BuildingWell Episode 7 Transcript

00:00:00

Music plays

00:00:03 Ching-Wen Hsiao

Whoever created green rating systems or green certification systems, they want to achieve sustainability. They want people to produce well performing buildings. However, there are different ways to describe, to talk about what’s good, what’s bad. So one way to talk about it is by talking about percentage savings. The other way to talk about it is: we have this really stringent target. We want you to meet a target.

00:00:25 Ching-Wen Hsiao

So I think, just different ways to make things happen.

00:00:28 Paul Eddowes

And by doing all these things, the airtight envelope, the high-performance thermal envelope and glazing and ventilation, that allows us to have as small a heating and cooling system as possible. And that’s really what drives down the energy consumption.

00:00:46 Michelle Moran

Welcome to BuildingWell, sustainable homes, equitable communities, your new podcast from New Ecology.

00:00:53 Michelle Moran

Join us as we explore real life stories from key players in green building and community development. We’ll examine exciting new innovations, highlighting practical solutions for creating more affordable, healthier, more resilient, equitable communities. We’re building well together.

00:01:14 Molly Craft

This episode was made possible by the Mass Save community Education Grant.

00:01:21 Alina Michelewicz

Welcome to BuildingWell, I’m Alina Michelewicz, your host today, and Principal Director of Finance at New Ecology. I’m here with my co-host, Michelle Moran, our head of marketing.

00:01:31 Michelle Moran

Hello!

00:01:32 Alina Michelewicz

Today we’re interviewing Ching-Wen Hsiao, an Energy Analyst here at New Ecology, and Paul Eddowes, one of our Directors of Green Building. We’ll be talking about a research.

00:01:42 Alina Michelewicz

Paper authored by Ching Wen Hsiao and Sankhanil Goswami, our Energy Engineer, titled “Investigating the Impacts of Climate Change on an Affordable Multifamily Building in Boston, Massachusetts.”

00:01:56 Alina Michelewicz

At the time of this recording, the paper was recently accepted to the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy to their Summer Study program. With Paul, and Wen we will dive into the world of energy modeling and climate resiliency, stay tuned for a great interview.

00:02:12 Alina Michelewicz

Let’s start by having Wen and Paul introduce yourselves. Wen could you tell us about what you do here at New Ecology and a little bit about yourself?

00:02:22 Ching-Wen Hsiao

Hi everyone my name is Wen. I’m originally from Taiwan. I have been working for New Ecology for almost 9 years. I was originally trained as an architect when I was in Taiwan and later I studied energy environmental design. When I came to the US and then because of the.

00:02:42 Ching-Wen Hsiao

Training, I started to focus on sustainability, energy modeling and simulation.

00:02:48 Ching-Wen Hsiao

When I found my job at New Ecology, I started to have a real world experience to actually apply what I’ve learned in the building projects. And so what I do day-to-day in New Ecology is to create energy models and to look into different design strategy and evaluate their energy performance.

00:03:08 Ching-Wen Hsiao

And also I’m looking at the energy model results to assess if the building meets energy code or green building certifications for example: LEED, Passive House, Energy Star or Enterprise.

00:03:23 Alina Michelewicz

Awesome, thanks. Paul, would you introduce yourself?

00:03:26 Paul Eddowes

Sure, hi. Thanks, Alina. My name is Paul Eddowes. I’m a director of Green building services. We’ve been working at New Ecology for around about nine years now. My background is in Environmental Conservation, and I got my start and sustainability in the built environment doing home energy assessments for the Mass Save program.

00:03:44 Paul Eddowes

When I started at New Ecology, I was an assistant project manager.

00:03:47 Paul Eddowes

And I really continue to do that project management work on our new construction projects and also lead a team of project managers and raters.

00:03:56 Alina Michelewicz

Awesome. You both talked about your involvement with projects at New Ecology. Could you talk a little bit about how you guys work together and how your work connects to each other from the modeling to the building projects?

00:04:10 Ching-Wen Hsiao

So my work is mostly technical side of sustainability.

00:04:16 Ching-Wen Hsiao

So when we talk about sustainability, usually people like to talk about green ideas, right? The green roofs insulation. But we really require quantitative data to support our claims. So what I do is to look at the architecture design drawing set, HVAC design drawing set and plumbing.

00:04:36 Ching-Wen Hsiao

Drawing set, and try to quantify what do those strategies mean in terms of energy savings or cost

00:04:44 Ching-Wen Hsiao

Savings. And so I’m kind of like provide data to support the design and to say like oh, for this design we can achieve 10 percent, 15% savings and then I will provide those quantitative data to the project managers and so they can discuss the results with the client most of the time, the architects don’t really know how their building perform.

00:05:06 Ching-Wen Hsiao

I guess I’m more like a back-end engineer. Try to talk to the PMs and also sometimes participate in the client discussion and to provide them like a different aspect coming from the architectural design background. I understand how easy it is to make decisions based on aesthetics, based on the design.

00:05:26 Ching-Wen Hsiao

Based on the code and based on the cost, but sometimes my existence will help them to also make decisions based on numbers.

00:05:35 Alina Michelewicz

That’s awesome. My existence helps them make decisions based on numbers I.

00:05:39 Alina Michelewicz

Like that a lot.

00:05:41 Alina Michelewicz

That’s awesome.

00:05:43 Alina Michelewicz

Paul, how do you utilize the modeling team in your projects?

00:05:48 Paul Eddowes

Yeah. So fundamentally, as an acting as a project manager on our projects, we we have the interface between the external teams that might be developers, architects, engineers and contractors and we, you know, act as a go between between them and our internal teams which can be

00:06:08 Paul Eddowes

The project management team members could be energy raters who are out in the field doing the testing and verification, and then energy modelers like Wen we work very closely with Wen throughout the design phase for any given project, it’s really important that we understand the energy usage for any given.

00:06:28 Paul Eddowes

Projects. A lot of the Green building rating systems and codes that we need to comply with. Energy usage is a huge factor in complying with those. So we look to Wen and our modelling team to ensure that we can model these buildings energy usage and ensure that they can comply.

00:06:45 Alina Michelewicz

Awesome.

00:06:47 Alina Michelewicz

That’s great.

00:06:50 Alina Michelewicz

Wen, you mentioned that you help building owners make decisions based on numbers, could you tell us what those numbers are? What are the outputs of your models and how do you make a typical model?

00:07:01 Ching-Wen Hsiao

Right. So it really depends on the the goal of the project, because different projects have different needs.

