[House Hearing, 111 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
PUSHING THE EFFICIENCY ENVELOPE:
R&D FOR HIGH-PERFORMANCE BUILDINGS,
INDUSTRIES, AND CONSUMERS
=======================================================================
HEARING
BEFORE THE
SUBCOMMITTEE ON ENERGY AND
ENVIRONMENT
COMMITTEE ON SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED ELEVENTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
__________
APRIL 28, 2009
__________
Serial No. 111-21
__________
Printed for the use of the Committee on Science and Technology
Available via the World Wide Web: http://www.science.house.gov
______
U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE
48-736PS WASHINGTON : 2009
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COMMITTEE ON SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
HON. BART GORDON, Tennessee, Chairman
JERRY F. COSTELLO, Illinois RALPH M. HALL, Texas
EDDIE BERNICE JOHNSON, Texas F. JAMES SENSENBRENNER JR.,
LYNN C. WOOLSEY, California Wisconsin
DAVID WU, Oregon LAMAR S. SMITH, Texas
BRIAN BAIRD, Washington DANA ROHRABACHER, California
BRAD MILLER, North Carolina ROSCOE G. BARTLETT, Maryland
DANIEL LIPINSKI, Illinois VERNON J. EHLERS, Michigan
GABRIELLE GIFFORDS, Arizona FRANK D. LUCAS, Oklahoma
DONNA F. EDWARDS, Maryland JUDY BIGGERT, Illinois
MARCIA L. FUDGE, Ohio W. TODD AKIN, Missouri
BEN R. LUJAN, New Mexico RANDY NEUGEBAUER, Texas
PAUL D. TONKO, New York BOB INGLIS, South Carolina
PARKER GRIFFITH, Alabama MICHAEL T. MCCAUL, Texas
STEVEN R. ROTHMAN, New Jersey MARIO DIAZ-BALART, Florida
JIM MATHESON, Utah BRIAN P. BILBRAY, California
LINCOLN DAVIS, Tennessee ADRIAN SMITH, Nebraska
BEN CHANDLER, Kentucky PAUL C. BROUN, Georgia
RUSS CARNAHAN, Missouri PETE OLSON, Texas
BARON P. HILL, Indiana
HARRY E. MITCHELL, Arizona
CHARLES A. WILSON, Ohio
KATHLEEN DAHLKEMPER, Pennsylvania
ALAN GRAYSON, Florida
SUZANNE M. KOSMAS, Florida
GARY C. PETERS, Michigan
VACANCY
------
Subcommittee on Energy and Environment
HON. BRIAN BAIRD, Washington, Chairman
JERRY F. COSTELLO, Illinois BOB INGLIS, South Carolina
EDDIE BERNICE JOHNSON, Texas ROSCOE G. BARTLETT, Maryland
LYNN C. WOOLSEY, California VERNON J. EHLERS, Michigan
DANIEL LIPINSKI, Illinois JUDY BIGGERT, Illinois
GABRIELLE GIFFORDS, Arizona W. TODD AKIN, Missouri
DONNA F. EDWARDS, Maryland RANDY NEUGEBAUER, Texas
BEN R. LUJAN, New Mexico MARIO DIAZ-BALART, Florida
PAUL D. TONKO, New York
JIM MATHESON, Utah
LINCOLN DAVIS, Tennessee
BEN CHANDLER, Kentucky
BART GORDON, Tennessee RALPH M. HALL, Texas
JEAN FRUCI Democratic Staff Director
CHRIS KING Democratic Professional Staff Member
MICHELLE DALLAFIOR Democratic Professional Staff Member
SHIMERE WILLIAMS Democratic Professional Staff Member
ELAINE PAULIONIS PHELEN Democratic Professional Staff Member
ADAM ROSENBERG Democratic Professional Staff Member
JETTA WONG Democratic Professional Staff Member
ELIZABETH CHAPEL Republican Professional Staff Member
TARA ROTHSCHILD Republican Professional Staff Member
STACEY STEEP Research Assistant
C O N T E N T S
April 28, 2009
Page
Witness List..................................................... 2
Hearing Charter.................................................. 3
Opening Statements
Statement by Representative Brian Baird, Chairman, Subcommittee
on Energy and Environment, Committee on Science and Technology,
U.S. House of Representatives.................................. 6
Written Statement............................................ 7
Statement by Representative Bob Inglis, Ranking Minority Member,
Subcommittee on Energy and Environment, Committee on Science
and Technology, U.S. House of Representatives.................. 7
Written Statement............................................ 8
Prepared Statement by Representative Jerry F. Costello, Member,
Subcommittee on Energy and Environment, Committee on Science
and Technology, U.S. House of Representatives.................. 8
Prepared Statement by Representative Eddie Bernice Johnson,
Member, Subcommittee on Energy and Environment, Committee on
Science and Technology, U.S. House of Representatives.......... 9
Witnesses:
Mr. Steven Chalk, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary, Office of
Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, U.S. Department of
Energy
Oral Statement............................................... 11
Written Statement............................................ 13
Biography.................................................... 20
Mr. William J. Coad, President, Coad Engineering Enterprises, and
Chairman, High-Performance Building Council, National Institute
of Building Sciences
Oral Statement............................................... 20
Written Statement............................................ 22
Biography.................................................... 23
Mr. Paul N. Cicio, President, Industrial Energy Consumers of
America
Oral Statement............................................... 26
Written Statement............................................ 27
Biography.................................................... 28
Dr. Karen Ehrhardt-Martinez, Research Associate, American Council
for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE)
Oral Statement............................................... 28
Written Statement............................................ 30
Biography.................................................... 63
Dr. J. Michael McQuade, Senior Vice President, Science and
Technology, United Technologies Corporation
Oral Statement............................................... 63
Written Statement............................................ 65
Biography.................................................... 73
Discussion
An Integrated Approach to Energy Efficiency.................... 73
Executing Best Practices in the Public......................... 76
Consumer Education and Behavior................................ 78
