As guest blogger for this entry, I'm pleased to share thoughts on the EEB's recent workshop at Lawrence Berkeley Labs (LBL) in Berkeley, California. But first, a bit of background.
Berkeley is not just a beautiful place (east of San Francisco on the outskirts of Oakland) – the brain power of Lawrence Berkeley Labs has helped California's policy-makers develop some of the most aggressive and leading-edge energy policies in the US, if not in the world.
Our direct contact there, Steve Selkowitz, heads up the Building Technologies Group at the Labs and has been quite involved with EEB since its inception. Christian and I met Steve at the 2006 ACEEE Summer Session in Monterey, and knew we had found an exceptional resource. On the subject of buildings and energy efficiency, Steve is probably one of the most knowledgeable people around. If he doesn't have direct knowledge, I will guarantee he knows someone who does. Steve and his team at LBL are leading experts on the subjects of building energy use, modeling, human behavior, policy options, systems and controls, and much more.
We assembled the EEB Core Group at LBL at the beginning of 2007 to help us analyze our initial findings after six months of data collection and discussion. It was here that our thoughts came together about business levers for building energy efficiency, forming the basis of our first report: Facts and Trends, Business Realities and Opportunities.
Given the access to the large body of knowledge and expertise, not to mention the available resources from California 's "thought leader" community, we decided to hold another workshop at LBL. This time we focused on market modeling.
This has been a key element in the second phase of the project, which began once we had published the first report. I call it “modeling pathways” and it's where the rubber hits the road. We take the issues, barriers and challenges we outlined in the first report and develop recommendations that we believe will set the market in place to make buildings zero net energy in the future.
Modeling pathways is just that - a first-ever quantitative look at how to make zero net energy buildings a commercial economic reality, by looking at policies, technologies and market actions under a clearly-defined set of plausible scenarios. To do this takes a model - not just any model, but a comprehensive model that can calculate financial and non-financial factors that will lead to market-based decisions given a variety of options or choices.
This is not simple stuff. It must be workable and credible to be widely accepted by the diverse set of skeptical stakeholders in the market.
Now back to Berkeley. We charted a 2-day workshop, first with the LBL experts to allow us a deep exploration of our model framework and structure.
We have outlined an approach that takes us into selected submarkets (e.g., residential single homes, commercial retail, offices, etc.) and evaluates changes in outcomes against a baseline set of information. Our baselines come from a detailed building energy matrix that has been collected for the six regions of EEB.
The model uses available resources for a bottom-up calculation to calculate design, technology and user choice factors with tools such as EnergyPlus, while using a top-down structure to evaluate policy and scenario-based discretionary factors.
This is truly a "hybrid" model approach. On the first day of the workshop, we received fantastic input from the LBL experts - some positive, some negative – which will vastly improve the quality and credibility of the model results. We also came up with some ideas that will make the model more workable and could lead to a possible WBCSD tool.
The second day of the workshop involved a number of "thought leaders" from the California academic, policy, design and engineering community. "Wow" was the word in terms of the thought leaders' contributions and inputs. The model results will directly benefit.
In the end, the modeling workstream walked away with pages of notes, countless and priceless contributions, and follow-on dialog that will go well beyond the two-day session.
We're off to Brazil now to hear from the 6th region of the project (read about that here soon). Then we take the long, hard road to put the modeling together with the efforts of our policy and scenario workstreams. Look for our results later this year, and don't be surprised if you're impressed – we have a lot of smart people helping us to achieve that!
Bill Sisson
Co-chair, EEB Project
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