Green Council Chapter Task Force for LEED Regionalization 2012 began to meet monthly.  Shortly thereafter, the Chapter Task Force (CTF) identified five general categories of regional priority issues: Water, Air, Energy, Ground and Resources.

Focusing first on what the important issues should be rather than where they might occur, the CTF compiled a comprehensive list of 17 possible priority issues. These priorities were compared with the ones identified in LEED 2009 Regionalization in order to maintain as much continuity as possible.  The list was also compared with the recommendations in the Urban Green Council Green Codes Task Force Report to identify which environmental issues would benefit most from green incentives, rather than from proposed legislation.

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A little over 10 years ago, I began a four-year stint as a legislative attorney at the New York City Council. Back in those pre-PlaNYC and pre-Green Codes Task Force days, it was no easy feat to get the Mayor’s Office to concentrate on environmental legislation and we had a big one cooking at the City Council: Local Law 86, which required all city owned and funded construction over $2 million to be built to LEED Silver.

One of the people who would attend meetings at the Mayor’s Office on this legislation was an elegant, soft-spoken woman who seemed to know everything about the building code: Deborah Taylor. Unbeknownst to me at the time, she was one of the principal advocates for this green building legislation within city government. I later discovered she was probably the first person to propose that city agencies meet to develop a broad sustainability agenda – this became the “Mayor’s Task Force on Sustainability,” the precursor to PlaNYC. Without her,  PlaNYC may never have happened. Deborah also recognized that New York City would need to adopt its own version of the state energy code, both to close state loopholes and so the city could make its own amendments. This led to the city finally starting to enforce the energy code for the first time since it was adopted in the 1970s. Another Deborah special. And so on, again and again and again.

Long before Urban Green Council or the U.S. Green Building Council New York, before PlaNYC and the Greener, Greater Buildings Plan, before the Office of Long-term Planning & Sustainability, before the Green Codes Task Force, and before Local Law 86 there was Deborah Taylor. Working behind the scenes and without public credit, she nurtured much of the green building revolution we’ve seen in city government and her imprint is on so many policy accomplishments in the last decade.

Last month, Deborah retired from city government after nine years at the Department of Buildings, and eight years at the School Construction Authority before that. A great public servant, she is one of New York City’s unsung green heroes. Let’s all celebrate her enormous achievements and hope that other champions within the Department of Buildings will continue in her footsteps.

Since the dawn of time (well, OK, since 1979 when Michigan and Princeton Professors Ross and Williams developed the idea of a “house doctor”), energy efficiency enthusiasts have been convinced that retrofitting a residential building to save energy could pay for itself in fuel savings.  It’s been a rocky road since those days, when the prime concern was our dependence on unreliable Mideast oil rather than climate change, and in the energy price valley of 1985 – 2000, it was a lot harder to make the case.

But over the last ten years, subsidized programs all over the country have carried out hundreds, perhaps thousands, of retrofits.  Many were aimed at affordable housing, including the federally funded Weatherization programs, and state efforts like NYSERDA’s Assisted Multifamily Program (AMP, in which I was active) and the current Multifamily Performance Program (MPP). Others focused on coaxing the owners of unsubsidized multifamily buildings, including coops, condos, and market-rate rentals, to upgrade their building systems in the interest of greater efficiency, but always with the carrot of long-term savings. Similar efforts went on in many of the more progressive states.

All these programs were successful in installing efficiency upgrades:  insulate the roofs, add caulking and weather-stripping, switch to fluorescent lights, replace that failing boiler, and add better heating controls.  And because we had used careful analysis and detailed computer models, we were confident the savings were there.  But the fact is, we couldn’t present fuel and electric usage data from any of the early projects to prove that our analysis was accurate. As late as 2008, we had a grand total of 20 buildings from AMP for which we had verified savings, largely of satisfactory magnitude.

Of course this is a problem from a technical perspective – we would like to know we are telling the truth when we claim that savings will be forthcoming.  But there is another, much larger problem:  all the retrofits done under Weatherization or NYSERDA programs are subsidized, one way or another, so the owner could expect a much more substantial return on their own partial investment than they would receive in pure market circumstances. And still it was hard to get them to undertake the projects.  Further, what we need now is a truly massive campaign of energy retrofits, far larger than can ever be subsidized by either NYSERDA or the federal government. And owners rarely have the cash reserves to undertake energy retrofits on their own.  The only way to bring retrofit activities “to scale” is to make them an investment opportunity for lenders, by which I mean banks.