Retrofitting................................................... 81
Green Building Standards....................................... 82
Efficiency in the Federal Government........................... 83
Implementing Demonstration Projects............................ 84
Green Infrastructure Funding................................... 85
High-Performance Building Standards............................ 87
Life Cycle Energy Pricing...................................... 88
Means of Informing Consumers................................... 90
Encouraging Efficiency at the Various Levels of Government..... 91
Closing........................................................ 94
Appendix: Answers to Post-Hearing Questions
Mr. Steven Chalk, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary, Office of
Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, U.S. Department of
Energy......................................................... 96
Dr. Karen Ehrhardt-Martinez, Research Associate, American Council
for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE)........................ 100
Dr. J. Michael McQuade, Senior Vice President, Science and
Technology, United Technologies Corporation.................... 101
PUSHING THE EFFICIENCY ENVELOPE: R&D FOR HIGH-PERFORMANCE BUILDINGS,
INDUSTRIES, AND CONSUMERS
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TUESDAY, APRIL 28, 2009
House of Representatives,
Subcommittee on Energy and Environment,
Committee on Science and Technology,
Washington, DC.
The Subcommittee met, pursuant to call, at 10:05 a.m., in
Room 2318 of the Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Brian
Baird [Chairman of the Subcommittee] presiding.
hearing charter
SUBCOMMITTEE ON ENERGY AND ENVIRONMENT
COMMITTEE ON SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
U.S. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
Pushing the Efficiency Envelope:
R&D for High-Performance Buildings,
Industries, and Consumers
tuesday, april 28, 2009
10:00 a.m.-12:00 p.m.
2318 rayburn house office building
PURPOSE
On Tuesday, April 28 the Subcommittee on Energy and Environment
will hold a hearing to receive testimony on the role of the Department
of Energy's research and development programs in developing
technologies, codes, and standards to enable deployment of net-zero
energy, high-performance buildings and support energy efficiency in
domestic industries.
WITNESSES
Mr. Steven Chalk--Principal Deputy Assistant
Secretary, Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, U.S.
Department of Energy
Mr. William J. Coad--President, Coad Engineering
Enterprises; Chairman of the High-Performance Building Council
of the National Institute of Building Sciences
Mr. Paul Cicio--President, Industrial Energy
Consumers of America
Dr. Karen Ehrhardt-Martinez--Research Staff, Economic
and Social Analysis Program, American Council for an Energy-
Efficient Economy (ACEEE)
Dr. J. Michael McQuade--Senior Vice President,
Science and Technology, United Technologies Corporation
BACKGROUND
Addressing public concerns about the high costs of energy, the
looming threat of global climate change and the Nation's economic
health requires continual assessment of federal programs designed to
mitigate the impacts of various economic sectors, including heavy
industry and the built environment. The construction, operation, and
demolition of buildings are recognized as major contributing factors to
the increase in energy consumption, emission of greenhouse gases,
depletion of valuable natural resources, and degradation of ecological
services such as water supply. The domestic industrial sector, while
making considerable gains in energy and resource efficiency in recent
years, still comprises a significant portion of the country's
emissions, and is more vulnerable than ever to rising costs of energy
and raw materials. To reduce both emissions and waste, and improve the
Nation's overall energy efficiency new advancements in industrial and
building technologies must be pursued by both the public and private
sector.
Buildings consume more energy than any other sector of the U.S.
economy (40 percent), including transportation (28 percent) and
industry (32 percent). From 1980 to 2006, total building energy
consumption in the United States increased more than 46 percent, and is
expected to continue to grow at a rate of more than one percent per
year over the next two decades. In addition, almost three-quarters of
our nation's 81 million buildings were built before 1979. Because
buildings are long-lived assets, significant improvement of their
energy efficiency will require either retrofits or total replacement.
Deployment of high-performance buildings can reduce the environmental
impact of buildings while making them cheaper to operate.
Industry accounts for approximately one-third of all energy
consumed in the U.S. with much of that usage concentrated in heavy
industries such as chemical, glass, cement, and metals production,
mining, petroleum refining, food processing, and forest and paper
products. These industries also have relatively high carbon dioxide
(CO2) emissions. Despite their relatively high energy and
emissions intensity, many industrial firms face competitive pressures
that make it difficult to justify the technical and financial risks of
R&D projects. Therefore, federal programs are essential to promote
development and deployment of technologies and process improvements
that increase energy efficiency, raise productivity, reduce and reuse
wastes, and trim costs.
Building and Industrial Efficiency Technology Programs at DOE
The importance of energy efficiency and sustainability in the
building and industrial sector has been recognized in various federal
laws, executive orders, and other policy instruments in recent years.
Among these are the energy policy acts (EPAct) of 1992 and 2005 (P.L.
