Construction is underway in St. Paul, Minnesota, on a major affordable housing development that will combine solar, geothermal and all-electric appliances to create one of the region’s largest net-zero communities.

Twin Cities Habitat for Humanity broke ground in June on a four-block, 147-unit project on the site of a former golf course that’s being redeveloped by the city and its port authority, which made the decision to forgo gas hookups. 

Affordable housing and Habitat for Humanity builds in particular have become a front line in the fight over the future of gas. The organization has faced criticism in other communities for accepting fossil fuel industry money and partnering with utilities on “net-zero” homes that include gas appliances. It’s also built several all-electric projects using advanced sustainable construction methods and materials.

The scale of the Twin Cities project is what makes it exciting, according to St. Paul’s chief resilience officer Russ Stark. 

“We’ve had plenty of motivated folks build their own all-electric homes, but they’re one-offs,” he said. “There haven’t been many, if any, at scale.”

Stark added that the project, known as The Heights, was made possible by the federal Inflation Reduction Act. 

“I think it’s fair to say that those pieces couldn’t have all come together without either a much bigger public investment or the Inflation Reduction Act, which ended up being that big public investment,” he said.

A vision emerges

Port Authority President and CEO Todd Hurley said his organization bought the property in 2019 from the Steamfitters Pipefitters Local 455, which maintained it as a golf course until 2017. When no private buyers expressed interest in the property, the Port Authority bought it for $10 million.

Hurley said the Port Authority saw potential for light industrial development and had the experience necessary to deal with mercury pollution from a fungicide the golf course staff sprayed to kill weeds.

“We are a land developer, a brownfield land developer, and one of our missions is to add jobs and tax base around the creation of light industrial jobs,” Hurley said.

The Port Authority worked with the city’s planning department on a master plan that included housing, and it solicited developers to build a mix of market-rate, affordable and low-income units. The housing parcels were eventually sold for $20 million to a private developer, Sherman Associates, which partnered with Habitat and JO Companies, a Black-owned affordable and multi-family housing developer.

“Early on, we identified a very high goal of (becoming) a net zero community,” Hurley said. “Everything we have been working on has been steering towards getting to net zero.”

Twin Cities Habitat President and former St. Paul mayor Chris Coleman said the project met his organization’s strategic plan, which calls for building bigger developments instead of its traditional practice of infilling smaller lots with single-family homes and duplexes. The project will be the largest the organization has ever built in the Twin Cities.

Coleman said the Heights offered an opportunity to fill a need in one of St. Paul’s most diverse and economically challenged neighborhoods and “be part of the biggest investment in the East Side in over 100 years.”

The requirement for all-electric homes merged with Habitat’s goal of constructing more efficient and sustainable homes to drive down utility costs for homeowners, he said. Habitat built solar-ready homes and sees the solar shingles on its homes in The Heights as a potential avenue to producing onsite clean energy.

Zeroing in on net zero

Mike Robertson, a Habitat program manager working on the project, said the organization worked with teams from the Minneapolis-based Center for Energy and Environment on energy modeling.

“The Heights is the first time that we’ve dived into doing an all-electric at scale,” Roberston said. “We have confidence that these houses will perform how they were modeled.”

Habitat plans to build the development to meet the Zero Energy Ready Home Program standards developed by the U.S. Department of Energy. Habitat will use Xcel Energy’s utility rebate and efficiency programs to achieve the highest efficiency and go above and beyond Habitat’s typical home standards.

The improved construction only adds a few thousand dollars to the overall costs and unlocks federal government incentives to help pay for upgrades, he said.

The nonprofit will receive free or reduced-cost products from Andersen Windows & Doors and other manufacturers. GAF Energy LLC, a solar roofing company, will donate solar shingles for over 40 homes and roofing materials. On-site solar will help bring down energy bills for homeowners, he said.

Chad Dipman, Habitat land development director, said the solar shingles should cover between half and 60% of the electricity the homes need. Habitat plans to use Xcel Energy incentive programs to help pay for additional solar shingles needed beyond those donated. 

Habitat will install electric resistance heating technology into air handlers to serve as backup heat for extremely cold days. Dipman said that the air source heat pumps will also provide air conditioning, a feature not available in most Habitat properties in Minnesota.  

Phil Anderson, new homes manager at the Center for Energy and Environment, has worked with Habitat on the project. He said the key to reducing the cost of heating and cooling electric homes is a well-insulated, tight envelope and high-performance windows. Habitat will build on its experience with constructing tight homes over the past decade, he said.

