Information on me and my current projects
I recently learned that I have been selected to take part in a international exchange program through NSCC International. The program is called “Energy Efficiency and the Built Environment.” It is a joint venture between the Nova Scotia Community College, Holland College in PEI, Institute of Technology Carlow in Carlow Ireland, and Hanze University of Applied Sciences in Groningen, The Netherlands. This project based learning venture will feature students in Architecture, Civil Engineering, Construction Management, Electrical Engineering, Energy Sustainability, and Mechanical Engineering. It will be a great chance for me to get some experience working with people in other disciplines.
The first stage will be a three week project in Dartmouth, NS. Each of the four schools will work together with local community partners, industry and relevant agencies to solve energy efficiency challenges related to constructing and retro-fitting homes. A special emphasis will be on low income housing and efficiency awareness and education education for the owners and tenants.
In late February the team will travel to Carlow, Ireland to undertake a second project. The details of this project will be worked out in the near future. Upon our return from Carlow we will prepare a final report as well as a presentation for the Technology Showcase 2012.
This project will allow me to gain international experience and an international perspective on energy efficiency. In densely populated areas like Europe resources are much scarcer and energy efficiency is a much more urgent priority. For this reason they are further ahead in their construction and conservation methods. I’m excited for what I can learn from them.
Tomorrow I will be leaving for Greenbuild and I wanted to talk a little bit about the green features that the conference will have. When you register for the conference you need to enter how far you will be travelling to get to Greenbuild, and your method of transportation. This is because Greenbuild will be offsetting the carbon associated with the travel as one of its green initiatives. Most of the conference hotels are within walking distance of the event. If you are staying at one of the few that are too far to walk you will receive a complementary 3-day transit pass with your registration.
The conference will be held at the Metro Toronto Convention Center (MTCC) in the heart of downtown Toronto. The MTCC will ensure that it is a zero waste event and will reuse or recycle 97% of all waste generated. Volunteers will be at all the waste stations helping attendees sort their waste. The event will also be powered using renewable energy. The energy will be generated off site and guaranteed available on the grid through renewable energy certificates. The menu for the event will all be locally sourced. Food, beer and wine available on-site will be from within 100 miles of the conference.
Maroon 5 will be headlining the opening celebration. The band practices green touring and travel using a bio-diesel powered tour bus. The band members also live on an organic food diet.
Exhibitors will be encouraged to be as green as possible when developing their displays. Green Exhibitor awards will be available to those who exceed the standards developed for the expo hall.
When it comes to being green Greenbuild is a winner. They certainly walk the walk. I’m excited to see all the green initiatives in action this week!
The theme of Greenbuild in Toronto this year is “What is next for green building.” With that in mind I have been thinking a lot about just what the future will hold. The LEED construction rating systems don’t contain any requirements for green building operations after construction. The LEED Operations and Maintenance rating system was created to remedy this, however right now it is under utilized. I think one of the things that will happen next is that more buildings will seek the operations certification as well. Recently the Empire State Building as well as Toronto’s TD Bank tower have both obtained LEED Gold certification under this rating system. These iconic buildings set a fine example for others and prove that LEED is not just for new buildings. By greening our existing buildings we move one step closer to the ultimate goal of green cities.
Green cities are another thing that will happen next. Both the USGBC and the CaGBC have buildings in their strategic plan as being a stepping stone to the ultimate goal of green cities. Before we can have this outcome we will face some significant hurdles. City infrastructure will need to be improved to allow buildings to share resources. The notion of net-zero will need to shift from the scope of the building to the scope of the city and this will require more advanced water and electrical facilities. I have no doubt that LEED will eventually develop a rating system or guide for green cities.
People will be a big part of what is next. I believe Emerging Green Builders (EGB) will play a significant role in the future. EGBs are young professionals less than 5 years into their careers or students. I am an EGB and our group was educated with sustainability in mind. We are freshly starting out and have our whole careers ahead of us. It is safe to say that we will be involved in whatever happens next for Green Building. I’m excited to be a part of it!
This years Greenbuild will bring over 900 different exhibitors to Toronto and fill two halls with booths at the Metro Toronto Convention Center. This is easily the largest event I have ever attended. Since I want to get the most out of my experience I have taken the time to research which booths I would like to visit. I only have 11 hours to myself during my 4 day trip to Toronto and this is the only time I have available to visit exhibits. I would like to have as much left over to see some sights in Toronto so it is extremely important that I develop a plan of attack for the exhibit hall.