102-486 and P.L. 109-58), the Energy Independence and Security Act of
2007 (EISA, P.L. 110-140), and the American Recovery and Reinvestment
Act of 2009. Through these laws the Department of Energy (DOE) is
authorized to carry out a range of activities to increase energy
efficiency in a number of economic sectors.
Within the DOE Building Technologies Program both the High-
Performance Buildings partnerships and Zero-Net Energy Commercial
Building Initiative, work to improve the efficiency of buildings and
the equipment, components, and systems used to control temperature,
provide lighting, and plumbing.
A high-performance building as defined by EISA is a building that
integrates and optimizes, on a life cycle basis, all major high-
performance attributes, including energy conservation, environment,
safety, security, durability, accessibility, cost-benefit,
productivity, sustainability, functionality and operational
considerations. As part of this approach, DOE selected building
industry groups to form a High-Performance Green Building Consortium
that works to accelerate the commercialization of high-performance
building technologies. DOE and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory
(NREL) also created the High-Performance Buildings Database, which
seeks to improve building performance measuring methods by collecting
data on various factors that affect a building's performance, such as
energy, materials, and land use. It is a unique central repository of
detailed information and data on high-performance, green building
projects across the United States and abroad.
The Net-Zero Energy Commercial Building Initiative aims to realize
marketable net-zero energy commercial buildings by 2025. In general, a
net-zero energy building produces as much energy as it uses over the
course of a year. The program brings architects, engineers, builders,
contractors, owners, and occupants together to optimize building
performance, comfort, and savings through a whole-building approach to
design and construction. The program is divided into three interrelated
strategic areas designed to overcome technical and market barriers:
research and development, equipment standards and analysis, and
technology validation and market introduction. Key research areas
include: commercial lighting solutions; indoor environmental quality;
building controls and diagnostics; and space conditioning.
The Department also participates in a variety of activities to aid
in standards and codes development for new building technologies,
appliances, and compliance and design tools. For example the Building
Technologies Program's Building Energy Codes initiative works with the
National Institute of Standards and Technology, State and local
governments, national codes organizations, and industries to help
develop improved national model energy codes. Unlike conventional
building codes which dictate only minimum requirements for
construction, ``model'' building codes are designed to push the
technological envelope of what can be achieved in building design,
construction and operation. Ultimately, there may need to be a
comprehensive and unified framework of standards which accounts for the
full range of metrics and benchmarks to maximize building performance.
DOE also updates and improves appliances and equipment standards by
testing products and technologies, and ultimately conducting rule-
making through a public process.
The DOE Industrial Technologies Program (ITP) seeks to reduce
manufacturing energy intensity and carbon emissions through coordinated
research and development with industry, deployment of innovative energy
efficient technologies, by providing energy assessments of industrial
facilities, and through dissemination of industry best practices. The
ITP invests in high-risk, high-value cost-shared R&D projects to reduce
industrial energy use and process waste streams, while stimulating
productivity and growth. Projects may be specific to a certain industry
(ex: aluminum smelting), or applicable across a range of industrial
applications (ex: fuel and feedstock flexibility). In addition, the ITP
serves as an informational resource by making available information on
other financial assistance and research opportunities, background on
both existing and emerging technologies, as well as results of case
studies from past ITP projects. The ITP also sponsors 26 University-
Based Industrial Assessment Centers (IACs) that provide no-cost energy
assessments primarily to small- and medium-sized manufacturers. By
operating through university engineering programs the IACs serve as a
training ground for the next-generation of energy and industrial
engineers.
Pushing the Energy Efficiency Envelope
While these programs continue to demonstrate success in developing
technologies and practices for high-performance buildings and
sustainable industries, advancing the state of technology far beyond
what is currently available will require the programs to incorporate
entirely new technologies and approaches into their R&D agendas.
For instance, buildings of the future will be designed to operate
as a singular system of inter-operable components--a concept that is
not possible today. A typical building is comprised of a complex array
of components (wood, metals, glass, concrete, coatings, flooring, sheet
rock, insulation, etc.) and subsystems (lighting, heating, ventilation
and air conditioning, appliances, landscape maintenance, IT equipment,
electrical grid connection, etc.) all of which are developed
individually by independent firms that do not often design and test
their performance in conjunction with other components and systems.
Even after building completion, systems are rarely optimized together
to improve overall energy efficiency and environmental performance. The
inefficiencies attributable to this fragmentation of the building
components and systems, and the lack of monitoring and verification of
a building performance, point to a critical need for a more integrated
approach to building design, operation, and technology development. An
approach that couples buildings sciences, architecture, and information
technologies could lead to entirely new ``self-tuning'' buildings with
subsystems that are able to continuously communicate with each other
and respond to a range of factors. Wide-scale deployment of these types
of net-zero energy high-performance buildings will likely require
federal programs to play a larger coordinating role in the development
of the common technologies, codes, and standards.
Pushing the efficiency envelope will also require engaging the
social sciences in providing a much greater understanding of how people
and organizations make energy-related decisions. Individual and
collective behavior plays a critical role in efficiency, not only
through direct demand for energy, but also by creating or failing to
create market demand for more energy efficient technologies. Consumers
make these decisions every day when weighing options such as what
vehicle or appliance to purchase, whether to drive or take public
transportation, what light bulbs to install, or whether to shut down
their computers at night. In aggregate these decisions have an impact
on the supply and demand curves that drive both energy prices and,
ultimately, energy technology development.
