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>> Our last speaker in these series is Dr. Chris Pyke from the US Green Building Council.
>> PYKE: All right. So, we--it is a complete privilege to talk with you today and I am
going to cop to a couple of things right off but I, you know, this isn't an enviable position.
You guys had a great lunch. You're in comfy chairs. You just heard something interesting
and now I'm supposed to keep you awake until coffee. So, that's not going to be easy but
I'm going to try. Okay. So, my--actually, here's the carrot I have for you which may
or may not be worth it. No modeling, for the next 20 minutes we will--I will not--no modeling.
I will actually inflict upon you data. And I think actually in the spirit of the dinnertime
conversation Dr. Specter told us last night, we're going to get along (inaudible). And
let me--let me start with this. Which is--this is a concept a few of you heard me say this
yesterday is that what I believe we do at the US Green Building Council which is a--by
the way not an agency of the US government. It is a nonprofit 501c3 non-membership organization,
18,000 member companies and 78 chapters and a whole bunch of other people working together
to move this. So, the idea is that out there in the universe, there is a prevalence of
practice across multiple performance dimensions. So, what is this? This is a--this is a histogram
or density plot that represents the prevalence of practice. So, how many actors? How many
buildings? How many projects are performing where across a spectrum? And our goal is to
induce, to cause, to do interventions that create a permanent and self-sustaining shift
in the prevalence of practice across the dimensions of what we understand as green. And so unlike--I
think the point was made earlier, that agnostic as to what is good, better and best, we're
not. We actually have an opinion. And our opinion is that we want things to go in a
certain direction with respect to energy efficiency, renewable energy materials, waste, human experience
and so forth. And so, we're going to chase that curve through the next 20 minutes. And
see if we can go from a conceptual curve that is the basis for what our movement has done
over the last two decades to a data driven version of that curve that we can seek to
understand and track over time. So, we're going to--I'm going to start by placing you
though--for those folks who aren't familiar with Green Building as it is right now, I
want to talk about the incredibly unstable moment that we find ourselves in. We are at
an infliction point; basically a movement that is unstable. We are ending what is called--what
I would call the Era of "Firsts". For the last decade, we have had an awful lot of fun
in Green Building. We have got to do the first lead certified building and in this case,
first lead certified laboratory in the West Coast, first platinum building. We had the
first green building in Harvard. The first green building in Peoria, the first one in
Tampa, the first animal husbandry facility, the first wastewater treatment facility. Whew.
We don't get to do that again. And actually, what we are entering into, we have combined
those “firsts” into a pattern of unique green buildings that have become regional
patterns, have combined to be national patterns and ultimately spread into 110 countries around
the world in collaboration with many different countries who are advancing Green Building.
So, we have created through an era of "Firsts" where basically every--many, many different
projects were first of a kind. Many, many different projects were kind of a unique "This
is our first time through this process" and we could all feel good about that. And at
the end of it we--one of the things USGBC is known for is we hand out a plaque. And
we say “This is your gold, silver, platinum plaque, that's great.” Okay. I'm not going
to talk a whole much about that because that era--not the era of handing out plaques but
the era of it being exciting that it was the first time. Just to kind of reflect on how
I think about that, if I told you One Man Survives Cancer, we have a special publication
for that. We call it like National Enquirer. You know, if we--if we cure cancer in a population
that is worthy of our attention as scientists and scholars and we put that in a journal
like the Lancet or something, right? So, these are a bunch of, maybe in a certain way, not
to demean them but this is one man being cured of cancer. What we're interested in is this.
We're interested as we saw earlier today in altering the prevalence of practice in the
design, operation construction of the built environment at this scale. All these lights
represent built environments from doghouses to skyscrapers that we are trying to alter.
And we're trying to shift that distribution not just around energy efficiency but across
all the dimensions, all the green dimensions that these urban areas are impinged. And so
let me talk about how I think we're doing that. But I also want to start by giving you
a sense of where I think we are now. So this is a--this just--I was trying to convey what
I thought about the nature of data flowing from the built environment today. And this
is about as close as I could come. So, we have an asset that typically cost millions,
hundreds of millions, sometimes billions of dollars. Typically the only real time--no,
we have--the only data stream we have of that is a wire that goes to an entity that sells
us--that sells us electricity, right? And I think back, well, what is an analogous communication
system look like? Well, the telegraph. But then actually the telegraph isn't actually
dumb enough. It actually is instantaneous communication and it’s bi-directional. So,
our current information about buildings is actually worse than we were in 1944. So, the
question is, we are rapidly, with the assistance of many people in this room, moving toward
this kind of reality where the entire nature of our understanding of this built environment
is, should be, and will continue to be instrumented, data driven and empirical in nature. And the
nature of that flow of information--a couple of things I would point out that would make
this more than just a movie graphic are that--the information density about the building is
complemented by information density about the people in the building. The people are
the sensors. You know, when we raised our hands and said how much we like this space
or didn't like this space or whatever, we--I--when you really get down to it, your experience
of that is the only legitimate sensor of that. I don't care about ASHRAE 55 or ASHRAE 62
or the other things. Your experience is the only legitimate barometer, our collective
experience is it. So, we are trying to collect multiple channels of information. What are
we doing? What is a Green Building? What are the flows--what are the green dimensions of
performance that we are trying to collect, trying to foster? We are interested in the
efficient use of energy. We are interested in the source of that energy. Be it renewable
or something else. We're interested in the flows of water, waste, the indoor environment,
the acoustics, the thermal, the ventilation rates. We're interested in the--your experience
in here. And actually I would partition our interest in your experience from many others.