“Overall, the houses that we’ve been part of over the last almost ten years have been very tight homes,” Anderson said. “There’s just not a lot of air escaping.”

Habitat’s national office selected The Heights as this year’s Jimmy & Rosalynn Carter Work Project, named after the former president and his wife, two of Habitat’s most famous supporters. The work project begins September 29^th and will receive as visitors Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood, who now host the Carters’ program.

Robertson said thousands of volunteers from around the country and the world will help put up the homes. The Heights project “raises a lot of awareness for Habitat and specifically for this development and the decarbonization efforts that we’re putting into it,” he said.

The Heights’s two other housing developers continue raising capital for their projects and hope to break ground by next summer. Habitat believes the project will meet its 2030 completion deadline.

A St. Paul, Minnesota Habitat for Humanity project will offer affordable housing without fossil fuels is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.

This article originally appeared in Canary Media.

Local Law 97, New York City’s groundbreaking, multistage effort to rein in carbon emissions from its big buildings, is facing its first major test — and it’s just a preview of the much steeper challenges to come.

Last week, New York City Mayor Eric Adams released proposed guidelines for how owners of the worst-performing buildings can comply with the law’s mandate to curb emissions by 2024. Next year, the city will begin imposing fines on buildings that haven’t reduced their emissions below certain thresholds, with even steeper cuts and rising fines to come in 2030 and 2040.

The response to the new compliance guidelines was swift. Real estate owners opposed to the law reiterated long-standing complaints that the mandates will force them to choose between paying steep fines or making efficiency investments that don’t make economic sense today.

Environmental activists countered with evidence that near-term compliance is not nearly as costly as opponents say it will be. They also worry that two parts of the proposed regulations, which would allow laggard buildings to postpone compliance for two years and use clean-energy purchases to offset continued building emissions after that date, amount to a surrender by the Adams administration to real estate interests at the expense of fighting climate change.

“Mayor Adams is proposing a gigantic giveaway to his real estate buddies that’s going to increase pollution and crush jobs,” said Pete Sikora, climate and inequality campaigns director of New York Communities for Change and a former member of the Local Law 97 advisory board.

That’s why Sikora’s group and a host of environmental and community activists are protesting what they describe as loopholes in the new proposed guidance. The conflict over these proposals underscores a key tension around the broad goal of decarbonizing buildings: how to balance the carrots with the sticks. If the cost of meeting the law’s emissions-reduction mandates is too high, building owners may simply choose to pay the fines instead, an outcome that does little to help the climate.

But building-efficiency experts agree that meeting the law’s 2024 targets should be relatively simple for the vast majority of commercial and multifamily residential buildings in New York City. As evidence, they point to the fact that 89 percent of buildings covered by the law are already in compliance with its requirements, including many older buildings that are harder to retrofit to become more energy-efficient. They also note that alternative compliance options have been established for more challenging buildings such as low-income housing.

“I do not believe there is a serious building professional in this city who would say that a building making a good-faith effort, absent very unusual circumstances, would not be able to get under the 2024 limit,” said Sikora. ​“In some buildings, they could do it almost immediately if they wanted by making some very basic changes — putting in LEDs [and] aerated shower heads, insulating exposed heating pipes, tuning the boiler correctly” and other such remedial actions.

What will be harder, he said, is meeting Local Law 97’s longer-term goals. Roughly 70 percent of the city’s buildings do not yet comply with the law’s tougher targets of cutting carbon emissions by 40 percent from 2019 levels by 2030.

Hitting that end-of-decade figure in particular will require far more extensive efforts to switch from the oil- and fossil-gas-fueled systems that heat the majority of buildings today to electric heat-pump systems or low-emissions steam heat systems. It will also require deeper building-efficiency retrofits to ease stress on the power grid.

Difficult as it may be to pull off, it’s crucial to meet these targets. Buildings contribute 70 percent of the carbon emissions in New York City, which means ​“we will not achieve our climate goals without addressing buildings,” said John Mandyck, CEO of the nonprofit Urban Green Council, which has played a key role in creating the law and monitoring its implementation. While building owners have been waiting for key guidelines on how the law will be enforced, with last week’s proposed guidance, ​“the compliance pathway is now evidently clear,” he said.

But the ongoing political fight over the law’s short-term targets could derail these longer-term efforts, Sikora said. New York City officials estimate the costs of hitting the law’s 2030 targets to range from $12 billion to $15 billion. If building owners don’t start making investments now, they run the risk of missing the law’s targets, which are designed to reduce the city’s carbon emissions in line with the Paris Agreement, he said.