In 2005, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) produced a report
on ``Decision Making for the Environment: Social and Behavioral Science
Research Priorities.'' In the chapter on Environmentally Significant
Individual Behavior, the NAS panel states: ``A basic understanding of
how information, incentives, and various kinds of constraints and
opportunities, in combination with individuals' values, beliefs, and
social contexts, shape consumer choice in complex real-world contexts
would provide an essential knowledge base for understanding,
anticipating, and developing policies for affecting environmentally
significant consumer behavior.'' \1\ Integrating social science
research into the larger energy R&D field will provide greater insight
into the best ways to convey information to consumers and help them
make decisions regarding energy efficiency and conservation. For
instance, understanding consumer behavior will help in development of a
whole building approach to design and operation of building systems,
where components are integrated to reduce energy consumption through
displaying information to occupants.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\1\ National Research Council. 2005. Decision Making for the
Environment: Social and Behavioral Science Research Priorities.
Washington, DC. P. 78.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Chairman Baird. This hearing will now come to order.
I want to welcome Members of the Subcommittee and our
distinguished panelists to today's hearing on advancing the
state of science and technology for energy efficiency in
buildings and industrial sectors.
Energy efficiency and conservation will have the greatest
near-term impact of any approach to our energy security and
global overheating problems. I don't refer to it as warming or
climate change. It is lethal overheating and ocean
acidification, and if we start calling it by what it is, we
will be more effective at combating it, I believe. Today's
buildings consume 40 percent of our country's energy, more than
any other sector of the U.S. economy. Together the building and
industrial sectors are responsible for almost three-quarters of
U.S. energy consumption. Given that, it makes sense that we
would start there to try to reduce that consumption, and our
most rapid way of stimulating the economy, reducing spending,
reducing ocean acidification and global warming gases is
through conservation, in my judgment.
As many of you know, this committee oversees a broad range
of activities designed to push the energy technology envelope,
including R&D programs through the Department of Energy,
programs that support the development of codes and standards
that are vital to ensuring the performance and inter-
operability of energy technologies.
The DOE Building Technologies Program, and within this, the
activities of the High-Performance Buildings and Net-Zero
Energy Commercial Buildings initiative, support advanced
technology development for buildings and their associated
equipment, material and systems. The Industrial Technologies
Program works to reduce energy intensity and carbon emissions
of industry through cost-shared R&D, energy auditing and
dissemination of best practices.
While these programs have proven successful over the years,
we still have a very long way to go in maximizing the Nation's
efficiency. Pushing the efficiency envelope will require us to
combine the expertise of multiple disciplines or look in
entirely new directions for scientific and technological
insight.
For example, coupling building sciences, architecture and
information technologies can lead to entirely new self-tuning
buildings with subsystems that continuously communicate with
each other and respond to a range of environmental factors. We
should also enlist the expertise found in the social sciences
to provide greater understanding of how people and
organizations make energy-related decisions. Insight into how
consumers receive and react to information will be critical for
progress in areas such as the development of a whole-building
approach to design and operation of building systems.
The Committee has a long and distinguished history in this
area. As the Congress moves forward with climate and energy
legislation, we will continue our efforts to assess the Federal
Government's role in building and industrial R&D and standards
development and to lay the groundwork for new activities if
needed.
With that, I look forward to working with you all and
exploring ways in which federal programs can be improved to
support cleaner, more efficient and sustainable buildings and
industry in the United States.
I now recognize my distinguished colleague and friend from
South Carolina, our Ranking Member, Mr. Inglis, for his opening
statement.
[The prepared statement of Chairman Baird follows:]
Prepared Statement of Chairman Brian Baird
I want to welcome Members of the Subcommittee and our distinguished
panelists to today's hearing on advancing the state of science and
technology for energy efficiency in the buildings and industrial
sectors.
Energy efficiency and conservation will have the greatest near-term
impact of any approach to our energy security and global over heating
problems. Today's buildings consume 40 percent of our country's
energy--more than any other sector of the U.S. economy. And together,
the building and industrial sectors are responsible for almost three
quarters of U.S. energy consumption.
As many of you know this committee oversees a broad range of
activities designed to push the energy technology envelope, including
R&D programs of the Department of Energy, and programs to support the
development of codes and standards that are vital to ensuring the
performance and inter-operability of energy technologies.
The DOE Building Technologies Program and, within this, the
activities of the High-Performance Buildings and Net-Zero Energy
Commercial Buildings initiatives, support advanced technology
development for buildings, and their associated equipment, materials,
and systems.
The Industrial Technologies Program (ITP) works to reduce energy
intensity and carbon emissions of industry through cost-shared R&D,
energy auditing, and dissemination of best practices.
While these programs have proven successful over the years, we
still have a very long way to go in maximizing the Nation's efficiency.
Pushing the efficiency envelope will require us to combine the
expertise of multiple disciplines, or look in entirely new directions
for scientific and technological insight.
For instance, coupling buildings sciences, architecture, and
information technologies together can lead to entirely new ``self-
tuning'' buildings with subsystems that continuously communicate with
each other and respond to a range of environmental factors.
We should also enlist the expertise found in the social sciences to
provide greater understanding of how people and organizations make
energy-related decisions. Insight into how consumers receive and react
to information will be critical for progress in areas such as the
development of a whole-building approach to design and operation of
building systems.
This committee has a long and distinguished history in this area.
As the Congress moves forward with climate and energy legislation we
will continue our efforts to assess the Federal Government's role in
building and industrial R&D and standards development, and lay the
groundwork for new activities if needed.