As we get into this, you'll find that--at least from my personal perspective, our goal
in the Green Building community is to not just provide you with a satisfactory experience
but our goal is to understand what it means for you to have an exemplary experience, an
exceptional experience in this space. I'm interested not just in your experience in
this space. I'm interested in how you got here, your level of physical activity, the
public health concerns, your--the--and I'm also interested in the financial dimensions
and the biodiversity and many others. Okay. That's a lot to be interested in. But that's
why Green Building is a really big tent. It is more than anyone of those things and when
we say Green Buildings, that's what it is to me. This density of information is where
we're going. The challenge as many people have said is how--what do we do with it? How
do we turn that--it's one thing to collect the information but I'm not agnostic as to
the state of that information. I am directional. I want this information to move in a certain
direction. So, this is where, in my mind, one of the things we have at our disposal
are rating systems. Just to--because everyone thinks I'm going to talk about rating systems.
I'll talk just a little bit about rating systems. The--what rating systems do is they provide
a lens to interpret some of that data. So a rating system is something that USGBC and
others around the world create. And what we do is we plop a value judgment on top of a
piece of data. And so the simplest case would be--basically, what we're trying to do is
to say that observation is good. That one is better. And that one is best. And we're
going to, through a collaborative consensus-based process and all that define that good, better,
best spectrum. And we are going to create competitive advantage and reward for those
folks who are best over those who are good and in far excess of those who are none of
the above, right? And so, a simple example of what I mean is we can take a data stream--so,
the US EPA creates a benchmarking tool called Energy Star portfolio manager for any given
building--commercial building in the US like an office building, we can score between 0
and 100, many you guys all had. The question--so, that's great. We have a line of data. We took
the utilities. We benchmarked them against these building stock in the US and we get
a number between 0 and 100. A rating system’s job is to basically sit on top of that data
stream and say, "If you're 69, yeah, that's all right. If you're 60--if you're 86, that's
an average for a green existing building in the US. That's good. And if you're 100, that's
best." So, that's the simplest case of dozens and dozens of those kinds of interpretations
that we make. But that said, the result of certification is--we are pushing beyond the
notion--and that actually what I want to focus more on our marks on is we are ending that
era where the result of certification is the glass plaque on a building. That act of certification
is the beginning of a data stream that we will use in all sorts of different ways--and
keeping in mind why one of the fundamental reasons that we do this is that we have a
vast market failure in the building industry that relates to the absence of information.
There is no--we don't have information on the comparative energy performance of different
buildings. I can't tell you how much water that building uses or how much people love
it or whether it provides great acoustics, I can't know that and so what I'm trying to
do is create the kinds of labels, the kinds of disclosures that allow us to efficiently
allocate resources to the better performing assets, and I'm not going just to do that
alone, I'm going to do that in partnership with others who have different bandwidths,
but the bottom line is we are going to create a great--our goal, our purpose is to create
a great deal more transparency about multiple dimensions of building performance and to
take it to scale, not a conceptual problem, a brass tax problem about I need to know more
about that asset so I can decide how I'm going to allocate my research. Am I going to buy
space in it, am I going to invest in it, am I going run away from it? What the heck am
I going to do? And what I can do once I have that data pipe, every certification that we
get, every building we come in contact with, we can offer them something important in return,
we can offer them context, and in my simple minded world, I--I'm not an engineer and I
understand the world more simplistically. I understand that there are things on the
left-hand side of this graph, that if I look at a distribution of performance across a
density distribution of projects, I have some on the less--on the left but if I continue
to create projects on the performance level over here, I will drag my average down and
I will be moving in the wrong direction if my goal is to achieve higher levels of performance.