My main interests lie in new and innovative products and technologies. I am looking to be impressed! I am also going to be visiting several companies that I have targeted for employment once I graduate. It will be a great chance to have someone from the company tell me about what they do and how they like working there.
I was able to narrow the 940 exhibitors down to a list of 89 that I would like to see. The majority of them are in the north exhibit hall so I will visit that on the first night and try to get that out of the way. The Greenbuild website has a really useful tool that allows you to select the booths you want to visit and print a map so you can take the most optimum route through the hall. I’ll be keeping the ones I’ve chosen to myself for now but watch for an update after the conference to see which ones impressed me.
A picture of the exhibit hall from a previous Greenbuild Expo
I am back from a bit of a break and have been doing some solar monitoring projects using flow meters. The benefit of the flow meter is it allows you to do an energy calculation and determine just how much energy the solar panels are saving you. Up until now I have been working on measuring the glycol energy, and the glycol uses a constant flow rate. The water side of the system is different because the flow is based on the buildings hot water demand. Without a flow meter or an estimated flow rate all you are really doing is measuring temperatures. Flow meters work by sending an electric pulse every time a specific volume of fluid passes them. Most give one pulse per gallon or one pulse per 10 gallons. The Web Energy Logger (WEL) counts how many of these pulses you receive each minute. You can easily scale this value with the WEL’s programming to whatever engineering units you want. I prefer liters per second. Once you have the WEL measuring the flow properly you can move on to the energy calculations.
The formula for calculating the solar output is as follows:
Solar Heat Output = (volume flow rate)*(density of the fluid)*(specific heat of fluid)*(temperature differential created by the solar system)
You can also calculate the total heating required by the building by measuring the temperature differential between the cold water supply and the final hot water on the outlet of the furnace. You apply the same formula as the solar output but using the new temperature differential.
Total Heating = (volume flow rate)*(density of the fluid)*(specific heat of fluid)*(temperature differential created by the entire heating system)
The total heating value can be used to calculate the percentage of the total water heating load that the solar system is able to meet. This percentage is known as the solar fraction.
Solar Fraction = (solar heat output) / (total heating) * 100
If you are monitoring an active solar system (one that uses electricity to run) then you will need to subtract the electrical energy used by the pump and control system from the solar output to get a fair representation of how much you are indeed saving. In most cases the equipment will use a minimal amount of energy but it is important to factor it in because over the course of the year it does add up.
Once you have the WEL calculating these values you can start logging daily, monthly, and annual totals. This will provide great insight into the effectiveness of your solar thermal system. It is important to note that without measurement you can never be sure that the system is working even if it is brand new. The math formulas and calculations for monitoring solar systems might seem a little tedious at first but before long it will become old hat.
An example of this in action can be found here: http://www.welserver.com/WEL0512/
A flow meter with an electronic pulse head counter
The above flow meter installed on a domestic hot water system
Today I attended the annual general meeting for the Atlantic Chapter of the CaGBC. I recently joined the local chapter and wanted to attend to meet other members, board members, and learn about the chapter.
The Atlantic Chapter has one part time employee on the payroll, and this is the Executive Director Lara Ryan. The rest of the positions are volunteer based. The chapter has 16 board members. There are also four committees:
1) Education Committee
2) Residential Committee
3) Carbon Committee
4) Build Green Atlantic Committee
Over the past year the chapter has held lunch and learn sessions in NS, NB, and NL. They are working on establishing relationships in PEI to be able to do the same there. The chapter currently has 264 paid members with the breakdown as follows:
New Brunswick : 34
Newfoundland & Labrador: 17
Nova Scotia: 204
Prince Edward Island: 9
Build Green Atlantic is the chapter’s major event. It was held on May 5th at the NSCC Waterfront Campus and was attended by 224 people (myself included). The keynote speaker on May 4th was attended by 125. The chapter also held a 1/2 day mini-conference at the Waterfront Campus in December which offered sessions on green building and the industry.
They provided us with a status report on LEED Buildings in Atlantic Canada.