“The law’s limits are achievable and affordable,” he added — a view backed by the Urban Green Council and other groups. The 2024 targets were meant to ​“get the most polluting buildings here to cut their pollution as a warmup to the 2030 requirements, which are quite a bit tougher.”

The ​“good-faith effort” pathway: A helping hand or a dodge? 

Environmental groups have two key complaints about the regulation proposed by the Adams administration last week.

The first is the proposal to allow the roughly 11 percent of buildings not yet hitting their targets to escape fines through 2026 if they make a ​“good-faith effort” to get on track. Some environmental groups argue that building owners have already had four years to prepare for 2024 targets and shouldn’t be rewarded for inaction.

“Responsible landlords are already doing that, not just to cut pollution but to save money on bills, too, and raise the property value,” Sikora said. ​“The mere fact that some landlords are incompetent doesn’t mean they should be let off the hook.”

But in Mandyck’s view, the good-faith exemption is a reasonable approach to forcing buildings that are behind schedule to meet the law’s mandates. Since Local Law 97 was passed in 2019, ​“we had Covid; we had supply-chain delays,” he noted. ​“It took the appropriate amount of time for regulations to unfold. And we’re now months away from compliance. So we have two options: We fine all those buildings and forfeit the carbon savings, or we find a pathway for compliance.”

The law’s fines — $268 per metric ton of carbon dioxide emissions that exceed an individual building’s cap — equate to ​“the highest price of carbon in the world,” he noted. ​“Do we tie up the administrative courts and start issuing fines? Then people are paying fines and not doing investments in the buildings. We need carbon savings — we don’t need fine revenue.”

Tristan Schwartzman, energy services director and principal at New York City–based building engineering consultancy firm Goldman Copeland Associates, agreed that a two-year extension could help a number of his clients that ​“do have a path that’s going to be arduous but feasible” to meet their compliance deadlines.

To qualify for the good-faith exemption, ​“you have to have a plan in place; you have to show that you’ve done something that’s been impactful,” he said. ​“There are a lot of hurdles you’re supposed to jump — but those are hurdles you’re supposed to be jumping anyway.”

But as Sikora and other environmental groups point out, it’s virtually impossible to discern whether owners of noncompliant buildings are indeed acting in good faith. These critics fear that the exemption will instead offer a two-year reprieve from fines for a subset of property owners who have been working to undermine the law.

Those efforts include a lawsuit filed last year by groups representing residential cooperative buildings in the borough of Queens demanding that the law be overturned. They also include millions of dollars of advertising and lobbying by the Real Estate Board of New York, a politically powerful group led by Douglas Durst, the owner of high-profile properties including some that are out of compliance with the law, such as the Bank of America Tower at 1 Bryant Park in Manhattan.

The group issued an analysis in January claiming that the fines from Local Law 97 could add up to $213 million for 3,780 buildings in 2024 and $902 million for 13,544 buildings in 2030, citing these findings as proof of ​“significant economic disruption that will occur if property owners are not provided adequate tools to reduce emissions.”

But Sikora noted that these figures misrepresent the financial impact on individual buildings and their tenants.

He cited the example of Bob Friedrich, the board president of Glen Oaks Village, a 2,900-unit co-op in Queens, who has been an outspoken opponent of Local Law 97 and a plaintiff in the lawsuit seeking to overturn the law. Friedrich has claimed that Glen Oaks would have to invest about $24.5 million to upgrade its gas and oil boilers to seek to comply with the law, and may still face an estimated $400,000 per year in fines from 2024 to 2030.

But divided among 2,900 units, that fine adds up to about $130 per unit per year through 2030, or ​“the equivalent of a parking ticket,” Sikora said. Similar economics apply to many other properties, making the law’s fines far from the death blow that many property owners have claimed they will be, he said.

Offering noncompliant buildings a route to avoid penalties for failing to achieve the relatively lax 2024 standards also risks setting a bad precedent for the much tougher 2030 targets, he added. That makes the good-faith exception a potential ​“signal to landlords and others that, well, maybe they’ll be delayed too.”

The battle over RECs 

It’s certainly true that the carbon-intensity of New York City’s electricity supply will influence the emissions impact of building electrification, Sikora said. But that doesn’t mean building owners should be able to use clean-energy accounting to avoid investing in fundamental efficiency improvements.

And that brings us to the second key criticism environmental groups have made against the Adams administration’s proposed regulations. This critique centers around the role of renewable energy credits (RECs) — contracts between building owners and clean-energy producers — in the Local Law 97 scoring regime.

