10 predictions for the US building industry

Portland/Seattle green builder Hammer & Hand has unveiled its ten predictions for the US high performance building industry.

These include:

• Focus will move beyond Net Zero Energy to Net Positive Energy buildings.

Three trends will begin moving the high performance building industry beyond Net Zero Energy (NZE) buildings toward Net Positive Energy (NPE) buildings:
a. Falling prices for photovoltaic panels to make energy production more feasible;
b. Increasing viability and availability of electric vehicles to harness surplus energy production and compete with buildings for electricity; and
c. The emergence of market mechanisms that reward both onsite energy conservation and production (see next point).

• Market mechanisms that reward energy conservation and renewable energy production will flourish.

Market-based tools like Feed In Tariffs (to allow building owners/operators to sell excess energy back to the grid), Carbon Offsets (to reward building owners/operators for reductions in carbon footprint), and Metered Energy Efficiency Transactions (to allow investors in building energy efficiency to sell “negawatts” back to the utility, being piloted by the Bullitt Center and Seattle City Light) will continue to gain ground in 2014.

• Building energy codes will move away from prescriptive rules toward performance-based measures.

The City of Seattle leads the charge toward performance-based code at the municipal scale, and the States of California and Washington have taken important first steps at the state level. The US Department of Energy continues to push the envelope through its work on the International Energy Conservation Code. Expect the trend toward performance measures to continue in 2014 as the limitations of prescriptive code become more and more obvious to policy makers.

• CO2 heat pumps will help transform heating and cooling performance.

New technology will continue to drive the development of the US high performance building industry, with CO2 heat pumps making an entrance into the North American marketplace. These heating and cooling units bring these benefits:
a. More earth friendly due to lower Global Warming Potential (GWP).
b. Move more energy more efficiently.
c. Work in much colder climates without the steep performance curve drop-offs seen with other heat pumps.

• The US-led move to make Passive House more climate-specific will improve performance at both micro and macro levels.

In the past year the Passive House Institute US began spearheading the effort to make the Passive House standard more sensitive to the diverse climates found across the US, including partnerships with the Building Science Corporation and the Department of Energy. This effort will bear fruit in 2014, helping to guide successful high performance building in the American South and across the northern portion of the continent.

• Europe’s push to eliminate thermal bridges in buildings will make high performance building more mainstream in the US, too.

Europe is pushing hard to eliminate thermal bridges (building elements that transfer heat or cool energy through the building envelope), resulting in a wave of new user-friendly software tools for calculating thermal bridging. This development has brought what was once a highly technical, niche element of high performance building into the mainstream in Europe. These same tools apply equally well in the US, and promise to make the battle against thermal bridges easier to win for US designers in 2014.

• China’s interest in high performance building will propel US market.

While still nascent, China’s move toward high performance, energy conserving structures and building envelopes will have far-reaching impacts. From demand for US-manufactured building components to supply of Chinese-made ones, the US high performance building industry stands to gain when the world’s second largest economy puts its weight behind building energy conservation.