Buildings
Overview
Question: What initiatives, policies and technologies can significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the building sector?
Submit proposals: https://www.climatecolab.org/web/guest/plans/-/plans/contestId/1303801
Rules: All entrants must agree to the Contest Rules and Terms of Use.
Deadline: Monday, May 23, 2016 at 19:59:59 PM Eastern Standard Time
Judging Criteria & Prizes: See below.
Background
Buildings: The Problem and Opportunity
Many point to climate action addressing the built environment as accounting for potentially a third to half of a solution for sustaining a livable Earth. Building construction, building heat, light, and other end uses are responsible for a third of all greenhouse gas emissions. Left to business-as-usual, building-related emissions are expected to at least double worldwide by 2050.
This contest invites you to develop new strategies for mitigating building-related emissions, either directly though energy efficiency or through less carbon-intensive construction or building energy substitution strategies.
Changes in building technologies, enabled by market strategies, are needed to stabilize and then reduce building sector emissions; it should be possible to do so as efficiency improvements typically have no net cost after subtracting the multi-year value of energy saved. However, getting those who own or manage over a billion individual homes and buildings to choose to act, under the variety of economic and political circumstances around the world is a challenging objective, even if profitable for the building owners and tenants.
Buildings: Request for Proposals
All proposals to accomplish effective climate mitigation in the built environment are welcome, including but not limited to:
- Building carbon mitigation technologies: such as Improved structures, systems, lighting, appliances; and as well enablers of Intelligent buildings, with flexible demand capabilities achieved through information and control technologies (ICT), thermal mass, and battery storage, to stabilize the electric grid’s growing reliance on intermittent solar and wind generation.
- Ways to overcome market barriers: such as energy analytics that will make it easier to discover opportunities and measure progress; or innovative approaches to galvanize action, such as finance models or Web applications, social networks and community-based marketing.
Buildings: Criteria as Guidance
When writing proposals, authors should consider the following criteria as guidance:
- What markets (geographic, demographic, socioeconomic, etc.) would your submission impact?
- How (specifically) would your idea work? Consider the perspective of any stakeholders who might be affected by implementing your submission.
- To the extent that you’re able to predict it, what quantifiable impact would your idea achieve?
- What would be your hypothetical next steps to bring your idea to reality? Consider any capital, political, or other pragmatic requirements that would need to be addressed.
Key Issues
Key Issues
The building sector presents some unique challenges such as the diffuse nature of the building stock, inertia in adoption of new technologies and design standards, as well as availability of benchmarking data for validating efficiency improvements. A comprehensive summary of actions that have been proposed to increase building efficiency, along with estimates of the amount these measures could reduce future emissions, can be found in IPCC, Climate Change 2014: Working Group III: Mitigation of Climate Change, Chapter 9: Buildings.
In the past few years, there has been a rapid proliferation of digital technologies in the built environment, coupled with the availability of large amounts of energy and other performance related data. These developments open the door for new and innovative solutions to take root, and hold significant promise for rapidly scaling-up energy efficiency efforts to achieve deep, cost-effective GHG mitigation.
There is already a sizable potential for greenhouse gas mitigation in the buildings sector that is not being realized because of significant technological, economic, cultural, political, and behavioral barriers. Section 9.8 of IPCC, Climate Change 2014: Working Group III: Mitigation of Climate Change, Chapter 9: Buildings presents the taxonomy of barriers that hinder the penetration of energy efficient technologies/practices in the buildings sector. These can be broadly categorized as:
1. Financial costs/benefits: Higher up-front costs for more efficient equipment; Lack of access to financing; Energy subsidies; Lack of internalization of environmental, health and other external costs);
2. Hidden costs/benefits: Costs and risks due to potential incompatibilities, performance risks, transaction costs, etc.; Poor power quality, particularly in some developing countries;
3. Market failures: Limitations of the typical architectural design process; Fragmented market structure; Landlord/tenant split and misplaced incentives; Administrative and regulatory barriers (e.g., in the incorporation of distributed generation technologies); Imperfect information;
4. Behavioral and organizational realities: Tendency to ignore small opportunities for energy conservation; Organizational failures (e.g., internal split incentives); Non-payment and electricity theft; Tradition, behavior, lack of awareness and lifestyle; Corruption.