If I get delivery of projects on the right, over time, I will move my average in a positive
direction and I will accomplish my goal of market transformation and in moving the population
in one direction and so, what I have is the universe of less successful solutions and
more successful solutions. As an organization, what can I do with that information? I can
create competitive advantage in differentiation, for the ones on the right and I can--I can
ignore the ones on the left. So, how do I see this playing out? What I want to do is
to create mechanisms, interventions that reward those successful projects, the high--based
on performance on multiple dimensions that you and I get to choose. We don't have to
agree on dimensions of performance. You can like energy efficiency more than I do. I can
like toxic reduction more than you do. But we need that transparency so you can make
that decision and I can make this decisions and I can choose my project. And what I want
is to move the entire mass of performance over time forward, and I want to see it with
empirical data in near real time. Okay. So with that aspiration--I promised no models
and then I gave you 10 minutes of concepts. Okay. Yeah. So--there's no free lunch, right?
Well, maybe there is. So--this is the one place that you can really say there is a free
lunch. So, the--so I want to show you how we are actualizing those concepts through
a set of tools that we call the Green Building Information Gateway. I considered an environment
when we are developing and demonstrating solutions to do what I just described to you. And you
can get a sense of where were at, and you can also envision where we're going. So this
is something that we've been working on for, I don't know, about a year and we are very
committed to working on in the future going forward. So the good thing about this part
of the talk is--actually if you don't like my talking, you can pull out your iPad right
now and go to GBIG.org and follow along. You can actually click on any of these. These
are a variety of apps and what not that you can try at your leisure and I want to focus
on these four key functionalities. First, the number one thing that we needed to create
is transparency. I need to not just, you know, not just walk up to a building and see energy
star plaque or a lead plaque, I need to unpack that plaque and learn more about it. Okay.
That's a pretty easy, right? At least it seems easy. Okay. So I can take a view like this
to downtown Chicago. I can take these buildings that have plaques on them. I could also show
you the energy star ones. You can go in there, you can use your iPad like this, hit that
little locator button and look at the characteristics of green buildings around you. I've started
to use our own toy and I love it. Actually I'm in downtown New York and I'm like, "What
is this building?" Okay. And so what I can do is I can take a building, like the Merchandise
Mart. I can click on it. I can zoom to the street level using our friendly street view.
I can see my little icon right there and I can also see the very creepy heads on spits
which is--that's what actually happened if you're a successful luminary in Chicago is
they put your head on those things. The--and I can then drill down to get information about
those assets. So I have begun to create a framework for providing asset level transparency
in real time. In other words, the story doesn't end with a plaque. The story begins with a
plaque because that gets you on the map. The next thing I can do is I've now created a
data anchor. So I can now attach all sorts of other people's great insights. You don't
like my metrics? You don't like the things I collect? Fine. What I've created is a data
anchor and--this is not rocket science for all of us, but the practicality of it is a
bit of rocket science. And so I can say, "Well, let me look something up and let me attach
a Walk Score." So a third-party metric about the relative walkability of that site, and
that's only a tease as to anybody’s third-party resource. So, if you’re out there and you're
saying I have a better way to represent the performance dimensions of this asset be it
walkability perform--physical activity, financial value, I have a mechanism now through web
services and other IT protocols to expose this to you. I can share this to you as a
JSON object. I can consume your API and attach information to it. So that's the kind of architecture
that we're doing. The next thing is that, I want to be able to not just explore it,
connect to it, but I want to compare it, right? Because now I'm going to start that process
of creating competitive advantage for the better actors. And the example I'm going to
give you today is a quick one. It's based on, say, a jurisdiction. So I have two municipalities.
I want to basically inspire or promote, or show Chicago how it compares to its rivals
in New York City with regard to Green Building Activity. I could be looking at energy efficiency.
I could be looking at the number of accredited professionals, the workforce that they've
created, but what I can do is I can tract and trend this overtime and so you can go
create this comparison. And I don't--there are numbers down here. Don't worry about them.