Registered Projects
NS: 107 (up from 78 last year)
NFLD: 39 (up from 29)
PEI: 3 (up from 2)
NB: 41 (up from 36)
Certified Projects
NS: 6 (up from 4 last year)
NFLD: 0
PEI: 2 (up from 0)
NB: 6 (up from 5)
I’m glad I attended the AGM because I learned a lot about what the chapter does that I wasn’t aware of. I intend to be more active with the chapter going forward. It was great to meet the board members who voted to send me to Greenbuild as their scholarship winner. I’m looking forward to connecting with the local chapter at the Canada House Pavilion at Greenbuild in Toronto next month.
My registration package for the Greenbuild Conference in Toronto arrived by email this weekend and I registered as quickly as possible. A big part of the event is the education sessions which are offered. Since some of these sessions fill up early I wanted to make sure I got my first choices. I had picked my choices a few weeks ago and today I registered and got into all the ones I wanted. Part of my responsibilities as a Greenbuild Scholarship winner is to share the knowledge with my local chapter. I will be presenting on what I learn to both the Atlantic chapter of the CaGBC and my classmates at NSCC. The sessions I will be attending are:
Passivhaus: Bringing German Energy Design Home to LEED
The Passive House approach (Passivhaus in German) is one of the world’s most aggressive, proven approaches to radical energy reduction, durability, IAQ and thermal comfort by design. This session will introduce and explore the Passive House standard design approach and requirements as well as demonstrate its application to projects in the North American context. This interactive session will introduce some of the barriers and opportunities–seeking input from attendees–for superior home energy performance
What You Need to Know About WaterSense for LEED 2012, Inside and Out!
The 2012 rating systems have been revised to ensure that LEED projects are protecting water supplies for future generations. Gain a firm understanding of the most reliable strategies to reduce water use in your projects for all rating systems, no matter what the size!
The Proof is in the Pudding: Performance metrics from the first Five Certified Living Buildings
The first 5 certified Living Building Challenge projects are the greenest buildings in the country. How did the teams accomplish this lofty goal and achieve net zero energy and water, what are the lessons learned? The panel will discuss the one year occupancy period and how that data informs building performance knowledge. Learn about each project’s strategies across five different climates and project types from the perspective of the client, consultant and audit team.
Advancing Energy Simulation Tools for Design and Retrofit Optimization: the EnergyPlus GUI Development
More deep energy retrofits and net zero energy projects are required! Better simulation tools should be accessible! EnergyPlus is widely viewed as the most comprehensive building performance analysis tool available. A primary barrier to widespread adoption (critical to DOE’s mission) has been the lack of a graphical user interface (GUI). The diverse panel will demonstrate interactive use scenarios of how the new EnergyPlus GUI can enable practitioners to use EnergyPlus to support innovative, integrated design.
Learning from Buildings: Technologies for Measuring, Benchmarking, and Improving Performance
This session describes methods developed at UC Berkeley for monitoring and benchmarking buildings’ physical environments and occupants’ perceptions. We present research results derived from such assessments, which have significant implications for building designers, owners, operators, employers, and occupants. We discuss the development and testing of the Performance Measurement Protocol, recently produced by USGBC and ASHRAE. Driving this work is the belief that all stakeholders benefit from increased assessment and sharing lessons learned about building performance
Infrastructure for Sustainable Communities
The current interest in green buildings often overlooks the far greater conservation potential of sustainable communities. Creating net zero energy and water usage communities is much easier than creating single buildings with the same performance. Communities can be vital, complex ecologies that obtain maximum use of consumed resources while minimizing waste. These goals are best achieved by exploiting the synergies among the separate infrastructure systems while obtaining multiple benefits from each conservation strategy.
LEED 2012
LEED must continuously improve to drive change and transform the market. This is especially important as green codes begin to raise the floor on the status quo and current LEED requirements become the norm. LEED 2012 has shifted to a performance-based structure that supports recertification and raises the bar to maintain LEED as a leadership tool. The rating system draft will have completed its 2nd public comment period and received thousands of comments on the proposed requirement. This session will provide insight into the decisions behind the changes in LEED and discuss some of the more complex issues that have arisen during the development process.
With my summer work term at a close I can look back at a successful summer with ThermalWise. We were able to get the tasks done for the website we had set for ourself at the start of the summer, which feels great. AtlanticGreenBuilding.ca is really starting to take off!
We added a map to the website which shows products manufactured in Atlantic Canada. You can enter your postal code it it will zoom in on products close to you. This helps builders and owners find products that are from the area, and not shipped in. By buying locally you reduce transportation related emissions as well as help the local economy. Have a look at the map here.