Another question for proposals to consider is: What innovative energy efficiency technologies, construction systems or policy solutions can help overcome these barriers?
National Standards
In 2002, the European Union passed an Energy Performance of Buildings Directive, which set standards for certifying buildings and established quality assurance procedures in order to further increase the push for EU buildings energy efficiency following the EPBD. Originally from 2002, this Directive was recently recast, on the 19th of May of 2010, as 2010/31/EU Directive.
In 2012, Australia followed suit and released for review a draft National Building Energy Standard-Setting, Assessment and Ratings. In the United States, the Department of Energy (DOE) oversees energy code adoption through the Building Energy Codes Program (https://www.energycodes.gov/).
During the 1980s and 1990s, the International Code Council® (ICC) and its predecessor
code development organizations developed the Model Energy Code (MEC), later renamed the International Energy Conservation Code® (IECC). Today, most states in the US use a version of the IECC for their residential buildings, requiring a minimum level of energy efficiency in new residential construction.
The IECC commercial building provisions include prescriptive and performance requirements that largely coincide with ASHRAE 90.1 requirements. DOE’s most recent analysis of commercial codes found the IECC 2015 and ASHRAE 90.1-2013 to be similar in terms of stringency (PNNL 2015).
The 2015 IECC achieves about 1% greater site energy savings than the 2012 IECC (DOE 2015b). States are required to file commercial code certification statements with DOE by September 2016 and residential certification statements by June 2017. However, passing stringent building energy efficiency standards is a time consuming and difficult process.
The key questions here are:
- What would it take to establish efficiency standards at a national level in these countries?
- What action would be required to be taken by a federal government?
- Could a combination of state/provincial governments, along with industry stakeholders, put such a framework in place?
- What should such a national framework cover?
Judging Criteria
Judges will be asked to evaluate proposals on the following criteria: feasibility, novelty, impact and presentation quality. Winning proposals will be especially strong in at least one of the first three dimensions, and also well presented. For details about the judging criteria, click here.
You can find the proposal template here, and contest schedule here.
Prizes
Top proposals in each contest will be awarded...
Judges’ Choice Winner – Strongest overall
Popular Choice Winner – Received the most votes during the voting period
Impact Award – Largest impact and highly feasible
Novelty Award – Most innovative
The Judges’ and Popular Choice Winners will be invited to MIT to present their proposal, enter the Climate CoLab Winners Program and be eligible for the $10,000 Grand Prize. All award winners will receive wide recognition and visibility by the MIT Climate CoLab.
All Finalists are asked to submit a 3-minute video outlining their proposal. Videos will be featured on the MIT Climate CoLab website and Winners will show their videos at the conference.
If your proposal is included in a top global climate action plan, you will receive CoLab Points, which are redeemable for cash prizes.
Resources for Proposal Authors
You may wish to read the references listed below in developing your proposal.
The New Buildings Institute (NBI) assesses technologies, promotes design approaches, and helps guide policies and programs that will significantly improve the energy efficiency of commercial buildings.
If you prepare a proposal with a specific geographic focus, you may wish to consult the IPCC's estimates of the mitigation potential of building efficiency initiatives in various countries and regions in Table 9.6 of IPCC, Climate Change 2014: Working Group III: Mitigation of Climate Change, Chapter 9: Buildings.
IPCC, Climate Change 2013: Working Group III: Special Report on Renewable Energy Sources and Climate Change Mitigation (SRREN).
World Energy Council Energy Efficiency Indicators
World Business Council for Sustainable Development, Energy Efficiency in Buildings;
Lawrence Livermore Labs, World Energy Flow, 2007;
Buildings Performance Institute Europe (BPIE), Date Hub for the Energy Performance of Buildings;
OECD/IEA and AFD, 2008, Promoting energy efficiency investments. Case studies in the residential sector.
European Commission, National Reports on Energy Performance Requirements
OECD/IEA, 2013 International Energy Agency, OECD/IEA, 2013: Technology Roadmap for Energy Efficient Building Envelopes
Environment and energy. Promoting Energy efficiency in buildings: Lessons Learned from International Experience.
UNDP: IEA, 2012. Spreading the Net: Multiple Benefits of Energy Efficiency Improvements
RAP, 2013. Recognizing the Full Value of Energy Efficiency
2012 Summer Study on Energy Efficiency in Buildings, American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy
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Photo credit: Rob Deutscher