Today, building owners can use RECs to procure clean electricity that can be delivered to the larger New York City grid to offset their building’s emissions from electricity usage. But environmental groups have been demanding that the Adams administration set a more stringent standard, one proposed by the Local Law 97 advisory board and supported by energy experts, to limit the use of RECs to offset no more than 30 percent of a building’s total emissions.

The problem with RECs, Sikora said, is that Local Law 97 doesn’t require that they be ​“additional,” or tied to paying for a renewable energy project that wouldn’t have been built without the money from their purchase. Instead, building owners can purchase RECs from already existing clean-energy projects and use them to comply with the law.

That’s a problem, because in New York state, as with many other parts of the country, these RECs are becoming so plentiful that they offer building owners a much cheaper path to compliance than investing in energy-efficiency upgrades to their properties.

Today, New York City gets most of its electricity from fossil-fueled power plants. But with new transmission lines capable of carrying massive amounts of zero-carbon energy into New York City now being built and expected to be complete by 2026, building owners will soon have access to plenty of RECs from clean-energy projects that have already been built.

The Real Estate Board of New York has pushed for expanding the opportunities to use RECs to offset not just building emissions associated with electricity consumption but all building emissions. The new proposed compliance guidelines did not take up that proposal — but it also declined to institute the 30 percent cap that environmental advocates are pushing for.

It’s important to note that buildings that take the good-faith alternative pathway will be barred from using RECs to meet their requirements. But Sikora said the real danger of the current REC policy is that it could be extended to 2030 and later, threatening the law’s more ambitious longer-term goals. The Urban Green Council has estimated that 40 percent of multifamily properties and 80 percent of office buildings could offset their emissions over their 2030 limits through the use of RECs alone.

That’s a problem because ​“in reality, it’s not possible for the city and the state to reduce pollution unless they reduce pollution at the source — at the buildings,” Sikora said. ​“And that means they have to get a lot more energy-efficient.”

Green groups including Sikora’s are calling for the Adams administration to put a REC cap into place and reconsider the good-faith exemption over the coming month of public comments and hearings on the proposed rules.

Where will the money come from? 

Sikora didn’t downplay the challenge of paying for the deep efficiency and electrification efforts that New York City buildings will need to undertake to meet Local Law 97’s longer-term mandates. But he sees a much larger role for public funding to close that gap — and while city and state agencies are providing money through a variety of programs, it isn’t yet enough, he said.

“We think the city and state should apply billions of dollars per year to decarbonize the building stock,” he said. That big one-time transition away from gas or oil to heat pumps is a big cost.” On the other hand, ​“we do not think the city needs to subsidize affluent [building] owners.”

That work must start with increased funding for the variety of affordable-housing units that are currently allowed to comply with the law via so-called ​“prescriptive pathways,” he said. The Urban Green Council estimates that rent-controlled apartments, public housing and other affordable-housing units make up one-third of all buildings covered by Local Law 97.

Mandyck noted that the new proposed guidance provides more clarity on how those buildings can comply via ​“commonsense” measures, such as insulation on water heaters and steam pipes and thermostats or temperature controls on radiators.

But Schwartzmann contended that many of these buildings ​“are really poorly maintained because they don’t have money to maintain them properly,” due to the challenging economics of financing improvements in rent-controlled buildings or tight budgets for public housing. ​“The city should be throwing money at that problem, not pushing it downstream.”

Last week’s proposed regulations also included a booster for buildings exploring the switch from fossil-fueled to electric heating, primarily via heat pumps — a new credit that increases the value of electrifying at least part of their heating demands.

The new credit system ​“not only gives you a zero-emissions equivalent for the electricity it uses, it gives you a negative” carbon score, said Jared Rodriguez, a principal with Emergent Urban Concepts and adviser to the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority. ​“It’s a very clear signal that they want you doing at least partial load electrification — and that you’ll get some credit for it.”

That’s an important boost for a technology that still costs more than fossil-fueled boilers and furnaces, both in terms of upfront equipment and installation costs and in ongoing utility costs, Schwartzman said. ​“There was a real hesitancy to move toward these electrified options because they’re not going to save you money at this point, because electricity costs more than gas,” he said.

Last year’s Inflation Reduction Act will help make efficiency and electrification more affordable via tax credits and incentives for equipment, installation and workforce training, Mandyck noted. City officials have said they will pursue funding from a variety of federal sources, such as ​“green bank” loans, to ease the cost burden.

The New York state government is also funding efforts to bring down the cost of novel decarbonization technologies, he added. Some examples include a $70 million initiative to develop window-mounted heat pumps that both cool and heat apartments and the $50 million Empire Building Challenge that’s targeting high-rise commercial and residential buildings for complex efficiency and electrification retrofits.