What I want to show is that there is a basis for going in and comparing place A to place
Y, and looking at the level of activity across multiple metrics. Ultimately, the goal is
to customize this. Is it how many green building projects, how many energy star projects, how
much revenue from green businesses do you have there? This is a platform from our world
to create that comparison, to provide a dashboard. The other thing that you’ll immediately
appreciate is that basically Chicago and New York are just instances of groups that happen
to be geographic. So if this is company one and this is company two, or your portfolio,
your collection and my collection, the same function works. So the basis is the--the most
simple thing I'm trying to do, is to allow you to inspire and to compare yourself to
others and see where you stand. But I'm not really satisfied by that. I want to go back
with that curve. I want to find that curve and move it. And so let’s spend the bulk--the
rest of our time talking about that. So, going back to the curve conceptually for the last
time, what I'm really tying to do is differentiate these two dimensions. The "how" side which
is the high- performance side where what I'm trying to do is provide you with increasing
rewards for being a high performer and so let me give you an example of one of those
types of projects. So, this is an example of an existing green building that was certified
in Chicago so this is the FBI building. Okay, so up to now, historically, we would have
given you a plaque and said, platinum building, that's great--good on you. That's fine, but
what I want to understand is I want to begin in increasing levels of detail to unpack what
that means, “On what dimensions did you perform and how were you performing relative
to your peers?” So what I can do is as-as one example of many--I can break the performance
of this building down into--in this case, the six categories that you guys are familiar
with––energy, materials, indoors, sight, water, innovation and critically, I can find
those curves. I can use the data. Every day, we get about a million and a half square feet
a day which is added up to over a billion square feet of real state over the past decade
and I can use that to establish the distribution of performance. In this case, the word ‘points’
essentially refers to metrics. I unders--I am collecting 30 different channels of information
on energy performance of which I have a positive result. They did something affirmative in
25 of those channels and so the key issue is not just where they were against my requirements
but where they were against the rest of the market. So, that distribution is the distribution
of achievement in energy and atmosphere for all existing--all buildings that certified
in that existing rating system. So I can say, I understand just how good that building is,
it's good, I mean pretty much, 95% of the buildings that passed through our system are
worse than it on the dimension. I can do that for materials, I can do that for IEQ, sustainable
sites, water and what you'll notice is the--and we'll come back to this, we can start unpacking
these distributions and ask why are those distributions where they are? What is the
combination of technology, cost, behavior that are causing these--these distributions
and conversely, I can also turn around and talk about why. Why are some buildings not?
Like I mean, obviously, I'm comparing green buildings to green buildings, but I'm still
equally interested in why someone is doing a below average green building for some market.
Let me give you an example. So here's a case where a building is doing the bare minimum
for energy. They're still exceeding code, in this case by 15% at least on a design basis
but what they're--but they're lagging the rest of the market. So I look at this and
gosh, if I was the building owner or investor, I wouldn't accept that. I mean, regardless
of what else you know, right? I mean, I don’t even have to put units on there, right? If
your design team comes in and says, "This is our project," okay. I would assume that
most people in this room would reject that project and say--you know, come back and try
again. And--but I can also look on the same project, they've actually have done above
average work on--on materials, they have done dramatically below average work on indoor
environmental quality, their average for their site--they're way below on water efficiency.
My goal with this is to provide this information early in the process in the--in the proposal,
in the design phase and ask folks, you know--to confront this comparative situation because
I'm going hold them to it later. Yeah. So let me give you an idea how we can drill deeper.
So I don't have to worry about--I don't have to limit myself to individual--there's lots
of different performance to mention and that's what I find rich about this space. I can worry
about energy efficiency as represented by Energy Star. I can worry about a performance--to
mention, like a ventilation rate or in the case of something we call a Greenhouse Gas
Index, I can take the 29 different channels of data that we collect that relate to Greenhouse
Gas Emissions, weight them by their relative contributions to Greenhouse Gas Emissions
so I can weight density and transportation accessibility very high, I can rate energy
efficiency very high, I can rate materials or water somewhere a little bit lower, I can
rate them in the portion to their relative importance and I can combine them into a synthetic--synthetic
index where 100 equals everything you could do weighted by its importance and zero represents
doing nothing. And I can start to dig in to these distributions in two different ways.
The first thing I can do is I can basic--the blue, I can look at it over time and I can
look at it by segment and I can say, you know, we didn't design a rating system to have a
mean of roughly 48, which is what this--this distribution has. But the market is telling
us based on its voluntary uptake of these things that that's what it's willing to provide
at this time and I can begin to unpack it and I can also see that between--using the
same yards stick, you don't have to worry about the idea, but the idea is we're using
the same yard stick, the same set of criteria. That in the time period 2006 to 2008 versus
the time period 2009 to 2011, I've seen a small positive shift in that distribution,
so projects are doing more with regard to things that reduce Greenhouse Gas emissions
in those two time periods. So I can know this, I can track this, I can slice this, I can
present it back to you and I can ask you to position your asset in--your proposed asset
or your real asset in this space. I can also break this down and so I can tell you the
two biggest components of a GHG index, include the--the location and the design of a site,
so how transportation-accessible is it. And I can start finding some interesting patterns.
If I look at the distribution of US projects, that's the blue, and I look at the distribution
of lead projects in China, there's a few hundred of them there and I look at that compared
with the distribution of all other international projects; I can start to see systematic differences
in the way that those projects are adopting GHG-abating strategies that are at large.
