"ASHRAE today is guided by a strategic plan with four directions.
The first is that ASH RAE will lead the advancement of sustainable building design and operation. That is the direction that will have the most impact on MCAA members, both those that construct and maintain buildings. For ASH RAE, sustainability means reduced energy with good indoor environmental quality.
Sustainable construction has a lot of momentum today. We are all aware of the growing influence of the sustainability rating programs, LEED and Green Globes. The energy bill passed in late 2007 requires the federal government to immediately reduce the amount of energy used in their buildings and to begin constructing net zero energy buildings by the year 2030.
ASHRAE is committed to provide design guidance for net zero energy buildings by 2020.
Frankly, I thought net zero energy was a pipedream until I started to work with the engineers at the National renewable Energy Lab. When the AIA adopted a position statement calling for their members to move toward net zero energy design it was a significant statement because those designs will have much more expensive mechanical systems. Congress then continued the rush toward net zero by passing the Energy Bill.
Where are we today? The latest Commercial Building Energy Consumption Surveyor CBECS data is from 2003. That data indicates that a typical commercial building in the US uses 91,000 btu per square foot per year. Buildings designed using ASHRAE Standard 90.1 should use about 70,000 btu per square foot per year, and buildings designed with the best technology available today will use about 40,000 btu per square foot per year.
A net zero energy building is defined as a building which on an annual basis produces as much power through renewable energy as it consumes. To get to a net zero energy level today then will require renewables to provide an average of about 40,000 btu per square foot per year. That is easy to do if you have a large single story building but impossible in many urban settings.
What we all want is commercially viable net zero energy buildings and they are still in the future.
Studies done at the National Renewable Energy Lab indicate that if life cycle costing is used, the lowest cost scenario is for a building about 30% better than code. For the same life cycle cost as a base case building, you can build a building about 50% better than code. Net zero energy buildings are still considerably more expensive. For them to become commercially viable, the cost of renewables, photo voltaics or wind turbines, is going to have to be reduced substantially. That should happen as the market for those products expands and new technology is introduced. The good news for MCAA members is that high performing buildings use more elaborate systems which drive owners toward the more capable contractors that make up our membership and our share of the construction budget typically goes up.
Energy is our problem. Buildings account for 40% of the primary energy use in the United States today. Lighting and HVAC systems use about two thirds of the energy used in buildings.
Projections call for global energy demand to increase by about 60% by the year 2030. What will energy cost in 2030 if the world market does increase by 600/0? It is our responsibility to work collaboratively with the design and construction teams to reduce the energy use of the buildings we are constructing, and to pursue that goal with the same amount of energy that has always gone into reducing the first cost of the projects.
For those of us in the maintenance and repair business, our obligation is to protect the efficiency of the systems we service, and to make every effort to correct the efficiency decay frequently encountered as buildings age.
Energy is our problem. Today, we are using the earth's atmosphere for a landfill. You know, we dump about 30 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide into our fragile atmosphere every year. Buildings are the largest users of energy. Now is the time for us to come together and work to reduce the amount of energy used in buildings. ASHRAE and MCAA members have enormous reservoirs of talent, and I am confident that we can meet the challenge of developing commercially viable net zero energy buildings."
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