With that, I look forward to working with you all in exploring ways
in which federal programs can be improved to support cleaner, more
efficient, and sustainable buildings and industries in the U.S.
I now yield to my distinguished colleague from South Carolina, our
Ranking Member, Mr. Inglis, for his opening statement.
Mr. Inglis. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you for
holding this hearing. When it comes to words, I am convinced
that less is more and people who write well can express
themselves in a few words. If you give me 30 minutes to speak,
I don't need to do any preparation, but limit me to two minutes
and I have got to really prepare.
You know, when we are blessed with much, we can get by with
a lot of inefficiencies. Electricity is cheap so we leave the
lights on. Material is cheap so we build big when we might
actually get more utility out of small. Gas is cheap so we
bought guzzlers instead of sippers. And so the challenge for us
is to figure out how to get more utility out of buildings and
get building codes that actually will improve efficiencies and
deliver for us more by having less, less use and less waste.
My wife and I have five kids and I designed the house with
the help of an architect, the house that we live in, and quite
often I am thinking if I could just have made it smaller
because you know your possessions come to possess you and so
all those porches that need to be washed at least twice a year,
man, that was a bad idea. All that space that needs to be
heated, gee, couldn't we have thought of a better way to get
that job done. So I am excited about hearing about some of the
technology that may drive better building codes and better
opportunities for us to get more out of less, and thank you,
Mr. Chairman, for holding the hearing.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Inglis follows:]
Prepared Statement of Representative Bob Inglis
Thank you for holding this hearing, Mr. Chairman.
When it comes to words, I'm convinced that less is more. People who
write well can express themselves with few words. Give me thirty
minutes to speak and I'll need no preparation. Limit me to two minutes
and I'll have to plan carefully what to say.
When we're blessed with much, we can get by with a lot of
inefficiencies. Electricity is cheap, so we leave the lights on.
Material is cheap, so we build big, when we might get more utility out
of small. Gas is cheap, so we've bought guzzlers instead of sippers.
But climate science, oil price hikes, and economic hardships remind
us that we need more efficient practices. Today, we're here to
specifically talk about how to encourage energy efficiencies in one of
our most energy intensive sectors--buildings. While I support the
government taking proactive measures to improve building codes and
promote R&D programs that result in the deployment of net-zero energy,
high-performance buildings, I think the answer lies in economics.
Attaching a price to carbon would be a built-in incentive for
construction of more efficient spaces. Industries, seeking to save on
costs and appeal to conscious consumers, will revamp wasteful
practices. Tenants will seek space that promises a reduction in energy
costs due to efficient lighting, heating and cooling appliances, and
utilities. We'll also witness improvements outside the walls of these
buildings. Demand will rise for efficient products, and jobs will be
created in meeting that demand. Reduced fuel consumption will translate
to increased national security, and efficient energy production will
mean cleaner air.
This is the potential of a revenue-neutral carbon tax. Yes, there's
a place to talk about developing positive codes and standards, but the
real incentive lies in the market, not in regulation. Thank you again,
Mr. Chairman, and I look forward to hearing from our witnesses today.
Chairman Baird. I thank Mr. Inglis. If other Members wish
to submit additional opening statements, your statements will
be added to the record at this point.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Costello follows:]
Prepared Statement of Representative Jerry F. Costello
Good Morning. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for holding today's hearing
on the role of the Department of Energy in research and development
(R&D) for high-performance buildings, industries, and consumers.
As Congress considers changes to our energy policy, we must
consider ways to cut back on our emissions and improve our energy
efficiency. The two sectors we are discussing today--building and heavy
industry--are the largest consumers of energy in the country and
significantly contribute to our greenhouse gas emissions. Discovering
and developing ways to improve the energy efficiency of these two
sectors will make major strides towards reducing our emissions while
creating thousands of new, high-paying jobs around the country. I am
seeing the results of investment in energy efficiency in my district in
Southern Illinois. Two counties and the City of Belleville received
over $4.5 million in funding from the American Recovery and
Reinvestment Act to invest in energy efficiency projects. This money is
putting people back to work while improving the efficiency of our
buildings.
Investing in long-term, high cost R&D projects is not feasible for
many of our heavy industries or building and contracting companies,
particularly in this difficult economic climate. For this reason, I
applaud the efforts of the Department of Energy to promote and
accelerate new technology, methods, and tools to improve building and
industrial energy efficiency. I am interested to hear more from Mr.
Chalk about how Congress and this subcommittee in particular can
continue to support DOE in these efforts.
I would also like to hear from our witnesses how these R&D projects
can become commercially viable and widely dispersed across our domestic
manufacturers and builders. In particular, I want to know what steps
DOE and Congress can take to ensure this research results in sector-
wide changes in building and heavy industry practices across the
country.
Making these changes marketable to the American consumer will also
be an issue to consider moving forward. I would like to hear from our
witnesses regarding the incentives or other programs they believe might
be necessary to encourage contractors, builders, and consumers to
choose high-performance buildings or products made by high-performance
manufacturers.
I welcome our panel of witnesses, and I look forward to their
testimony.
[The prepared statement of Ms. Johnson follows:]
Prepared Statement of Representative Eddie Bernice Johnson
Good morning, Mr. Chairman.
High-performance buildings are those that are designed with
environmental conservation in mind.
Solar paneled roofs; natural light; green roofs; sustainable
construction materials: all are examples of architectural elements that
do good, rather than harm, to the environment.