So I don't think it--I'm sorry, this should actually say GHG Index, but the idea is the
same. The idea is that this--this thing right here is saying "US projects are adopting slightly
less of what's available than our counterparts in China, than our counterparts internationally
who are at large." There's a bunch of good reasons behind that, but the crux is we could
unpack it and you can compare it. So if I'm just comparing--the differences in these shapes
are important to providing that context that creates competitive advantage. A similar story,
actually probably more germane to some folks in this room, is the adoption of energy and
atmosphere activities; that's energy efficiency commissioning renewable energy monitoring
and so forth. And one of the things you can see is that we have a distribution that's
centered on about 30, 35% which is--well, actually, this number of points, five or six
points. And what we have is this incredibly long-tailed distribution. So we begin to get
out--we can begin to get in a position to use this information to ask what's going on
in this tail, what's going on this tail, why is this peak centered where it is because
we didn't design it to be centered this way? This is information content on the receptivity
of these groups for this, and this is something that we can track in near real time. Okay.
So where I hope I've gotten you to in the remaining 50 seconds before I take your questions
is the idea that we, 20 years ago, started a movement with the goal of taking a distribution.
A distribution that was actually completely devoid of data and through a process essentially
“Ready, fire, aim” we--trying to set benchmarks and drive projects toward it. Now 10 years
after we really operationalize that system, we're at a point where we can track real distributions
in real time and ask--and use that as the basis for understanding the underlying mechanisms.
And it's just in time because this is the playing field that that's going to play out
in. So our interest is in creating the kinds of scalable information analytics that we're
going to need to tackle this problem. So with that, I really welcome any questions.
>> Hi. This is--I'm Mit [INDISTINCT] from Los Alamos here.
>> PYKE: OH, I'm sorry. Thanks.>> So my question is do you have any influence on the policy?
Like, some of these things have to be imposed because you might come up with data but people
may not want to do it because of cost.>> PYKE: Yeah. So there's--there's two answers to that.
So, when we look at moving a curve, we understand policy as one intervention. And particularly
in the building sector, policy is there is--there is kind of public policy then there's building
codes and standards as so forth. And what we're trying to do is--but fundamentally,
we're trying to mix those whole things together. And so, when we say do we have impact on policy?
There's a couple different ways we absolutely have impact on policy. But on the other hand,
the goal is to create a--to create competitive advantage for the high-performing actors in
the space so that it is desirable, economically beneficial to adopt those higher performance
practices. I think that it is a--candidly I think it is a mistake to understand these
distributions in strictly--as much as we might like to, to understand this kind of stuff
and terms of ROI. This stuff, this distribution of energy efficiency, distribution of renewables,
these real projects out there in the world are partially responsive to narrowly framed
kind of rational understandings of ROI, and they're actually responsive to a lot of other
stuff. o the last part about that part about that--about regulation--there is obviously
a very close coupling between codes and standards, like building codes and energy codes and this.
And our understanding is that this creates room. And the literal [INDISTINCT] for raising
the bar with regard to standards and we've seen that. So for instance, right now, basically
the average building, this number of points corresponds to about 30% better ASHRAE 90.1,
2007 which is the kind of most widely used energy code. So--what that basically said
is there are thousands of projects out there who are readily capable in delivering today
30% above code. So we can take that back into the codes process and argue to raise the floor,
and what are we going to do, we're going to move 30%--we're going to keep raising so that
competitive advantage is realized 30, 40, 50% over. So we're not going to be done. We're
going to move together. So--lot to unpack in that. Sorry.
>> This is Arsie, from Usman Chemical. You are using and writing on doesn't affect us--doesn't
affect those to qualify whether the building is green or not?>> PYKE: Uh-hmm.>> And do
you see whether those scoring on each of these factors could change or whether the life of
the building, number one? And number two, whether the lead certification or the net
energy zero audit, is this one time analysis audit or they go back in five years, ten years...
>> PYKE: Yup.>> ...and see what they are to...?>> PYKE: Okay. So two questions. So the dominant
issue is that the idea of certification over the last decade has grown up around span of
control, essentially saying we have--we understand that building designing construction time
period, and we have a set metrics and a set of things that are under control. And then
we have an operations period under which a different set of conditions are under control.
And so I think it's absolutely critical to understand that that is--there's not a--the
goal is to connect those things together, but the goal is that they will--they are necessarily
different because the currency of designing construction, AEC construction, is different
than it is for operating and those are necessarily segment. So to you point, yes, there are different
performance metrics, yes, there are different issues that are under control in different
phases and that's why we have a proliferation of segmentation. So now--today we have 14
different rating systems that deal with everything from interiors to homes, to warehouse, distribution,
data centers, commercial, schools, retail, neighborhoods and so forth and they--it gets
to your point. The other part about the Time Value. So within--last year, there's two or
three profound things. The entire green building movement is moving, as John told us earlier,
toward a focus on performance and where the first issue is, how does the building perform?