But you know bankers – dour, untrusting, “show me your cash flow” types who want proof that you will have the money to meet your monthly obligations. (We will omit discussion of the unfortunate events of the last few years except to note that now no one will lend any money without ironclad guarantees of credit-worthiness.) If we want bankers to lend money for retrofits based on the use of energy savings to repay the loan, we need tools to convince them that the savings will be forthcoming.  Until now, those tools were not in evidence.

Today, we stand a chance.  Deutsche Bank Americas Foundation and Living Cities commissioned Steven Winter Associates and HR&A Advisors to undertake a massive study of energy retrofit activities in New York City, and to formulate an underwriting approach based on their findings. The just-released report provides both a powerful case that the savings will be realized in enough instances to justify significant investment activity, and an analytic framework that will make investments even more secure.

On the technical side, they examined 231 buildings for which pre- and post-construction data was available, and developed a strong set of useful conclusions. Just a few examples: expect more substantial and reliable savings from fuel use reduction than from measures aimed at electric usage; the more fuel your building uses, the greater the potential for savings. (Before you say “duh”, this was quantified in way that that will be very useful for underwriting, as we will see.) And because buildings are complex systems, they found that while observed savings tracked projected savings in a statistical sense, there would still be cases where the savings fell short.  How can this risk be minimized, making energy efficiency retrofits an attractive investment for our dour banker?

Here is where the team developed an exceedingly clever analytic approach.  The engineers designing the retrofit will use their models to predict savings.  But from an analysis of the 231 buildings, the team already knew that on average, they could expect savings roughly equal to half of the pre-retrofit fuel use minus a substantial constant. (See the paper for the math!)  The clever approach then is to trust the engineer’s model unless it predicts savings greater than the average found for their data set, adjusted for energy use in the building being modeled. If the model predicts savings greater than the data set average, use the data set average. If the model predicts savings less than the data set average, use the model results. Then go talk to your banker. When this approach was applied to the buildings in the data set, they found that the actual energy savings substantially exceeded these adjusted predictions, a situation that should leave underwriters satisfied.

Can this work?  Will we see a dramatic increase in capital available for energy efficiency retrofits? Only time will tell, but we have made a substantial step forward.  All the buildings in New York City over 50,000 square feet will undergo energy audits, as required by Local Law 87 of 2009, and the proposed measures and their estimated savings will be there for all to see. Now, a robust way to justify financing the measures is also available.

The same day last week the City Council helped us all breathe easier with a new law on chemicals in carpets, the Department of Environmental Protection released its new stormwater rule that encourages natural rainwater detention and retention, along with accompanying design guidelines. “Natural” here is not being used like the labels on cleaning products – here we are talking about honest to goodness mother nature. Rather than send rainwater to concrete tanks, sewers, and treatment plants, the new DEP rule encourages onsite reuse and natural infiltration.

It’s hard to overstate how much of a “180” this rule and the Green Infrastructure Plan represents for DEP, at least in terms of the principles involved. Until very recently, the only stormwater approach that mattered to DEP’s water engineers were those that could be measured in tanks and pipes. While we all know rainwater can be absorbed in the ground, directed into a rain barrel, and retained by a green roof, it wasn’t that easy to measure this capture. So it didn’t count at all for DEP. It does now.

The new rule is not a panacea for those who favor green infrastructure but is still a big step forward. The rule drastically reduces the allowable runoff from new construction and major reconstruction (a 90% reduction from previous limits). DEP will consider a range of approaches to reduce runoff including vegetative cover, green roofs, and permeable pavement. It will also consider open-bottomed detention systems that allow infiltration. Owners are required to provide maintenance for these systems so they work as intended. And finally, new developments next to a waterway must send rainwater into the waterway (rather than the sewer system).