In Dallas, the Trinity River Audubon Center is a shining example of
such a structure. Its green features include a vegetated roof,
rainwater collection system, energy efficient systems, and recycled
materials.
Audubon serves as the gateway to the 6,000 acre Great Trinity
Forest.
As the largest urban hardwood forest in the United States, the
Greater Trinity Forest supports a diverse community of plant and animal
species, and contains a unique mixture of bottomland hardwoods,
wetlands and grasslands.
Trinity River Audubon Center is the first building constructed by
the City of Dallas Park and Recreation Department that is certified by
Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design Green Building Rating
SystemTM.
The Center was actually built upon a part of land that is a
remediated Brownfield site: the Deepwood Landfill.
The Deepwood Landfill comprised 1.5 million tons of construction
debris illegally dumped over a 15-year period.
With the goal of returning this land to nature for the use of
future generations and as a site of the Trinity River Audubon Center,
the devised plan consolidated the waste into capped rolling hills
replanted with tall prairie grass and hardwood trees once dominant on
the Texas Blackland Prairie.
The permeable paving around the area and preservation of the
Trinity River marsh helps with stormwater control. The Center even
harvests rainfall to be used as irrigation. It has installed low-flow
toilets to conserve water.
High-efficiency heating, ventilation, air conditioning and
electrical systems help minimize the Center's carbon footprint.
The building's use of regional construction materials minimizes
harmful emissions generated from transporting materials from the place
of extraction to the manufacturing plant to the consumer.
The Trinity River Audubon Center is comprised of many local
building materials, as well as cypress siding certified by the Forest
Stewardship Council; recycled-content materials; rapidly renewable
resources such as bamboo, wool, cotton, straw, wheat and cork; and low-
volatile-emitting materials.
For the concrete, all the gravel and sand was extracted from local
quarries.
Fly ash, a by-product from coal plants that would normally go into
a landfill, was used as a partial substitute for the cement content.
Mr. Chairman, I am delighted to point out the Trinity River Audubon
Center as a model of the architectural designs that this committee
seeks to encourage.
With some thought and effort, ``green'' buildings can be built and
are a beautiful addition to our communities.
I believe that it is appropriate for the Department of Energy to
support research into green building technologies.
Current programs continue to demonstrate success in developing
technologies and practices for high-performance buildings and
sustainable industries.
I support advancing the state of technology beyond what is
currently available by funding to incorporate entirely new technologies
and approaches into their research agendas.
Mr. Chairman, thank you for your focus on this important subject. I
want to welcome today's panel of witnesses, and I yield back the
balance of my time.
Chairman Baird. At this point I would like to introduce our
witnesses. I unfortunately need to express some disappointment
and I am reluctant to do so but it is necessary. The Committee
has a practice of asking that testimony be provided in advance
of hearings so that we can study it and know what is happening.
It is a reasonable request, especially given that we anticipate
that our witnesses sort of by definition will have expertise in
the field. When I am hiring staff, I sit them down with a
challenge, an issue they have to deal with, and they have two
hours to write a report to me, two hours. They are by and large
brave young people and with the wizard of the Internet they are
able to do some remarkable things. Hence, when we give several
weeks' notice of testimony requests and it doesn't come and
when it is coming from an agency of the Administration, we are
particularly disappointed. That is the case today. The energy
efficiency testimony we were asking for from the Department of
Energy arrived about 20 minutes ago. It is disappointing that
the Department of Energy either does not have its act together
well enough to provide this in, I would imagine it should be
virtually instantaneous manner, but certainly several weeks
notice is more than adequate and it is either a sign of
inefficiency or disrespect, neither of which are acceptable to
this committee.
With that, I introduce Mr. Steven Chalk, Principal Deputy
Assistant Secretary for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy
at the U.S. Department of Energy. Mr. Paul Cicio is the
President of the Industrial Energy Consumers of America. By the
way, I should underscore my following comments. All the other
panelists, we want to thank you for getting your information to
us in a timely, informative manner so the initial comments were
directed unfortunately at the Department of Energy. The rest of
the panelists were most informative and prompt in their
response and we are grateful for that including Mr. Coad as
well. I didn't mean to jump over you. Karen Ehrhardt-Martinez,
did I say that right? Ehrhardt?
Dr. Ehrhardt-Martinez. Ehrhardt-Martinez.
Chairman Baird. I should have known Ehrhardt.
Dr. Ehrhardt-Martinez. Just like Amelia.
Chairman Baird. I figured that, the pioneering aviator. Dr.
Karen Ehrhardt-Martinez is a Research Associate at the Economic
and Social Analysis Program at the American Council for Energy-
Efficient Economy. Dr. Michael McQuade is Senior Vice President
of Science and Technology at United Technologies Corporation.
At this point I would like to recognize my friend, the
gentleman from Missouri, Representative Russ Carnahan, to
introduce our final witness.
Mr. Carnahan. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. It is great to sit
in on this subcommittee today. I have got the honor to present
a native of St. Louis, Dr. William Coad. He is President of
Coad Engineering Enterprises. He is a consulting principal and
Past Chairman and CEO of the McClure Corporation. For 17 years
he has been an Affiliate Professor at Washington University in
St. Louis teaching graduate courses in mechanical engineering.