“Because of the scale of New York City and the state…we’re going to spur innovation that’s going to help the whole market,” he said. Local Law 97 is just the most ambitious of a number of similar mandatory building-performance standards already in place in cities including Boston, Denver and Washington, D.C. and in states including Colorado, Maryland and Washington, he noted.

Finally, it’s important to remember that the climate emergency requires building owners to think differently about the costs and benefits of efficiency and electrification, Mandyck said. ​“We need to think about payback differently. Climate is a life-safety issue now. Nobody asks what the payback is to put a sprinkler safety system in your building. There’s no payback there — if there isn’t a fire.”

NYC’s big building-decarbonization law faces its first major test is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.

ARLINGTON COUNTY, Va. — It’s clear Amazon thought outside its own ubiquitous brown cardboard box when sketching blueprints for its second headquarters.

At a series of mid-June opening events, guests oohed at the pair of sleek, 22-story glass-paneled towers on the former site of a nondescript warehouse near the Potomac River. And they aahed at the adjacent 2.5-acre public park replete with art, a central green, a playground, and gardens flush with native plants and trees.

However, what has awed authorities at the U.S. Green Building Council is how dozens of carbon-saving measures woven into the complex will advance climate consciousness and energy conservation in the construction industry.

The 2.1 million square feet of HQ2 office space hums along with zero operational carbon emissions because it is powered 100% by renewable energy.

Minimizing reliance on fossil fuels aligns with the mega-company’s commitment to achieve net-zero emissions by 2040, a decade ahead of the Paris climate accord.

“When you get a large, high profile project like an Amazon, which jumps through hoops to innovate, it transforms the market,” said Wes Sullens, LEED director at the council. “This is an anchor project that can move mountains.”

Indeed, the council will be adopting some of Amazon’s innovations with concrete and other materials when it releases an update to its Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) scorecards next year. 

In the meantime, draft concepts of version five will be shared and reviewed in late September at Greenbuild, the council’s international conference and expo in its hometown of Washington, D.C.

Amazon is seeking LEED platinum certification — the most stringent of the building council’s four levels — for this first phase of HQ2, also called Metropolitan Park.

One of the drivers behind that push is Fernando Arias. He operates out of Clark Construction’s nearby McLean, Virginia, office as the director of sustainability. Clark and its contractors began strategizing about an ambitious carbon diet once Amazon selected the Northern Virginia site in 2018.

Arias, an architect, beamed when explaining that his team strove to exceed green building goals even as supply chains were severely disrupted when construction began with the onset of the pandemic in 2020.

For instance, the total project called for 200,000 cubic yards of concrete. That’s enough to fill the reflecting pool at the Lincoln Memorial six times.

Amazon specified in its contract that it wanted the carbon footprint of all concrete use at HQ2 to be 20% below the industry baseline. Arias helped to almost double that goal — achieving 37% — by meticulously targeting lifecycle emissions. 

“I get a sense of pride” about HQ2 because “we’ve moved the needle on what to expect in the future,” Arias said. “It was Amazon’s climate pledge that spearheaded a lot of this.” 

‘These are not frou-frou green things’

Moving that needle required a single-minded obsession with the growing field of environmental product declarations, or EPDs for short. 

Simply put, the declarations are reports that spell out the full-cycle environmental impact of a material or product over its lifetime. Those calculations quantify what the construction industry refers to as embodied carbon. Comprehensive reports track emissions generated from mining a particular raw material, transporting it, operating the kiln, furnace or other equipment to create the building material, then using it to build a road or structure.

Those details offer sustainable options for architects, engineers and designers. As well, the information allows manufacturers to openly market their carbon transparency.

Arias jokingly refers to the declarations as “nutrition labels for structural materials.” In all, his team relied on more than 60 EDFs, mainly to account for the Amazon project’s supplies of cement, steel and masonry.

Some of those EDFs are new and unique to HQ2 because Amazon was so intent on shrinking emissions. First off, the team’s overall approach to cement was hyperlocal. The cleared site in what’s locally known as Crystal City was roomy enough to include an on-site batch plant. That curbed transportation emissions significantly because it eliminated fleets of giant delivery trucks from area highways and neighborhood streets.

Relatedly, Arias and his Clark colleagues brainstormed with other specialists about the “cleanest” method for crafting cement from “ingredients” provided by nearby vendors. 