00:07:08 Ching-Wen Hsiao

I would say that the majority of projects they want to meet the Energy Code. That’s the primary goal, right? So the number will support the team to show to the City Hall during the permitting processes that the building actually reach the energy goal and the energy goal are different from city to city, from state to state.

00:07:29 Ching-Wen Hsiao

And So what we need to do is to understand the requirement, the modeling guidance and then to produce those results.

00:07:37 Ching-Wen Hsiao

That’s the 1st, the owners say usually they are also very concerned about the cost, so the cost savings could be a number. Sometimes we provide, but when we talk about cost savings, I want to make a note here that usually when for the modelers when we talk about cost saving, we are not comparing against the real-world cost saving.

00:07:57 Ching-Wen Hsiao

Especially for the new construction buildings, because there is no existing building yet. So we really cannot tell you how much you will save when there is nothing.

00:08:06 Ching-Wen Hsiao

There usually we will create a benchmark baseline model and that will represent typical construction building and then we’ll use that as a benchmark to tell you how much money you are saving. The third kind of the data we provide are the CO2 emissions reduction, which is important for certain rating systems.

00:08:26 Ching-Wen Hsiao

And also the cities they want to know about the CO2 emission reduction now. So that’s I think it’s a more and more important factor we’re looking into right now occasionally some of the projects especially existing.

00:08:40 Ching-Wen Hsiao

Projects that are requiring retrofitting, they want us to make a model to represent the status quo, like the existing building, and then we will look into different improvement strategy. But perhaps they want to replace the existing gas boiler with the heat pump then for that very specific reason, we will make a very simplified.

00:09:02 Ching-Wen Hsiao

Model and to show them what that means after they replace it.

00:09:07 Ching-Wen Hsiao

And so these are like the typical type of the modeling result that we will use to communicate with the owners. It could be a whole building for new construction, it could be just like a room for like a envelope study.

00:09:23 Michelle Moran

Very cool.

00:09:24 Alina Michelewicz

What are the weather files that you use and how does that relate to?

00:09:28 Alina Michelewicz

The model.

00:09:29 Ching-Wen Hsiao

During the energy modeling processes, essentially what we do is to calculate heat transfer, heat loss and heat gain

00:09:36 Ching-Wen Hsiao

And through walls and roofs, and the slabs. And so it’s really important to understand the temperature difference between the indoor and outdoor conditions. Right. Most of the buildings that have AC or heating systems. So the indoor condition is kind of static. It’s always around 68 to 75°.

00:09:58 Ching-Wen Hsiao

But however, outdoor condition changes a lot, right? So it could be -10° it could be 80°.

00:10:04 Ching-Wen Hsiao

And then full thermal calculation that represent like a different kind of like fluctuation of of heat that will travel through your envelope. I think it’s really important to first point out the science before.

00:10:16

I talk about.

00:10:18 Ching-Wen Hsiao

The weather, the weather file, so that’s why weather is really important. I believe this is also the first time I mentioned.

00:10:24 Ching-Wen Hsiao

Weather in our conversation, right. And so now we understand the modelling is actually calculating the heat transfer.

00:10:32 Ching-Wen Hsiao

And so we want to find the weather file that could tell us hourly temperature changes in outside of your building, right. So we can do an hourly calculation to see how much heat loss and heat gain can that will travel through a certain window or certain walls typically.

00:10:52 Ching-Wen Hsiao

In our industry, we use a a weather file format called TMY. So TMY is a typical weather file that the climate scientists they look at the weather condition from the past 20 to 30 years and they found the most representative.

00:11:11 Ching-Wen Hsiao

Month and so each month comes from different years and then they will customize this more like a fictional utopian kind of like weather file that represents a region. So usually one where a file represent a city, for example, in Boston, the TMY 3 weather file, the original data.

00:11:31 Ching-Wen Hsiao

From Logan airport. So they use Logan airport and then they look at like a past 20-30 years. And so this is the typical weather file we use. There are other kind of weather file we can use. There are groups of volunteers. They are now trying to make new weather files which call.

00:11:49 Ching-Wen Hsiao

TMY X of course, in our day-to-day work, sometimes we have to customize and make our own weather file. That’s when we have to search some underground or some public available weather station data and try to integrate those into existing weather file.

00:12:06 Ching-Wen Hsiao

To sum up most weather files, they are located in airports and we are using the airport weather which could be not very realistic, right? Because airports usually in this open field but most of our buildings are in the cities or in the residential zones.

00:12:23 Paul Eddowes

Yeah, that, that’s interesting, Wen, just thinking about Boston Airport as well. That’s very much on the ocean. You know, it’s got water on all three sides of it, I think. So I’m sure it changes the data that you see in terms of weather versus what we actually see in the residential neighborhoods in and around Boston.

00:12:40 Ching-Wen Hsiao

Right, that’s exactly why sometimes when we work on certain projects, we understand that a specific weather file does not really represent the site. And then when that happens, we will have discussion on if we want to replace the weather file recently, we have this project in Salem.

00:12:59 Ching-Wen Hsiao

It is a Passive House project and we were talking with Phius about the project and the first thing they say. They told us their review is, oh, the weather the file is never representative to Salem. Maybe you can consider to use Boston weather file instead, you know. So I’m like oh, this is interesting. The argument behind this.

00:13:20 Ching-Wen Hsiao

You know, selection of a weather file is mostly like how high the altitude of your site and how close the site is to the ocean or to the forest. You know, those will kind have a huge impact over microclimate.

00:13:36 Alina Michelewicz

Yeah, for sure.

00:13:36 Ching-Wen Hsiao

Uh, yeah, sorry. Like a last technical nerdy thing about this is it also depends on the software you use, because different kind of simulation software, they use different inputs, certain software. For example, they don’t use wind speed or wind direction if you don’t use wind speed and then that is not very important.

00:13:56 Alina Michelewicz

Yeah.

00:13:56 Ching-Wen Hsiao

So you you you will want to, you know, look, think about what kind of data are going to be compute in your software. And then also think about what does that mean if I choose certain whether file over the other one?

00:14:08 Alina Michelewicz

Yeah, that’s really interesting. One thing we haven’t really talked about on the podcast is Heat Island Effect and the effect of not having trees in the neighborhood or different things like that. And you’re kind of alluding to it with forests being a cooling effect, the ocean, the wind like that was all super important. I didn’t realize it’s the airport.