Taken together, this rule implements 4 Task Force recommendations:

• SW 2: Reduce Stormwater Runoff From New Developments
• SW 4: Send Rainwater to Waterways
• SW 5: Encourage Innovative Stormwater Practices
• SW 6: Maintain Site-Based Stormwater Detention Systems

Another good day for green codes and a great way to kick off the New Year!

Green codes continue to fly off the City Council’s legislative shelf like bagels on a NYC morning. We can’t even keep track and we helped draft them!

Last Wednesday, the City Council gave New York a New Year’s present by prohibiting the sale, offer for sale, or installation of carpets and carpet cushions that contain volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in excess of the Green Label Plus standards from the Carpet & Rug Institute. Implementing the Task Force proposal Health & Toxicity 1: Limit Harmful Emissions From Carpets, we believe this law is another first in the nation for a municipality. While many jurisdictions have standards on paints and coatings, carpets haven’t received the same attention.

But they should. For those who aren’t familiar with VOCs, they are a class of carcinogenic chemicals behind “new car smell” that cause a host of health problems ranging from respiratory ailments to major organ damage. While paints and coatings off-gas VOCs very quickly, it takes longer for carpets to release their VOCs thus increasing the likelihood that end users will be impacted. Interestingly, the vast majority of U.S. carpet manufacturers meet the Green Label Plus standards — the problem is with imported carpets. So, in one package we have a new law that improves the health of New Yorkers and also increases the competitiveness of American carpet manufacturers.

For ongoing updates on the status of the GCTF proposals, check out our Codes Status Report.

Change is a funny thing. Often when I discuss subjects like urban agriculture someone will scoff and say, “You can’t feed everyone through urban farming.”  But the hope is to reduce our dependance on, not eliminate, industrial agriculture.  (And is it churlish to point out that our current agricultural system also doesn’t feed everyone?)  When I raise the prospect of renewable energy I can expect a similar response- and have a similar answer at the ready.  The same goes for biking.  When I argue for continuing the expansion of bike lanes in NYC I am rebuffed with a lot of high dudgeon about how biking isn’t for everyone, that sometimes you need to transport kids or groceries, etc. etc.  But no one is calling for the impound of all combustion powered vehicles.  We are simply hoping to make the city a more hospitable place for cyclists and pedestrians.  I have found that the arguments that are most persuasive in this regard are the ones that explain the multiple positive impacts of these new systems.  Not just from one perspective but from many.  The folks at an organization called Healthcare Management Degree have developed a series of infographics on biking and health that are brilliant example of this.  Their graphics link the impact of driving on public health, the positive impacts of biking on individual health (average weight loss in ONE YEAR = 13 lbs.!) and, perhaps the most compelling argument in this era of tight budgets, the considerable reduction in health care costs. They might have expanded these issues to include positive community impacts like the retention of local dollars, but they are a health care company so we’ll let that slide.

Santa- all I want for Christmas is for someone to develop a similar set of graphics for my other pet causes: retrofitting existing buildings, smart growth planning, and coffee.

A couple weeks back I attended “math night” at my kids’ school- when the parents hear about the math curriculum they can expect their children to be following in the coming year. (Bear with me- I promise this is relevant to green building.)  The major focus of the evening were changes that will be required by New York State’s adoption of what are called the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) for mathematics.  The CCSS are a state-led effort to develop best practices guidelines for teaching mathematics across the country.  When I first heard that we were about to review the findings of an enormous committee of state bureaucrats I kicked myself for not bringing a book to the meeting.  I presumed that we’d be subjected to a nearly illegible mess of obvious and/or irrelevant platitudes- all delivered in bureaucratese, crammed onto Powerpoint slides in chunks of 3-400 words.

Imagine my surprise when the items presented to us were clear, instructive and, almost unbelievably, intellectually invigorating.  What I found most astonishing as we walked through the standards was that they were so sound and so deeply fundamental that they could be applied to almost any discipline.  In their own way, the standards are systems thinking at its most effective.

The common core standards are below, along with my thoughts on how they can be applied to the sustainability and green building fields:

1. Make sense of problems and persevere in solving them.
I like the implication here of making sense of a problem before searching for the solution.  Often the way a problem is presented to us obscures the core issue.  Taking a moment to ask if the question being asked is the right one can help us ensure that we are not slaves to habit and inertia- the forces most powerfully aligned against change.

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