Eight different videos were produced by us this summer, as well as 10 new or improved project profiles. The videos showcase green building projects in the area and include interviews with people involved whenever possible. These videos turned out very professional, and make the profiles much more interesting to viewers. The ThermalWise team has expressed an interest in hiring us to produce additional case studies in the future, which means they are obviously impressed with our work. You can view the project profile and videos here.
I’ve learned lots about green building products and services through this job. I was fascinated with all the innovative ideas that were put on the market in recent years. Researching these products has taught me a lot about green washing and how to detect it. By developing and sticking to strick criteria for listing products we were able to identify which ones were actually green and which ones were just faking it.
By developing case studies I’ve learned about and witnessed different building strategies. One of the most interesting was the combination of Passive House standards with LEED certification that was used by Passive House E-Design and Leonard Construction when building the Hawkins House. The Hawkins House is the first passive house in Nova Scotia and possibly the greenest home in the province. It uses Passive House which focuses on extreme energy efficiency, and combines it with LEED which contains the broader green strategies related to materials, energy and water use, sustainable landscaping, and design innovation. There is a workshop on Passive House and LEED combination at the Greenbuild Expo this fall and I will be attending for sure!
This job has identified a career path for me that I didn’t always consider. I’m really interested in Project Management. A lot of the work we did at ThermalWise was very dynamic. It was always different and required different skills and different planning. Project management is the business of working on different projects for a fixed time period with unique challenges and outcomes. When I look for my next job I’m going to try to find one that will put me to work in project management. This time of work ensures every day is different, challenging, and exciting.
This week is the end of my work term with ThermalWise through the Nova Scotia Youth Conservation Corps. The Corps held a debrief exposition at Mount Saint Vincent University to wind the program down. Each crew was responsible for putting a booth in the exposition to showcase our summer projects. Members of the community were invited to attend including the Minister of the Environment the Honorable Sterling Belliveau.
It was interesting to see what the different groups got up to this summer, and hear stories about their adventures. We all took part in a feedback session that tried to answer some key questions:
– What would you change?
– What were some of the challenges you faced?
– What did you learn?
Another event was a roundtable discussion with people working in the field of environmental science. They discussed what led them to where they were today and told us about what kind of work they did in their jobs each day. It was very interesting. This was followed up with a workshop on interview skills including some mock interviews. It is great to be told by someone who does a lot of interviewing what they are looking to hear!
I very much enjoyed my summer working with the youth corps and I think that it is a great program. I’ve learned a lot in my position and I’m sure I will take that knowledge with me as I move on from here.
When I heard that Greenbuild was being held in Canada (the first time ever outside of the US) this year Oct 4-7th I thought this is my chance to see the world leaders in the green building industry in action. I was overwhelmed by the conference cost so I explored other options. Students are allowed to volunteer 8 hours in exchange for admission. Getting to Toronto would be a big expense, and I wasn’t sure I would be able to afford it. The United States Green Building Council (USGBC) had scholarships available, but as far as I could tell they were for US citizens.
About a month ago I found out at the last minute that the Canadian Green Building Council (CaGBC) was handing out 10 scholarships on behalf of the USGBC since they were the host country this year. Subsequently the Atlantic chapter was handing out at least one of them. I scrambled to put together an application, but I felt as though I still did an excellent job. As time went buy I assumed I didn’t win because I still hadn’t heard anything.
Recently I was notified that I was one of the recipients, and honestly I’m still kind of in shock. The scholarship includes conference admission, airfare to Toronto, and 3 nights accommodations at one of the conference hotels. I also get to meet and have my picture taken with Rick Fedrizzi, who is the CEO and founding chairman of the USGBC.
This is Greenbuild’s tenth anniversary and the theme will be “Whats Next for Green Building.” The conference will feature a job fair with green employers looking to network with green job seekers. There will also be a green job summit to discuss how to accelerate the creation of green jobs in the economy. Educational sessions will take up most of the time during the 3 day event. I will get to choose from a wide array of topics, but I will focus my attention on presentations related to green building operations & maintenance and LEED for homes. Between education sessions I can browse the exhibit hall where over 900 companies will have info booths set up showcasing green building products and services. There will be lots of guest speakers, one of whom will be Michael Bloomberg the mayor of New York City.
Part of the deal is that I have to deliver a presentation to share what I learned. I will also use my blog to document the experience and share knowledge with the rest of the world.
Fin MacDonald 