00:14:28 Alina Michelewicz

It is a very different kind of feeling over there than it is in downtown or in some of the neighborhoods, for sure.

00:14:35 Ching-Wen Hsiao

Right. For people who study heat island effect, they probably want to, you know, use more like a microclimate data.

00:14:41 Alina Michelewicz

Microclimate, yeah.

00:14:45 Ching-Wen Hsiao

So they they could put their own sensor there or they can find like. The weather station in the city that is more realistic. There are also, like CFD, simulation, computational fluid, dynamic simulation software they can use to simulate more zoom in microclimate conditions around your site. Those are doable, but I would say those are super expensive.

00:14:59 Alina Michelewicz

Hmm.

00:15:05 Ching-Wen Hsiao

So usually we don’t do it.

00:15:07 Alina Michelewicz

Yeah, I was gonna say like fluid dynamics sounds difficult to model. That makes sense.

00:15:14 Alina Michelewicz

That’s great. Is there anything else you want to add about energy models Wen?

00:15:19 Ching-Wen Hsiao

There are a few like high level points. I want to talk about energy model. First of all, there are different kind of energy models softwares. So there is like IES, energy plus, E plus, WUFI passive and a lot more and they don’t do the same thing. However, the underlying engine between them kind of similar.

00:15:39 Ching-Wen Hsiao

Most of them coming from Doe, D-O-E, that is the engine, and the other one that people use a lot is called Energy Plus, and those two are originally developed by the DOE.

00:15:49 Michelle Moran

The Department of Energy.

00:15:50 Ching-Wen Hsiao

Right. So there’s a first and second because we are going to talk a lot about passive House moving forward, the energy simulation software for passive House is somehow unique. It is developed by Fraunhofer, the regular traditional energy simulation software looks into 8760 hours. That’s the all the hours of the year. And so when they calculate the heat.

00:16:16 Ching-Wen Hsiao

Transfer, or the solar heat gains, we actually calculate hourly. So that’s like the time stamp that we use for the traditional software. However for WUFI, WUFI passive, the passive House software, it’s doing the monthly calculation, so it’s not an hourly calculation. That’s a huge difference. When we look into.

00:16:36 Ching-Wen Hsiao

The entire building in the model we are practically creating a digital twin of this, you know, real world building into a digital world, right? So we are trying to build something that’s completely digital but reflect the reality when we do that, we want to build every thermal zone inside the building in our model however.

00:16:56 Ching-Wen Hsiao

For the passive house, they don’t do that. They don’t build different zones, different rooms in your model. It’s one zone only. That’s the second big difference. I want to bring this up because a lot of people don’t understand that there is a huge difference.

00:17:11 Ching-Wen Hsiao

Whoever created the green rating systems or green certification system they want to achieve sustainability, they want people to produce well performing building. However, there are different ways to describe to talk about what’s good, what’s bad. So one way to talk about it is by talking about percentage saving. The other way to talk about it is we have this really stringent target.

00:17:32 Ching-Wen Hsiao

We want you to meet a target. So I think just different ways to make things happen.

00:17:37 Ching-Wen Hsiao

Yeah. Do you think that makes sense, Paul, what’s your perspective on this?

00:17:41 Paul Eddowes

I think what I’d like to add is that the caveat that we have to deliver this information with to project teams, you know, energy modeling like any other kind of predictive modeling is.

00:17:53 Paul Eddowes

Trying to predict the future.

00:17:55 Paul Eddowes

And there are so many variables at play that we have to make some assumptions on the weather in the future, which is, you know what, we’re here to talk about today is there’s one of them, but it could be, you know, occupant behaviour, you know, do you have a population in the building that likes it warmer than what we might have assumed in?

00:18:14 Paul Eddowes

The model or do they?

00:18:15 Paul Eddowes

Take more showers and baths than what we might have assumed, so they’re using more hot water.

00:18:21 Paul Eddowes

Yeah, there could be.

00:18:23 Paul Eddowes

Our energy models take into account shading from other buildings in 10 years time. Is there going to be another building built right next to this building that’s going to shade it in a completely different way that we have in the model? These energy models are great tools that we have. They’re the best tools that we have to predict energy consumption, but there are limitations on what they can report.

00:18:45 Paul Eddowes

As long as we understand those limitations, you can present the information with those limitations in mind.

00:18:51 Ching-Wen Hsiao

We have this saying in in the modeling world, garbage in, garbage out. So the model is only as good as assumptions, and certain assumptions we can never predict. We cannot predict a guy running underground laundry service in his unit. We cannot predict someone who keep their windows open in the winter in Boston.

00:19:11 Ching-Wen Hsiao

We have seen those, we cannot predict those. So I think modeling tool does have its limitations, but it’s a good tool when we do a comparative study, it’s very similar to how like the finance people try to predict the stock market, they look into like all the economic equations and parameters and try to create a models to predict.

00:19:29 Ching-Wen Hsiao

Future, but they can still not foresee the crash of the market.

00:19:34 Michelle Moran

I love that.

00:19:35 Alina Michelewicz

Yeah, that makes sense. Paul, could you tell us a little bit about how the energy model show compliance and what the different types of certifications are that you have projects using?

00:19:45 Paul Eddowes

Yeah, there’s there’s so many different green building rating systems that we work with and virtually every single one of them has some sort of energy usage target or threshold that we need to show compliance with. And because there’s so many different types of rating systems, different types of buildings, we have multiple different energy models that we might use.

00:20:05 Paul Eddowes

Sometimes it might be the unit-based modes such as a HERS model. Yeah, they might be used for showing compliance on smaller buildings for certifications like LEED or Energy Star. Then we might have larger buildings where you know common areas might account for a larger usage in terms of energy. That unit-based energy model wouldn’t capture that.

00:20:26 Paul Eddowes

So that’s where we might use something like Equest or UFI, which are better capable of capturing whole building energy consumption. The larger building energy models like like Equest and WUFI they’re used for showing compliance with LEED and Passive House.

00:20:41 Alina Michelewicz

Could you talk a little bit about Passive House?

00:20:43 Alina Michelewicz

And give us an overview of an example project.

00:20:47 Paul Eddowes

Yeah. So passive House as a principle. Yeah. It’s been around for a while. It’s been around since the late 1970s and was born out the oil crisis. And essentially it boils down to having a really high-performance thermal envelope and glazing very airtight, building energy recovery, ventilation so that.