He is also currently a member of the National Institute of
Building Sciences. He has served as Chairman of the High-
Performance Buildings Task Force, which the initial report led
to the formulation of the High-Performance Building Council
under his leadership. I have been honored to chair the
bipartisan High-Performance Buildings Caucus within the
Congress and they have been very instrumental working with our
caucus. So I appreciate especially him being here, his
expertise nationally, but I am pleased with his roots from St.
Louis.
Chairman Baird. I thank Mr. Carnahan, and thank you for
your leadership on the caucus. Obviously you have recognized
this well early on and your input has been very, very valuable.
I thank the gentleman. At this point we will hear from the
witnesses. I have been corrected. Actually, Mr. Chalk,
apparently we had your testimony at 8:30 last night, still
inadequate and certainly not very helpful to me as I had
already retired for the evening to read the other stacks of
material I get. But we will start with Mr. Chalk and then
proceed. Each witness will have five minutes and then we will
proceed with questioning for the panel. We have also been
joined by Dr. Ehlers, the gentleman from Michigan. Thank you,
Dr. Ehlers.
With that, Mr. Chalk, please enlighten us with your
testimony and thank you again for being here.
STATEMENT OF MR. STEVEN CHALK, PRINCIPAL DEPUTY ASSISTANT
SECRETARY, OFFICE OF ENERGY EFFICIENCY AND RENEWABLE ENERGY,
U.S. DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY
Mr. Chalk. Thank you, Chairman Baird, and no good excuses
for the late testimony. We will make sure that doesn't happen
again.
Chairman Baird, Ranking Member Inglis and other Members of
the Subcommittee, thank you for the opportunity to discuss the
Department of Energy's Building Technologies Program and the
enormous potential for energy savings in the building sector. I
commend you for holding this hearing. I look forward to working
with you to continually innovate and invest in energy
efficiency.
Energy security and climate change, or global overheating,
if you will, are two of the most important challenges of our
time and require urgent attention. It is clear that there is no
single solution to the problem. The challenge is so massive and
urgent that it requires multiple simultaneous responses and
solutions. In 2008, our nation's 114 million households and
more than 74 billion square feet of commercial floor space
accounted for nearly 40 percent of our primary energy
consumption, 40 percent of our greenhouse gases, but it is also
about 70 percent of our electricity consumption. For every gain
in building energy efficiency, there is a corresponding
reduction in power plant generation and greenhouse gases and
there is a greater conservation of natural resources,
particularly water, which is consumed in large quantities in
power plants today.
Today, with existing technologies and knowledge, we can
cost-effectively increase U.S. residential building efficiency
by 30 percent. In temperate parts of the country, it is
possible to increase efficiency by 40 percent with little
additional first costs, and really no additional costs at all
when savings for utility bills are factored in. Reaching these
efficiency levels, particularly through means such as
stimulating technology adoption via building codes, is one
marker on the path to reaching DOE's ultimate goal, which is
the widespread construction of affordable net-zero-energy
buildings or buildings that produce more energy than they
consume over the course of a year. The Department's building
technologies portfolio is aligned to develop the techniques and
tools necessary to make affordable residential and commercial
buildings net-zero energy by 2020 and 2025, respectively.
I would like to use my time today to highlight some of the
ongoing initiatives that help us reach those net-zero-energy
goals. Our Commercial Buildings Initiative is the umbrella
initiative that will guide and coordinate public and private
partnerships to advance market adoption of net-zero-energy
commercial buildings. In support of this initiative, we are
focusing on building system integration, indoor environmental
quality, control strategies, diagnostics and space
conditioning.
In the area of energy codes and standards, the Department
is working very closely with the American Society of
Refrigeration and Air Conditioning Engineers, or ASHRAE, on its
standard commercial building code. In 2007, DOE challenged
ASHRAE to upgrade the 2004 standard 90.1 by 30 percent, to make
it 30 percent more stringent by 2010. ASHRAE responded
positively and is on track to achieve that 30 percent greater
efficiency.
In addition, we work with the International Code Council on
the residential standards and we have a similar effort with the
ICC, or the International Code Council, to achieve 30 percent
better efficiency than the 2006 residential code and we want to
achieve that by 2012, and we are already halfway there. The
2009 code that was just released is 15 percent better than the
2006 version.
The Department's Appliance and Commercial Equipment
Standard Program develops test procedures and the minimum
energy conservation standards for residential appliances and
commercial equipment. These standards save consumers money and
energy, spur innovation and reduce greenhouse gas emissions and
save water resources. President Obama shows interest and
expectations for this program. Just 17 days after he took
office, he visited DOE, issued a memorandum requesting that the
Department take all necessary steps to expeditiously finalize
the appliance standards rule-making in process. The Department
is committed to fulfilling the President's request.
As I wrap up, I want to emphasize the American Recovery and
Reinvestment Act places significant focus on buildings and
building energy codes. The Act provides $3.2 billion for energy
efficiency and conservation block grants and for such
activities as endorsing building energy codes, conducting
audits, establishing financial incentives and installing energy
efficiency upgrades. The Department is gearing up now to
provide technical assistance to States to implement these new
codes and to enforce and evaluate compliance. The Department is
committed to improving energy efficiency through innovative
R&D, public outreach and collaborative partnerships. We look
forward to working with Congress to continue to realize short-
term energy savings and cost savings as well as a long-term
goal of achieving affordable net-zero-energy residential and
commercial buildings.