For instance, they had to formulate how to efficiently boil the raw limestone so as to extract the cement that serves as the glue, or binding agent in concrete. Then, they had to balance what ratios of water, mineralized carbon dioxide, and sand and aggregate would create a mixture that cured correctly.

Cement might be a small portion of that recipe, but freeing it packs an enormous carbon punch, Arias said.

“This [region] has a lot of infrastructure in place to provide low-carbon concrete for construction,” he said, referring to the District of Columbia and neighboring counties in Virginia and Maryland. 

Understandably, he didn’t want to share any trade secrets, but some of those new concrete-centric EDFs will be setting a higher bar on the Green Building Council’s scorecards.

“These are not frou-frou green things,” Arias said. “Low-carbon construction is not about using exotic materials. It’s a combination of humans being smart, making efficient decisions and buying locally.”

He’s aware that co-locating a cement batch plant isn’t possible for every construction project, but other low-carbon resources can be at a builder’s disposal. 

Arias is intimately familiar with the Green Building Council’s guiding principles because he serves on a 10-member steering committee tasked with preserving the integrity of the LEED rating systems. Members are now devoting much of their time to upgrading LEED to version five.

It was fortuitous that plans for HQ2 in Arlington were taking shape as embodied carbon awareness was gaining traction in the industry. The project dovetailed with the launch of what’s called an embodied carbon in construction calculator. That tool, abbreviated as EC3, allows builders to dig into a database that compares carbon information across classes of most materials.

“The landmark year for all of this was 2019,” Arias said. “It really presented a fuller carbon picture.”

EC3 was devised by Building Transparency, a nonprofit based in Washington state dedicated to sustainability in construction.

That initiative, paired with efforts such as the federal government’s Buy Clean standard, is advancing low-carbon progress across the marketplace, he said.

EPDs help tame energy hogs

One reason the U.S. Green Building Council can even embark on the next iteration of its LEED measuring stick, version five, is because companies such as Clark push the envelope with HQ2 and similar exemplary projects.

“We can go farther than we would have otherwise,” Sullens said. “Over time, as more companies reach these rigorous standards, they get pulled into the mainstream and we can reach for the next level.”

The council first concocted a green building rating system 23 years ago because its members were alarmed by the industry’s carbon footprint.

An initial focus on new construction in the commercial sector has expanded to all building types, as well as neighborhoods, communities and cities. Reducing a building’s contribution to global climate change isn’t the only way an applicant can score certification points. Buildings also are scored on factors such as how they enhance human health and community quality of life, protect and restore water and biodiversity, and promote sustainable material cycles.

Today, it’s the most widely used green building rating system. Upward of 105,000 buildings have earned LEED certification around the world.

Still, buildings account for 39% of global energy-related carbon emissions, according to the World Green Building Council. Roughly 11% are from materials and construction practices, while the remaining 28% come from the energy needed to cool, heat and power them.

Version five of LEED will remain laser-focused on decarbonization, Sullens said, but will also address critical imperatives that include equity, health, biodiversity and resilience.

It’s crucial for the LEED scorecards to offer credits for innovative EPDs — environmental product declarations — because it spurs demand for better products locally, regionally and nationally, Sullens said. Knowing what’s achievable can lead to environmental- and health-related policy changes at the state and federal level.

Studies indicate that projects can reduce embodied carbon by 20% to 40% with negligible extra costs, Sullens said. He’s hopeful that continued progress with sequestering that embodied carbon means emissions will hover close to zero by 2050.

While EPDs had a head start in Europe, this country is catching up.

“Once emissions are disclosed, and producers realize, ‘Oh, our project is an energy hog,’ they want to do better,” Sullens said.

The concrete industry, while relatively new to the EPD game, has buckled down on addressing its outsize emissions. 

“That industry saw the writing on the wall and knew it needed to get ahead of the curve,” he said. 

Sullens noted that EPDs for concrete — and all other building materials — are not a one-size-fits-all proposition. Variables such as geography and the location of a manufacturer mean some declarations apply only to a certain region or local area. 

“We can say that, overall, we want to reduce embodied carbon by 20%, for instance, but what is realistic?” he asked rhetorically. “Despite the climate crisis, a question is, ‘What will the market bear?’”

While lifecycle information about carbon emissions is widely available, smaller industry players are known to grumble about having to compete with more muscular and well-heeled competitors to earn their green stripes. But Sullens maintains that’s no reason to put the brakes on ingenious solutions instigated by the Amazons of the world.

Acquiring a LEED platinum ranking is no cakewalk. And that’s intentional.

“We don’t want to give points for standard practices,” Sullens said. “We want to reward those actors who are first at peeking around corners to come up with innovation.”