00:21:07 Paul Eddowes

Yeah, the energy that’s exhausted through your bathrooms and your kitchens is captured and recirculated and and put back into the building by the fresh air coming back into.

00:21:18 Paul Eddowes

The building and by doing all these things, the airtight envelope, the high-performance thermal envelope and glazing and ventilation that allows us to have as small a heating and cooling system as possible. And that’s really what drives down the energy consumption for passive house buildings.

00:21:37 Paul Eddowes

Overtime, you know, these principles have been codified in various different green building rating systems, starting out in Germany with the original Passive House Institute and their certification system that was adopted worldwide.

00:21:52 Paul Eddowes

And then more recently in the US, we have Phius, that have taken those same Passive House principles and guidelines to implement their own system that’s more specific to the US and the various different climates that we have in the US, the majority of our new construction projects are now pursuing Passive House certification through Phius.

00:22:12 Paul Eddowes

Energy modelling plays a critical role in showing compliance with those certifications. We do look at other things with Passive House certifications like indoor air quality, resilience and durability, but really the main performance criteria that we have to focus on is the energy performance and that comes out of the energy modeling process.

00:22:32 Alina Michelewicz

That’s really interesting.

00:22:33 Michelle Moran

So by envelope you mean the insulation and air sealing and other things that protect basically the inside of the home from the outside of the home. Either keep it cool in the summer or warm in the winter.

00:22:43 Paul Eddowes

Right. Yeah. I think everyone is kind of aware of the concept of, you know, having insulation to keep you warm. It’s the same at the building. Most people understand what you need to do for a wall, but there are so many other components.

00:22:57 Paul Eddowes

In a building that traditionally we have not thought about insulating. So like foundation, wall or slab or, you know, ensuring that there’s structural components that are protected from the exterior, you know whether it’s wood framing or steel framing. We’ve kind of in the past largely ignored those, but with Passive.

00:23:17 Paul Eddowes

House it really dials into the high-performance envelope across the whole building. Yeah, with Passive House, we really dive into those issues and make sure that they’re not gonna be a problem in the future.

00:23:29 Alina Michelewicz

We’ve seen a lot of adoption of Passive House in Boston specifically, but in Massachusetts as a whole and we kind of alluded to this earlier, we’re talking about building code, but I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about what’s driving Passive House adoption in Massachusetts.

00:23:45 Paul Eddowes

Yeah. So really it all started out with a couple of things. So one is at New Ecology, we work on a lot of affordable housing and the low-income housing tax credits that are available to developers building affordable housing in Massachusetts have, you know.

00:24:02 Paul Eddowes

For the past five to 10 years really started to push projects towards Passive House certification.

00:24:08 Paul Eddowes

Through their Qualified Allocation Plan, they incentivize projects by offering more points to projects that pursue Passive House as well as you know, various other green building rating systems.

00:24:20 Paul Eddowes

But overtime, the incentive for Passive House construction has increased.

00:24:25 Paul Eddowes

So that’s one thing that’s certainly been driving it for a while.

00:24:28 Paul Eddowes

Now, in the affordable housing market, and then more recently, Mass Save, which has been available to residents and developers in Massachusetts for a long time now to improve the efficiency of their buildings and all types of buildings, whether it’s single family multifamily, offices, warehouses.

00:24:49 Paul Eddowes

They have slowly introduced incentives for Passive House construction at the current day it’s up to $3000 available per unit for developers to build Passive House construction, and that has been a big help in pushing market rate developers in the direction cause it shows that a little bit of additional costs that comes along with Passive House construction can be offset somewhat by the incentives offered by Mass Save.

00:25:15 Paul Eddowes

And what we’re, you know, seeing in the past year or two is the implementation of the specialized opt-in code in Massachusetts, which for all intents and purposes makes Passive House a code requirement. There are some limitations. It depends on the size of the building. But most multifamily projects in Massachusetts.

00:25:35 Paul Eddowes

As long as they’re over 12,000 square feet, they’re gonna have to do Passive House construction. If they are built in a town or city that has adopted this opt-in code, Cambridge and Boston, and many of the other cities in the Boston Metro area have already adopted this opt in code or will adopt it within the next year or so.

00:25:54 Paul Eddowes

So that’s going to become the new standard. So eventually, you know, Passive House will become the base code for most towns and cities in Massachusetts.

00:26:03 Alina Michelewicz

I wanna take a step back and just mention that when we’re talking about Passive House, we’re talking about capital PH passive house, because there’s also sort of an underlying term passive house and earlier one of you had said the acronym, Phius. And I wondered if you could explain the acronym.

00:26:21 Ching-Wen Hsiao

P-H-I-U-S there’s a Passive House Institute US and so that’s, uh as Paul mentioned earlier in the US, we learned from the Germany for the Passive House design strategies. And so I think there are currently 2 institutions doing Passive House now in the US one is called PHI, Passive House Institute the other one is

00:26:42 Ching-Wen Hsiao

Phius, P-H-I-U-S. In Massachusetts, most of our projects we work with the Phius, but the the Energy Code allow us to use.

00:26:50 Ching-Wen Hsiao

PHI or Phius both.

00:26:52 Alina Michelewicz

Ok, thanks.

00:26:53 Ching-Wen Hsiao

To echo, your distinction between passive house and PH, the capital Passive House. So traditionally there are passive design strategies and those are not necessarily connected to the certification we’re talking about. Right. And so even before Phius became a thing in the US.

00:27:11 Ching-Wen Hsiao

In the past, people are interested in sustainability design and for example they design super thick wall. Try to use the wall to regulate the temperature and that is considered like a classic passive design strategy, another example open window. That’s another natural ventilation. That’s another passive design strategy. So Passive House kind of is a collection of a lot of those together and make them into like.

00:27:34 Ching-Wen Hsiao

Systematic guidelines based on different climate zones and the site conditions.

00:27:39 Alina Michelewicz

Yeah. Thanks.

00:27:39 Michelle Moran

What Paul was saying, what you were saying was that it looks like many towns or most towns and cities in Massachusetts, if you want to construct a new building, you’ll have to comply with capital P Passive House principles.

00:27:52 Ching-Wen Hsiao

Right now it’s only the multifamily above 12,000 square feet as are required, but Passive House is a compliance pathway. You can choose even if you are not doing the multifamily.

00:28:03 Paul Eddowes

Yeah, if you’re in a town that hasn’t adopted that opt-in code or you’re in a building multifamily building under 12,000 square feet, you can still voluntarily

00:28:12 Paul Eddowes

Opt to do Passive House certification or whether it’s PHI or Phius, and you can use that as a way of showing code compliance in the.