And the next issue is how did you perform well? So--up to now, we ask kind of "What
were we putting in?" Inputs. And then hoping that it derived outputs that we liked. There's
a lot of good reasons for that. But what we are doing is creating a whole new paradigm
of "performance drives the show." Because of that--what the--there's also another way
to answer the last part of your question. The market has basically said that certification
of buildings, whether it's lead or energy star, the market has valued that at about
a five-year shelf life. I certify a building today that creates marginal benefit in terms
rent, effective rent, tenancy and so forth; they can detect that through economic analysis.
That premium basically falls way within five years. So whether you are following our recommendation
which is to re-certify your building every three years, or whether you are letting the
market be your guide which says "If you don't re-certify in five years, anything you did
to create advantage the last time is not believed by the market." One or th other, three to
five years in you need to be doing this. My feeling is we need to approach a per--a state
of continuous certification, like a state of continuous evaluation. That to me is more
like a diving board on the submarine, you know? Like green lights ready to dive, right?
Green lights, we are in a constant state of high performance. And--and what were asking
is how do we work back from a technology we have today as episodic score card sort of
approach, to a set of automation that allows us to *** continuous performance. That's
the transition. >> [INDISTINCT] at MIT. This was extremely
interesting. You emphasized a lot, the gradients within a pool of buildings that already belongs
to the green buildings.>> PYKE: Yup.>> Wouldn't there be more value in trying to get more
buildings into this category? And secondly, by emphasizing the buildings within this category,
you need to be top performers. Might you not be putting off those who are about to decide
whether they should enter the pool of green buildings?
>> PYKE: Wait let the--the--I this question a lot. So there's two ways into that. One
is I would love to have more buildings enter the pool of green buildings for a bunch or
reasons because first and foremost, it is the first step in this transparency. It is
the fact--it is the point we become aware of them, it’s the point we'll know anything
about them at all. So I want that to happen. But at the same time, what was the not--you
actually can actually do this mathematically as well as saying you said, "We have the diversity,
the heterogeneity of green building performance has increased. We created a voluntary system
it has heterogeneity." And so we--I do believe have a sufficiently large cohort of green
buildings that we can stimulate internal competition, and that's actually the right thing to do
after being--doing this for ten years. Because I'm not going to look at you and say "I don't
think a certified building is great shakes (ph)." And I don't think that the delivery
of a--that is a minimum level. And I think it is fully within our power to create competitive
dynamics within the pool of green buildings because people like ourselves want to compete
in that pool. So I want to compete to bring more entities on to the radar screen, whether
that's through certification or just through advanced data channels or other types of things,
but I need--it's a both "and" I think is the answer to your question. It's a both "and."
I want to stimulate competition within the pool; I want to enlarge the pool.
>> Sam Gekler [SP], Cummins. In order to push--push the distribution the way you like to see it
go, where do you see the weak link in clients or customers asking for it or builders available
to provide it?>> PYKE: I think it's a demand problem, largely. I think that the level of
sophistic--[INDISTINCT]. I probably answered that too quickly. But I think my gut reaction
is that many of these are demand problems. The market is capable of delivering more sophisticated
higher performance solutions and they have not--and we have a variety if reasons that
inhibit demand for those higher performance solutions. I think there are exceptions. I
think what I said is true with regard to energy performance. I think it is--it is probably
much more debatable when it comes to water performance. Because water performance--basically
we've set standards that basically everyone is meeting. They're all--like basically 70-80%
of projects are meeting our highest standards with regard to water performance, and were
not really sure where to go with raising that bar. So if you look--so in other words, that's
not demand-driven. We're not sure if the market would demand higher, but the market isn't
really clear about how--what next to offer. Here, in this space, we know that higher performance
solutions for energy with regard to efficiency and renewables are available, but there's
a lack of demand for them. And these--and these case where people are absorb--are performing
at this level are special in some way. So--and so--that can be answered, is you can find
situations on different performance variables. The last one I'll add to that is like; if
we think energy is demand limited, water is some sort of limitation in supply of good
idea. And--and occupant experience, you know, how much do you love this space is completely
limited by the lack of data. We don't--to the point that was brought up--it was brought
up earlier by Michelle, she’s like, the issue was saying "I don't have the data on
enough spaces to get people to really compete on the quality of these spaces in this same
way. If I did, I could open up that competition but I can't right now.">> Hi, I'm [INDISTINCT]
Chan with Wide [INDISTINCT] Associates. Question is what's the correlation between US GVC lead
certification and the green building codes (ph) such as CAL Green?