How Amazon’s HQ2 pushes the (building) envelope on embodied carbon is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.

Minnesota would accelerate its adoption of commercial building codes and put new large buildings on a path toward using 80% less energy by 2036 under legislation awaiting the governor’s signature.

The building code measure passed last week amid a wave of climate and clean energy proposals that also includes major investments in weatherization, public transit, and electric vehicle incentives.

“New construction provides a fantastic opportunity because it’s a blank slate for us to get it right,” said Katie Jones, program and policy manager for the Center for Energy and Environment, a Minneapolis nonprofit that administers several weatherization and energy efficiency programs. 

The legislation had been debated for several years before clean energy organizations, unions, utilities and industry representatives came together to support it this session. The bill was crafted to help the state meet goals in Minnesota’s Climate Action Framework.

The legislation would require the state’s commercial building energy code to achieve an 80% or greater reduction in annual net energy consumption by 2036 as compared to a 2004 model code baseline measure. The Department of Labor and Industry, which administers building codes, would also be expected to more rapidly implement the latest commercial building energy codes starting in 2024.

The state’s commercial code covers larger multifamily projects but not single-family homes or smaller residential properties.

While buildings represent around 40% of emissions in the United States, they often are responsible for more than half of emissions in cities such as Minneapolis and St. Paul, Jones said. The changes should help lower residents’ energy bills, including people who live in apartments, she said.

Eric Fowler, senior policy associate for buildings at Fresh Energy, publisher of Energy News Network, said the 2036 goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions from new buildings by 80% moves Minnesota toward “near zero” for new building emissions.

“This puts us on a path to meaningfully reducing the energy intensity of new commercial buildings, to better prepare the state to meet our climate goals and make reasonable improvements to building performance,” he said.

The energy code allows for flexibility, he said, and does not require building owners to use renewable energy. Instead, the regulation requires that buildings “be sipping rather than guzzling that energy” they use, Fowler said.  

Housing First Minnesota, which represents homebuilders and remodelers, is among the industry groups that supported the commercial code legislation. Nick Erickson, Housing First’s senior director of housing policy, said the commercial energy code continues the state’s focus not just on efficiency but also on “safety, durability and affordability.”

Simona Fischer, director of sustainable practice at MSR Design and co-chair of the Committee on the Environment for the American Institute of Architects’ Minnesota chapter, said many architects would embrace adopting new commercial energy codes more quickly.

“The reason that we want to adopt more recent energy codes is that the more recent codes are better at setting a building up for efficiency and resilience,” she said.

Building to a higher standard will save money and prepare structures for extreme weather events caused by global warming, Fischer said. Constructing buildings to older codes, for example, can lead to costly repairs and underperformance, she said.

Upgrading commercial energy codes faster should unlock federal government tax credits and funding sources available in the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, Fischer said.

The bill also requires the Department of Labor and Industry commissioner to offer a report to the Legislature the year after the most recent commercial energy code adoption. Utilities can claim energy savings in projects as part of the state’s Conservation Improvement Program.

Minnesota’s building codes, and those of other states, are based on regulations developed by the national organization ASHRAE — the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers — and other groups. The latest commercial energy code is ASHRAE 90.1-2022 edition. The state also incorporates codes from the International Energy Conservation Code.

Minnesota’s code first goes through the Department of Labor and Industry’s Construction Codes Advisory Council. The process, which typically takes more than a year, involves gathering input from stakeholders before the department releases a code customized for Minnesota’s building community. The state will begin using the ASHRAE 90.1-2019 commercial energy code starting in 2024.

Gov. Tim Walz is expected to sign the legislation in the coming days.

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Minnesota lawmakers update commercial building code amid flurry of energy bills is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.

Massachusetts lawmakers and municipal leaders are increasingly pushing for measures that would lower the greenhouse gas emissions associated with building materials. 

“We’ve seen a lot of new interest and momentum,” said Rebecca Esau, manager of the carbon-free buildings practice at the clean energy think tank RMI. “At the local level especially there’s a lot going on.”

The state legislature is considering three bills that would address “embodied carbon,” a measure of the carbon dioxide emissions generated in extracting, manufacturing, transporting, maintaining, and eventually disposing of building materials. The communities of Cambridge, Brookline, Newton and Amherst have all taken up the question as well.

Much of the conversation around reducing the climate impact of buildings so far has focused on the greenhouse gas created by the day-to-day use of a building, generally called “operational emissions.” While embodied carbon has received little notice, it makes up an estimated 11% of global greenhouse gas emissions.