00:28:22 Paul Eddowes

Stretch codes, which is kind of one level below the opt-in code which, the majority of towns and cities in Massachusetts have adopted over the past 10 to 15 years. You know there’s multiple code compliance pathways, whether it’s Passive House certification.

00:28:37 Paul Eddowes

Energy Star certification or just doing energy modelling through HERS or some other energy modelling software to show compliance with an energy performance target.

00:28:48

Music plays

00:28:49 Molly Craft

I’m Molly with your Mass Save Minute. Today, we’re exploring Mass Save’s Passive House incentives, which promote energy efficient construction in Massachusetts. Mass Save offers generous incentives for homeowners and builders who commit to Passive House construction standards. These incentives cover various aspects of the building process, from insulation to ventilation systems.

00:29:09 Molly Craft

Helping to offset the initial investment. From the very beginning of the process, Mass Save offers rebates for owners and builders looking to see if their project is eligible for Passive House certification. They offer significant rebates and incentives for your feasibility study, helping to bring more projects on board. One key incentive is the Passive House design assistance providing Technical Support and financial incentives. To help integrate Passive House principles into your project from the planning stages.

00:29:36 Molly Craft

Additionally, Mass Save offers rebates for specific components like triple pane windows, high efficiency heat pump water heaters and energy recovery ventilation systems. All essential elements of a Passive House. By embracing Passive House standards, homeowners not only reduce their energy bills, but also enjoy superior comfort and indoor air quality, while contributing to a more sustainable future.

00:29:58 Molly Craft

If you’re considering a construction project and aiming for exceptional energy efficiency, be sure to explore Mass Save’s Passive House incentives. They can make a significant difference in achieving your goals. Head over to the mass save website at masssave.com, M-A-S-S-S-A-V-E dot com to learn more. That’s it for today’s Mass Save Minute.

00:30:18 Molly Craft

Remember, building with Passive House standards isn’t just about saving energy, it’s about building smarter and greener. Until next time, stay inspired and energy conscious.

00:30:27

Music plays

00:30:37 Alina Michelewicz

Now you might not know the answer to this, but I’m curious what other states might have. Do you have any insights into what’s driving Passive House adoption in Massachusetts versus other areas?

00:30:50 Paul Eddowes

Yeah for Massachusetts what’s ultimately driving this is our, you know, 2050 climate goals.

00:30:56 Paul Eddowes

Which you know to stay, at least for construction and buildings, you know, they see the only way we can feasibly achieve this in new construction is by implementing this Passive House certification requirement for buildings of certain size. So it’s definitely driven by the state regulatory atmosphere. You know, Massachusetts has always been.

00:31:16 Paul Eddowes

A leader in terms of energy efficiency, but there are other states, they are probably not far behind Massachusetts in terms of adopting some kind of Passive House certification requirement into their building codes.

00:31:30 Alina Michelewicz

It’s interesting that the state goals actually are doing something.

00:31:34 Ching-Wen Hsiao

For this, I think from the developer or like the lenders’ perspective right, if you’re building owner and you’re looking at your construction cost and you work with like your contractors, why do you want to build something like Passive House if it’s not required because it actually, it’s something you’ve never done before, a lot of the developers there are really.

00:31:54 Ching-Wen Hsiao

Comfortable doing what they have been doing and they can still profit from it.

00:31:58 Ching-Wen Hsiao

And I I would say like the building industry as a whole, if there is like no policy behind to push it, the market doesn’t really push it that much. Right now is a kind of common practice for the developers to provide like LEED certified buildings. I think for them that’s like good enough when I talk to my friends who are in finance or in other field.

00:32:18 Ching-Wen Hsiao

For them, sustainability is just.

00:32:20 Ching-Wen Hsiao

Status quo. So I think it’s really the policymakers and lawmakers who need to have this like vision for the future and they have to be able to execute and put that into practice in law, to push things further.

00:32:34 Alina Michelewicz

Mhm.

00:32:35 Ching-Wen Hsiao

I think another party that will be interested in doing this is actually the insurance company.

00:32:41 Alina Michelewicz

Yes. Yeah.

00:32:42 Ching-Wen Hsiao

So the insurance company they are now suffering from, you know climate change because a lot of flooding or like a power outage and other incidents that make it almost impossible to do business in certain states, right. So for them they, the insurance company may have incentives to encourage the developers or builders to build something better.

00:33:03 Alina Michelewicz

Definitely. I think that’s actually a good segue into.

00:33:07 Alina Michelewicz

The recent research paper, Wen, that you had accepted into ACEEE.

00:33:12 Alina Michelewicz

It really focused on climate resiliency and why it’s

00:33:15 Alina Michelewicz

So important for us to be focused on Passive House and other code that’s encouraging us to insulate the buildings and prepare for the future. So I wondered if you could talk a little bit about your research and what you found in regards to climate resiliency.

00:33:35 Ching-Wen Hsiao

Great. Thank you for mentioning that, the modeling team we have been.

00:33:38 Ching-Wen Hsiao

Recently, thinking about incorporating climate change into our practice, the current norm in the industry is to use the TMY 3 with the file that I described previously. So those are the weather file from the previous 20-30 years. Some people are using the word file from TMY X. Those are.

00:33:58 Ching-Wen Hsiao

The files data from maybe 10 years ago.

00:34:01 Ching-Wen Hsiao

The current code.

00:34:02 Ching-Wen Hsiao

Current modeling guidelines, they never demand us to incorporate climate change in our weather file. We know, like in climate science, even the UN on the news, people are talking about climate change a lot. But when we are trying to assess what’s going to happen in the future, we never actually use the future climate.

00:34:23 Ching-Wen Hsiao

Which is the puzzling to me.

00:34:25 Ching-Wen Hsiao

Right. And I think there are a few reasons why we’re not doing that. First of all, the energy engineers, HVAC engineers or architects, we are not climate scientists. We don’t really understand what’s going on in their research, right? They they publish a lot of papers, white papers on policy directive, but we don’t know what’s.

00:34:44 Ching-Wen Hsiao

The real data, we have no access to it. That’s the first so technical challenge and 2nd the code is set.

00:34:51 Ching-Wen Hsiao

For BERDO, so BERDO is the reporting requirement in Boston that require building owners of large properties to report the carbon emissions of their building and water usage. And so you have to report it year after year into the future. And starting from 2030, if you if you’re building perform.