>> PYKE: Yup. Good question. So green building codes and standards are--there’s two answers
to that. The first--you got to first put it in context. Today there are two--there are
two--there are two universes of green buildings. There are--this summer we reached a parity
point in US GVC where there are as many square feet of existing green buildings, i.e., existing
buildings that have been recognized as green, as new construction. That's going to continue
in that parity going forward. So, for half of the green buildings we deal with, codes
are not really relevant because there are existing buildings that are performing against
operational benchmarks. For the half that are new construction which increasingly over
half of that new construction volume is overseas. It's in China, Korea, Indonesia, Brazil. It's
an over--developing world markets were that's really relevant. So that's an interesting
code twist too. But the issue--so for that fraction that is new built. What we understand
is what we're trying to create, is a complementary relationship between green codes and voluntary
standards. So were trying to create a delta where the voluntary standards get the market
experienced reaching up to higher level of performance which allow us to raise the green
codes levels. So US GVC has been a very strong supporter of ASHRAE 189 of IGCC, and to a
degree of CAL--CAL Green. And so the goal has been to move this up in lockstep where
the voluntary reach standard is tied to incentives and other things that are helping the market
stretch and the codes are bringing up the floor. We still don't know--although we know
a lot about--we're doing a study right now that compares all the intricacies of codes
and voluntary standards. We still don't really have--we have essentially no buildings that
have been built to green codes yet. So there's a lot--there is a major transition step between
the adoption--right now, we have green codes as hypothetical documents. The adoption of
those codes and then people building to those codes is the next step. We understand what
a--what a LEED building is. We don't really understand what a green code building is yet.
So that's a long conversation. >> WILLIAMS: Hi. I'm Oliver Williams of [INDISTINCT]
Research. I think I lost couple of questions actually expand my question, but I'll say
it anyway. The thing that sort of occurs to me is a little bit is that, you know, obviously
we [INDISTINCT] energy examples, and these great examples of gold and platinum LEED places,
but in some sense the goal is obviously to have green energy efficiency for the whole
globe taken as [INDISTINCT] and that to have, you know, .0001 percent of the buildings being
outstanding and everything else not so great. Its better--it's not as good as having like
50% that were good. And so obviously you want these things to sort of trickle down a little
bit, and it's not entirely obvious that--that some of the techniques that you are rewarding
by providing things like, you know, like platinum status are scalable. You know, could every
house in a large development, you know, scale to having all of the great things that you’re
rewarding there? And again, as you said that goes into code and these other things be it’s
just...>> Right. It's a good question. I think we have to ask ourselves some profound questions
about scalability, although I will point a couple of things in the commercial space.
So, right now we know that green building practices are written into the specs of 70%
of commercial new construction in the US. That's from the analysis of building specification
by McGraw-Hill. And so the idea--whether green building as a, kind of integrated holistic
concept like a LEED platinum building or a [INDISTINCT] excellent building is--is possible.
I think that they play an important role as a test bed and need to be understood as pilots
and test beds and market, you know, things that are easing market adoption. What we definitely
see empirically, is the uptake of those practices into down market. And so the--how that plays
out is a critical concern. I mean we are all are asking ourselves, you know, what--we want
what you just said. You know, we want that broad scale or adoption. We understand that
as a diffusion of innovation problem and we understand how do we create multiple interventions
to bring it down market. And we can look it very specific--you know, I think we can hang
our hat on some things that are--maybe sound trivial, but were actually quite effective
like the broad based adoption low VOC paint. It's something where the green building industry
help get people comfortable, create demand, incubate demand for low VOC paint, and now
we see a substantial adoption of low VOC paint across the market. You know, those are not
the kind of really swing-from-the-trees examples we want, but maybe 10 years on.
>> CLOWELLA: Whitney Clowella, Pacific Northwest National Labs. Thank you for your very interesting
talk. I'm just curious how you calculate the GHG index?
>> PYKE: I'm happy to follow up with you and give you details. The crux of it is what we
do is we take a--a proto-typical reference building, in this case, a typical US office
building and we conduct a series of--use a series of models to estimate the basically--it's
173--175,000 square-foot US office building with a certain specified occupancy and a certain
specified use on a one acre parcel of land that uses irrigated water, all sorts of different
things. So, what we do is we specify our prototype and we basically divide out that carbon footprint
that would be associated with that reference building so in the sense that reference is
the target for lead for new construction and so that building has a proportional carbon
footprint. This much from transportation, this much from the building systems, this
much from solid waste, this much from lifecycle of materials and then what we do is we basically
look at the ability of individual credits--those strategies to abate different pieces of that--of
that distribution of that--of that pie. And so the larger a chunk of that pie you're going
after, the greater a co-efficient you have in the index. So basically you have a vector
with 29 coefficients. Each one is a--achieved or not of a--of a LEED credit. And so what
we track is the achievement of those credits and we translate it into a proportional value
for GHG reduction. We also have a variant of this that actually works in tons which
is--but you have to actually specify the prototype more. So, again, if you folks want so see,
I have a--there's an online demo of that tool available, and there's a lot of documentation
for the index. The thing I will mention about the index is the index is one of 13 indices
that make up LEED 2009, so there's another 12 that are equally accessible. And there
are 25 more that are in development and we actually have working with academic colleagues
to develop indices against other issues, such as we're working with the New York Department
of Public Health on an active designed, physical activity index that works the same way. So
that was a lot of information, but the idea is that indices as ways to interpret credit
achievement are very important to us, and I'm happy to follow up with anybody who finds
that remotely interesting because I can get really nerdy about.