And it is a time-sensitive problem, advocates said. The amount of emissions going into the atmosphere matters, but so does when they are released: A ton of emissions that goes into the air today will cause compounding effects into the future. So avoiding a ton of carbon dioxide today by choosing less carbon-intensive building materials will have more impact than avoiding that same ton of emissions five years from now. And because buildings last for decades, each new structure offers only one chance to choose the right materials and lock in the impact of lower embodied carbon emissions. 

Concrete, steel, glass and insulation are among the materials that contribute the most to a building’s embodied carbon. Cost-effective, lower-carbon versions of some materials are already available — lower-embodied concrete can reduce emissions by 14% to 33% with little cost premium, for example, according to a 2021 report from RMI. And alternative materials such as mass timber, which is a renewable resource and can sequester carbon, are also becoming more common, albeit slowly. 

“Everyone knows that has to be addressed, but the focus really has not been there,” said Logan Malik, interim executive director of the Massachusetts Climate Action Network. “We know that there are solutions to addressing it; we know it has to be done, so let’s start moving things forward.”

Cities and towns taking the lead

In Massachusetts, a handful of cities and towns has been leading the charge.

The city of Cambridge, which has been working to curb building emissions since 2015, made the reduction of embodied carbon a part of its net-zero action plan in late 2021, with provisions going into effect this January. The plan, which applies to buildings larger than 50,000 square feet — with exceptions for laboratories and affordable housing —will start by collecting data to determine baseline embodied carbon emissions. In a few years, the city will begin requiring reductions relative to that baseline, ratcheting up the required reductions to 50% over the years. 

“It is our intention to move beyond requiring an accounting, to also push in the direction of reducing,” said Sussanne Rasmussen, Cambridge’s director of environmental and transportation planning.

Neighboring Brookline has been addressing embodied carbon for the past two years. In November 2021, the town passed a resolution calling for the use of concrete with 10% lower embodied emissions than conventional standards in the construction of any town building. The measure also requires the city to recycle concrete that is removed in the course of municipal projects, and to encourage private developers to use lower-embodied-carbon concrete in their designs as well. 

In April, the city of Newton added a provision to its special permitting process requiring buildings larger than 20,000 square feet to conduct an embodied carbon analysis as part of their building permit application. Eventually, the city could add limits on embodied carbon, but the focus for now is on education and data gathering. 

“Let’s learn about these impacts and how to measure them, and get developers and designers up to speed on the whole topic,” said Mark Webster, a structural engineer and member of the Green Newton Building Standards Committee. “Once we have a nice set of data from around the region, we can start to use that to set thresholds.”

State-level solutions

Municipal action has been necessary because there has been little done at the state level so far to address embodied carbon emissions. 

“We have been doing these things and pushing it along because there hasn’t been action at the state level,” Rasmussen said. “And it is so urgent that we don’t add emissions.”

At the same time, it can be difficult for municipalities to effectively take action because of conflicts between state and local authorities. Cities and towns cannot require the use of certain materials in private projects, because these requirements fall under the authority of the state building code. Municipalities, therefore, have to find other ways to push for lower embodied carbon, such as Brookline’s focus on public projects and Cambridge and Newton’s use of the special permit process for larger buildings. 

These varied strategies should lay the groundwork for further action by the state and by other cities and towns by demonstrating the feasibility of lower-embodied-carbon construction, said Lisa Cunningham, a Brookline resident and co-founder of climate advocacy group ZeroCarbonMA.

“When you get multiple communities moving forward to enact these resolutions, you can point to it [and] say, ‘We’ve done this; this is a great solution,’” she said. “The power of local action is very important.”

And broader interest is starting to pick up. The state legislature is now considering three bills addressing embodied carbon. One bill would require state building projects to use low-embodied-carbon concrete. The second would create a “buy clean” policy, which would require public projects to meet progressively tighter limits on embodied carbon. The final bill calls for the state to establish an embodied carbon advisory board and to incorporate plans to measure and reduce embodied carbon into stretch building codes — optional, more environmentally stringent codes used by most municipalities in the state. 

“That is a real indication of how much support there already is from folks in the legislature,” Esau said. 

Other states have already gotten out ahead on tracking and restricting embodied carbon. California, Colorado, Oregon, New Jersey and New York have all passed “buy clean” legislation of their own. But with growing local efforts and the bills pending in the legislature, advocates hope Massachusetts will soon be among those with the most aggressive policies. 

“We see it as creating an opportunity for Massachusetts to be a leader on the issue of embodied carbon,” Malik said.

Heating and cooking aren’t the only sources of building emissions is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.