00:35:11 Ching-Wen Hsiao

Badly and fall under certain targets that the city can fine you. Right. So that’s when I started to think about. OK, so now we have to predict the future performance of our buildings.

00:35:21 Ching-Wen Hsiao

And then so when we talk with the client, especially with the clients who are trying to retrofiting their existing building, we have to do the BERDO analysis for them. But we are still using the current climate as a base when we run this analysis. My question will be, oh, does this make sense? How can we tell a client?

00:35:40 Ching-Wen Hsiao

Now you have to replace this roof.

00:35:42 Ching-Wen Hsiao

In 2050, without knowing what’s going to happen in 2050.

00:35:46 Alina Michelewicz

Mhm.

00:35:46 Ching-Wen Hsiao

Yeah. So this thing where we started our research and the other question that we’re asking is like now the city, Boston, a lot of progressive city in Massachusetts now they require Passive House. So there is this like almost revolutionary trend in Massachusetts and people are starting to build this super insulated house, you know, with the air tightness.

00:36:05 Ching-Wen Hsiao

But we don’t know how will this building perform in the future. It sounds like a silly question, but the question started with, so what’s going to be the weather like in 2050, 2080? Are we going to become as hot and as humid as Memphis or DC? So the climate will become warmer and warmer.

00:36:25 Ching-Wen Hsiao

That’s a trend that is clear. And so if we super, we well insulate the building to an extent. Are they good for the future and what happens to existing buildings.

00:36:35 Ching-Wen Hsiao

We have large building stocks in Massachusetts. Those are uninsulated or poorly insulated. We also have buildings that were built in the past 10 to 20 years. They were like quite well insulated under the code. And so that our research paper trying to ask a lot of questions. So first question we’re asking is how do we integrate?

00:36:55 Ching-Wen Hsiao

Future climate change into our modeling practice and 2nd we want to know the performance of Passive House or poorly insulated buildings and just regularl building. How do they perform in the future climate?

00:37:07 Ching-Wen Hsiao

Third, we want to know like what happens if there is extreme accident, maybe there is a power outage blackout. We’ve seen those on the news, right? Texas black out a few days and it became a disaster. Buildings, they fail. Can people still survive? You know, in the winter if there is a power outage, what does that mean? And then lastly, we want to know.

00:37:28 Ching-Wen Hsiao

Will Passive House or fully insulated house? What kind of financial burden do they bring to the tenants, especially people from low-income community? New Ecology, we primarily focusing on social housing, affordable housing, so a lot of our clients there are like in a low-income bracket.

00:37:46 Ching-Wen Hsiao

You know there is an underlying reason why this kind of financial stress is important. That’s because when we introduce Passive House into the market, into the code, literally we’re trying to build electricity-only building. So the heating and cooling, they rely on electricity. Electricity is very expensive in Massachusetts, compared to gas.

00:38:08 Ching-Wen Hsiao

So those poor insulated buildings, existing buildings, most of them, they still rely on gas as they’re, like, heating source. So in the winter, if you look at the building purely relying on electricity for heating versus the building that’s rely on gas for heating, the utility bill is very different. And so the introduction of Passive House.

00:38:28 Ching-Wen Hsiao

Into the multifamily world, especially for affordable multifamily. What does that mean for the tenants?

00:38:34 Ching-Wen Hsiao

And so we look into three different tools that allow us to generate future weather files. We look into like the source, the raw data from CMIP 6, which is the primary research group responsible for climate change research. And then we are able to, you know, download future climate models and experiment datas.

00:38:55 Ching-Wen Hsiao

Under different climate scenarios. So when we talk about climate change, we also need to talk about scenarios. There is a scenario where we still rely on fossil fuel. There are scenarios that represent the green future where renewable energy is a primary source. There is another scenario where there are regional rivalries where.

00:39:15 Ching-Wen Hsiao

Countries don’t share their resorces. So there are like different kind of socio economical scenarios under climate change, right? So we look into like 4 different scenarios. We got data, process future weather file between 2020 to 2080 and we compare the weather data and see what this looks like and then we’ll put them into a case study building.

00:39:36 Ching-Wen Hsiao

So the case study building that we chose is a affordable building which is almost completed right now in South Boston.

00:39:43 Ching-Wen Hsiao

And it’s a new construction and that building received a Phius design certification and so it’s a Passive House, right. So we use that building as a case and then we replace the Passive House envelope with the code minimal envelope. And then we also have a scenario where we take out all the insulation and so we compare them. And so in the future.

00:40:03 Ching-Wen Hsiao

Of course, the Passive House will perform the best right, and then the building without insulation. They perform badly. However, when we look at the resiliency piece of it when there is power outage, what’s going to happen in the coldest week of the winter and in the hottest week of summer?

00:40:19 Ching-Wen Hsiao

When there is no power and you live in a Passive House in summer, it’s hot, so it’s it’s not necessarily more resilient in summer, right? But but in the winter it’s super resilient and they also tell us like a very simple thing we can do, we can.

00:40:35 Ching-Wen Hsiao

Open our windows.

00:40:38 Ching-Wen Hsiao

And so there are like things.

00:40:39 Ching-Wen Hsiao

We can do to mitigate the the heat, however, for the poorly insulated buildings in summer and winter they perform the worst, and so even with a little bit insulation based on the code 15 years ago, they still performed much better than the building without any insulation. So I think for those it’s like really important to remind us that.

00:40:58 Ching-Wen Hsiao

Even in the future, at the current and future climate, we want to have more insulation. The Passive House is actually quite good in terms of the energy burden, the financial resiliency piece for the low income tenants. Our research find out that if you live in the Passive House, your financial burden doesn’t change because of climate change. It’s almost the same.

00:41:19 Ching-Wen Hsiao

Because your envelope is too good. So even though it becomes hotter and hotter.

00:41:22 Ching-Wen Hsiao

It’s fine. The change is very minimal for people who live in new construction built in the past 15.

00:41:29 Ching-Wen Hsiao

Years. They are also OK. Kind of OK, but for people who live in like an uninsulated building, the financial burden for like a low income bracket, people could reach 10%. So when we talk about financial burden, that means how much percent of your total income is used to pay your utility bill. So 10% is a lot.

00:41:48 Alina Michelewicz

Crazy.

00:41:49 Alina Michelewicz

If you live in a house that’s uninsulated, climate change may cause your energy burden to be 10 percent, 10% of your income would be paid towards energy, right?