>> Jimmy [INDISTINCT], Arkansas. I was just, you know, when your doing this a lot of the
big buildings and this is kind of going back down to the house example as [INDISTINCT].
In my experience people want to be green. They really do. I mean--but they--and houses
really don't have any idea how, you know? It's like, in seeming like a lot of the stuff
that's been talked about throughout all the speakers is higher upfront initial cost, energy
savings down the line. But--I mean, is the result to this also going to result in like
for--like some sort of heuristic of "Okay, if I want to be green my first best thing
for spending a little bit more money upfront that's on mortgage is this [INDISTINCT], this,
when you have a slide. >> PYKE: Yeah. Well, I think... Exactly. I
think that--okay. So homes are really important. Homes are different. So we have whole group
in San Diego who focuses exclusively on homes and homes have a lot of different issues.
But what I found motivating, I'll give you my--what I want--where I want to be with respect
to homes, is I want this same context. I live in my home and I look down my street, and
there's a half-dozen other homes that they are essentially the same as my house. I have
no idea which ones of those homes perform better or worse than the others. And I have
no idea those homes that do perform better, how they do it? So in the same way that I
want to offer this context to a commercial project, I desperately want to offer it to
residential. Because what I lack is I--I mean this is--some of us is channeling old (ph)
power or channeling other people in the field, but the idea is basically saying "What I lack
as a home owner, someone who’s trying to make these decisions, is any sense of context
or perspective on how green I really am, or what the highest performing people like me
are doing." These are questions that we can inform, we can unpack and then say those high
performers what systems are they using, how are they going about doing it, those sort
of things. So my dominant connection between this and what you're talking about is the
desperate desire to give home owners and occupants of homes context so that they can begin to
put themselves in context and act on that. The thing--a lot of other things come from
that. >> [INDISTINCT]>> PYKE: Sure.>> There's two
of you in a row. So who ever starts first, okay.>> PYKE: [INDISTINCT]
>> Jedah [SP] [INDISTINCT] from the University of Maryland. I had a question, actually a
follow up. Typically for a residential house, if you look at the cost of constructing a...>>
PYKE: Uh-huh.>> ...LEED certified home or, you know, green sufficiently to a large extent
than what is from what is currently probably out there for a typical home, what is the
cost to differential. >> PYKE: That is a great question. Okay. So
we have a study going on in California right now. So in November come back and I'll give
you the answer. But there's actually two ways to do it. If you do a bottom up cost estimate
and you ask, you know, basically, how much is the cost to get into an energy star or
a LEED home relative to a conventionally built. The rough order of magnitude is $1,500 because
you're really paying for envelope-tightening; you're paying for a few pre-requisite type
activities. It's actually and incredibly know--low number. And so a bottom-up estimate of these
sort of basal amount that it takes to get up to an energy star level of efficiency and
those things is of that order of magnitude. So that's a pretty trivial amount of money
and that's--when you really get down to it. You can obviously take that to much larger
sums of money when you put on photovoltaics and you start doing mechanical ventilation
and lots of other things, that number can skyrocket, right, at that basal level? The
interesting thing though is--so when I made this distinction between a bottom-up cost
estimate which is just "What does it cost to get there?" The real interesting question
right now is how the market values it? Because a lot of developers are going around and saying
"I’m going to try to sell you that green home for 20% more." And so they're trying
to get quite ambitious marks-ups. And so, it's going to be quite interesting to get
some real market signal about what the--what the market is really willing to absorb. We
know what those numbers looks like in the commercial office space because the residential
space has been such a disaster, like we launched LEED for Homes 2007. Yeah. That was good,
right? So we've been battling through a tough market. And if you want to understand what
the shape of that market looks like, it gets wonky (ph). But the issue is it's a bi-modal
market. Basically, home activity is dominated by multifamily affordable and relatively expensive
custom builds. The market rate homes are the--are the hardest to do because they are most first
cost sensitive, and they're dominated by production of builders. And so that is changing slowly,
but that's the nature of the market. So we have the most information on, of this kind
of weird ends of the market. That's more than you wanted.
>> All right. Well, please help me thank Doctor Pyke and all of our speakers.