00:42:00 Ching-Wen Hsiao

Right.

00:42:01 Alina Michelewicz

And if you live in a Passive House building, then you won’t necessarily see an increase in your energy burden. So it really.

00:42:07 Alina Michelewicz

Is like a very big financial impact for the residents of these buildings that we’re building now that are Passive House that are much more resilient.

00:42:16 Ching-Wen Hsiao

Yeah, I think This is why, like it’s important for like low-income housing to embrace the Passive House standard, right. They make sense for the low-income people. I think it makes sense for everyone. But for them, especially, as I said, they confirm the need to have some kind of subsidy to encourage affordable housing developers to build.

00:42:37 Ching-Wen Hsiao

More resilient housing.

00:42:38 Alina Michelewicz

Yeah, for sure. Paul. What were some of your takeaways after reading the research paper? Because you you’re very nearly embedded in the field?

00:42:46 Paul Eddowes

Yeah, so I found it really interesting. Read this this paper. You know, the whole idea of planning and designing these buildings for a future climate rather than the past climate just kind of turned on the light bulb in my head. I was trying to think of an analogy for it, and it’s it’s a bit like you’re going on vacation and looking at the past week’s weather to plan on what you’re packing and what you’re going to wear.

00:43:08 Paul Eddowes

Rather than looking at.

00:43:09 Paul Eddowes

The weather forecast in the future and its.

00:43:11 Paul Eddowes

Like. Yeah, why? Why haven’t we been thinking about this in the past? But the predictions and the models that we’re getting for future climate are getting so much more accurate that they’re helping to better inform what we should do for the future. I think, you know, as I was reading this and digesting it, I all of a sudden start to panic thinking. Ohh no what?

00:43:31 Paul Eddowes

What are we doing? Are we?

00:43:33 Paul Eddowes

Building buildings that are not going to be suitable for our future climate? There is this going to be another sick building syndrome outbreak where the buildings that we’re building are gonna be unoccupiable and not safe to live in for people. But reading through the paper and reading through the results, I was really reassured that the building typology.

00:43:53 Paul Eddowes

That you modeled as case A. You know the Passive House buildings that is part of the code requirements in Massachusetts now and will quickly spread elsewhere.

00:44:02 Paul Eddowes

You know, they perform the best under normal circumstances. They have the lowest energy consumption, both in heating and cooling. You know, they help, as we discussed, reduce energy burden for low-income residents and then the the resiliency thing as well, I think is really important to highlight. You know, I think because of the the increased thermal performance of the.

00:44:23 Paul Eddowes

Passive House envelopes they they obviously retain heat better, which is great in the winter, and it’s not even a problem in the summer when we have active air conditioning, you know, to help offset those heat loads.

00:44:34 Paul Eddowes

But it’s when we don’t have air conditioning that you know, they could be more susceptible than a power outage situation. It was interesting to note that I think it is within the first two to three days. Passive House scenarios still maintained comfort levels that are survivable inside, you know, it’s only once you got above.

00:44:55 Paul Eddowes

That two to three day mark, but it started to get uncomfortable.

00:44:59 Paul Eddowes

Thinking about grid resiliency and what we’ve seen in the recent and somewhat distant past, we can look back to the the power outage in 2003 in the Northeast and, you know that was a a massive catastrophic event that we haven’t seen in this region recently. But even then it was only 6 to 8 hours.

00:45:20 Paul Eddowes

Of power outage that people had to endure. Which Passive House type projects would right through easily? Everyone can think back to Texas in 2021 where some areas were without power for that two to three, maybe even longer time period, two to three days longer.

00:45:36 Paul Eddowes

Yeah, and that was different. You know, it was a winter power outage and it was the inability of the Texas grid infrastructure, you know, reliance on gas for electricity production, tied in with electric resistance heating, being dominant, that kind of overloaded the grid. You know, that highlights how relying on one way of operating.

00:45:58 Paul Eddowes

Can lead to the breakdown of the grid relatively easily and relatively quickly.

00:46:03 Paul Eddowes

You know, what we need to do at a much wider scale is think about how resilient our grids are and plan for these types of events in the future.

00:46:12 Paul Eddowes

Overall, I’m I’m happy to see that that the Passive House type projects are going to be resilient to a certain extent for these types of events, as well as helping reduce energy consumption. And you know, making occupants more comfortable and reducing their overall energy burden.

00:46:27 Alina Michelewicz

Yeah. Could you talk a little bit about grid resilience?

00:46:31 Alina Michelewicz

It wasn’t the focus of the paper necessarily, but how do we make the grid more resilient so that these

00:46:38 Alina Michelewicz

Types of buildings can maintain livability based on the grid?

00:46:41 Paul Eddowes

Yeah, I think an important point in there is is electrification Passive House, whether it’s through PHI or through Phius, is largely agnostic as to what fuel source you use.

00:46:58 Alina Michelewicz

Oh, ok.

00:46:59 Paul Eddowes

It does play into it in terms of your source energy requirements to a certain extent. But you know you can do Passive House projects with either gas or electric heating, but there’s been a push at the states’ level, at least in Massachusetts, to electrify buildings. And that’s in conjunction with Passive House certification.

00:47:12 Paul Eddowes

So we know that in the future we’re going to be more reliant on the electrical grid for heating as well as cooling. So ensuring that the grid has the capacity and the resilience to be able to handle that, that additional load during peak heating days where, just in Boston over the past week or so we’ve seen.

00:47:32 Paul Eddowes

Many of those.

00:47:32 Paul Eddowes

Where we know there’s gonna be high demand for electricity and cooling, but throw in a power outage event on top of that or a power station going offline, that’s gonna stress the the system even more.

00:47:45 Paul Eddowes

So, yeah, I think grid resiliency is going to be an important factor that comes into play.

00:47:51 Alina Michelewicz

Yeah.

00:47:51 Ching-Wen Hsiao

One aspect of the grid resiliency is to do the peak demand shifting. So which means like if everyone turn your AC on at the same time, then you’re kind of bring this stress to the grid. If we can somehow make a group of people turn it on later, flatten the peak energy demand from each building, then we can kind of like.

00:48:12 Ching-Wen Hsiao

Avoid this catastrophic event.

00:48:14 Ching-Wen Hsiao

I think the implementation of solar PV will help that, you generate electricity to support yourself or support the grid. Another way to do this is to flatten the curve by introducing better insulation and better design smaller size of your HVAC, also reduce the peak demand.

00:48:33 Paul Eddowes

To go back to that Texas example, you know, one of the problems there was that they were overly reliant on electric resistance heating, which is far less efficient than any kind of heat pump. So.

00:48:46 Paul Eddowes

If we can ensure that we are using these efficient systems, which we are in Passive House projects then that will help with the grid resiliency because it’s not going to be as stressed at those peak load times during the summer.

00:48:59 Alina Michelewicz

You know, that’s really interesting. It really echoes what we were talking about with domestic hot water with Charlie Simek and Neil Donnelly in the 5th episode of this season, where we were talking about the peak loads in the evening and the morning for hot water usage in.

00:49:12 Alina Michelewicz

Buildings and how that impacts the sizing and different things it’s it’s interesting the the trend there, the peak mitigation.

00:49:22 Michelle Moran

I never thought about that using solar to mitigate that, but of course that’s excellent. It’s a great connection, and many sites in Massachusetts and beyond are now incorporating solar panels, or at least making sure their sites are ready to be incorporated with solar panels in the future.

00:49:37 Michelle Moran

So that’s excellent.

00:49:38 Paul Eddowes

Yeah, and and like taking that to the next level. So using smart grids or micro grids to be able to still provide power to smaller regions during a power outage is kind of the next level.

00:49:52 Paul Eddowes

With implementation of micro grids and smart grids that helps enable smaller pockets of areas to be able to switch back to a power grid and maintain their power throughout any kind of power outage.

00:50:06 Alina Michelewicz

Yeah. What about existing buildings? Are there takeaways from your research or just your experience at New Ecology about upgrades to

00:50:15 Alina Michelewicz

Existing buildings that we should consider for climate resiliency?

00:50:19 Ching-Wen Hsiao

When we talk about existing buildings, we have to consider two kind of existing.

00:50:23 Ching-Wen Hsiao

Buildings, one is existing buildings with historical monument status, and the other one is existing buildings without any historical significance. If we work with the building that has some kind of historical value, there will be historical committee that will prevent you from adding solution from on the outside.

00:50:42 Ching-Wen Hsiao

Of the building.

00:50:43 Ching-Wen Hsiao

Because then you are kind of destroying like the look, they don’t want us to cover it. And also for those kind of structures, it’s harder to drill a lot of holes inside. It’s challenging. So for those groups, usually the efficiency relies on HVAC system.

00:50:59 Ching-Wen Hsiao

Second type of existing buildings we work with, we have a lot of freedom. We have license. You know we can change the structure, we can cover. We have for those it’s easier, we can still maintain like the square footage and then we can maintain like the basic skeleton of the building. But we have freedom to implement a lot of like insulation, we can replace the pipes and pumps.

00:51:20 Ching-Wen Hsiao

Those are great.

00:51:21 Ching-Wen Hsiao

Originally, when Passive House came out, they don’t have retrofitting in mind. 2 days ago Passive House just roll out a new standard. It’s called Revive, that is designed for existing buildings. I haven’t looked into the details of that, so I don’t know like how rigorous that is in comparison to the new construction, but.

00:51:41 Ching-Wen Hsiao

I think it’s a very important step moving forward because Passive House now is addressing the need to insulate, to improve the existing buildings.

00:51:50 Michelle Moran

That’s so timely that that just came out recently.

00:51:53 Michelle Moran

Of course. I mean, even BERDO, which is only one example. It’s all buildings over a certain size. It’s not just new buildings over a certain size. So I’m glad pacifist is getting on board with that, or, Phius.

00:52:04 Ching-Wen Hsiao

I want to clarify that BERDO is a reporting requirement. It is not energy code itself.

00:52:09 Alina Michelewicz

Mmmmm. OK. Yeah.

00:52:09 Ching-Wen Hsiao

So. So BERDO does not concern like how we model the building. It’s like more reported, but in order to make a good plan to compile with BERDO or for the future, we need energy model.

00:52:24 Alina Michelewicz

Are there any takeaways you’d like to communicate to anyone listening to the podcast, whether it’s modelers, policymakers, building owners, about what we’ve discussed?

00:52:36 Paul Eddowes

It’s important to note that these buildings don’t live in isolation. They are part of neighborhoods, and yes, the building itself is important. We need to look at its envelope and its systems and its performance. But in a warming climate, if we’re thinking about how we keep buildings and neighborhoods cool, we also have to look at the site around the building.

00:52:56 Paul Eddowes

Thinking about urban heat island effect and mitigating that so.

00:53:01 Paul Eddowes

Designing neighborhoods so that they can be shaded. That’s going to be important to help make these buildings and make the neighborhoods places we live more comfortable in the future.

00:53:11 Ching-Wen Hsiao

I would encourage everyone to incorporate climate change. It could be just a factor or it could be a weather file into your analysis, and to think about what happens in the future if you have to, you know, remove your installation, or you have to replace your roof in the future. What’s going to happen?

00:53:30 Ching-Wen Hsiao

One thing that we have been thinking about in office is like, what happens if it’s too hot, to warm in the future? We actually need to remove insulation? So what happens if you become too humid and then the humidity will cause problem with your ventilation system? Those are things that could happen. So I think the danger to assume what’s real now is real in the future, I think there’s a danger to that.

00:53:52 Alina Michelewicz

Nice. I like that. Thank you so much for both of.

00:53:55 Alina Michelewicz

Your time, this was really great, and the research paper was really interesting. I’m sure we’ll have it up on our website at some point and become available.

00:54:03 Alina Michelewicz

For people to read.

00:54:04 Alina Michelewicz

Read. Thank you guys.

00:54:05 Michelle Moran

Thank you.

00:54:05 Ching-Wen Hsiao

Thank you.

00:54:05 Paul Eddowes

Yeah, thank you.

00:54:08 Michelle Moran

Thank you to our guests, Ching-Wen Hsiao and Paul Eddowes for joining us today. To learn more about what we talked about today, you can find the show notes at newecology.org/buildingwell-podcast. You can find New Ecology on Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, and X at New Ecology, Inc.

00:54:27 Michelle Moran

The season 1 BuildingWell Podcast Committee at New Ecology is led and organized by Alina Michelewicz and Michelle Moran. Mass Save Minutes by Molly Craft. Production, editing, and music by Michelle Moran. Video editing by Michael Abdelmessi.

00:54:42 Molly Craft

This episode was made possible by the Mass Save Community Education Grant.

00:54:46

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