Thank you for the opportunity to appear before you this
morning, and I will be happy to answer any questions. Thank
you.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Chalk follows:]
Prepared Statement of Steven Chalk
Chairman Baird, Ranking Member Inglis, Members of the Subcommittee,
thank you for the opportunity to appear before you today to discuss the
U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Building Technologies Program
activities and the enormous potential for energy savings in the
buildings sector. I have included, as an appendix to this testimony, an
update on the Department's progress in implementing sections of the
Energy Policy Act of 2005 (EPACT 05) and the Energy Independence and
Security Act of 2007 (EISA), as requested by the Subcommittee.\1\
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\1\ EPACT 05 was codified into law as Pub. L. No. 109-58; EISA as
Pub. L. No. 110-140.
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In 2008, the Nation's 114 million households and more than 74
billion square feet of commercial floor space accounted for nearly 40
percent of U.S. primary energy consumption, as well as:
73 percent of electricity and 34 percent of natural
gas consumption,
Energy bills totaling $418 billion, and
39 percent of Carbon Dioxide, 18 percent of Nitrogen
Oxide, and 55 percent of Sulfur Dioxide emissions.
Additionally, construction and renovation accounted for nine
percent of GDP, and eight million people were employed in the
sector.\2\
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\2\ DOE, 2008 Building Energy Data Book.
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The Department is committed to improving energy efficiency in
buildings from advances in building technologies and systems, to energy
codes for new construction, to weatherization retrofits and promotion
of efficient appliances. The Administration continues to renew and
build upon these efforts. I would like to give a broad overview of the
Building Technologies Program and highlight some of its ongoing
activities.
DOE's Building Technologies Program
The Building Technologies Program develops technologies,
techniques, and tools, as well as minimum performance standards, for
making residential and commercial buildings more energy efficient,
productive, and affordable. The program's current goal is to create
technologies and design approaches that enable net-zero energy
buildings\3\ at low incremental cost by 2020 for residential buildings
and 2025 for commercial buildings. The program expects that efficiency
technologies and designs will have application to buildings constructed
before 2025, resulting in incremental reductions in energy use
throughout the sector.\4\
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\3\ A net-zero energy building is a residential or commercial
building with greatly reduced needs for energy through efficiency gains
(60 to 70 percent less than conventional practice), with the balance of
energy needs supplied by renewable technologies.
\4\ DOE, 2008 Building Technologies Multi-Year Program Plan, http:/
/www.eere.energy.gov/buildings/publications/pdfs/corporate/
myp08complete.pdf
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
The research and development (R&D) activities of DOE's Building
Technologies Program are fully aligned toward enabling the widespread
construction of net-zero energy residential and commercial buildings by
2020 and 2025, respectively. The Commercial Buildings Integration
subprogram conducts systems integration R&D, works with national energy
alliances on best practices, engages national accounts with research
technical assistance to achieve deep energy retrofits and design of
high-performance new building prototypes, and provides targeted mass
procurement and technology solutions to the industry.
The Residential Integration subprogram works through the Building
America public-private partnership to develop high-performance
residential sub-systems and whole house energy improvements, and
testing them on a community scale. In addition, the Residential
Integration subprogram is implementing the Builders Challenge to deploy
the results of the R&D activity, and is implementing DOE's portion of
the Home Performance with Energy Star program to spur deep retrofits in
homes throughout the Nation.
Equipment and component research is designed to fill identified
gaps in technical performance and/or cost reduction needed to fully
achieve the net zero energy cost and performance goals of the
Commercial and Residential subprograms. Component and equipment
research is conducted on Solid State Lighting; Heating, Ventilation,
Air Conditioning, Refrigeration and Water Heating; Solar Heating and
Cooling; Thermal Envelope and Windows; and Design Tools.
The Appliances and Commercial Equipment Standards Program develops
test procedures and energy conservation standards for residential
appliances and commercial and industrial equipment. The Program
develops regulations that manufacturers must adhere to in making energy
efficiency claims as well as in manufacturing products for sale in the
United States. These regulations apply to products manufactured in the
United States as well as those imported into the United States.
The Department's Building Technologies Program and its partners
strive to integrate energy efficient technologies into the marketplace
through technology validation and market introduction activities such
as Builders Challenge, Building Energy Codes, EnergySmart Hospitals,
EnergySmart Schools, ENERGY STAR, Solar Decathlon, and the Utility
Solar Water Heating Initiative (USH2O).\5\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\5\ More information is available on each of these programs at the
following links: Builders Challenge: http://www1.eere.energy.gov/
buildings/builderschallenge.html; Building Energy Codes: http://
www1.eere.energy.gov/buildings/energycodes.html; EnergySmart Hospitals:
http://www1.eere.energy.gov/buildings/energysmarthospitals/;
EnergySmart Schools: http://www1. eere.energy.gov/buildings/
energysmartschools.html; ENERGY STAR: http://www1.eere. energy.gov/
buildings/energystar.html; Solar Decathlon: http://
www1.eere.energy.gov/buildings/solar-decathlon.html; Utility
Solar Water Heating Initiative (USH2O): http://
www1.eere.energy.gov/buildings/ush2o/
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
I would like to underscore certain successes within Building
Technologies Program, from net-zero energy commercial buildings to
efficient appliances for consumers that have contributed to
technological advancements and significant energy savings.
Commercial Buildings Initiative
Launched in August 2008, the Net-Zero Energy Commercial Building
Initiative (CBI) is the umbrella initiative that will guide and
coordinate public and private partnerships to advance the development
and market adoption of net-zero energy commercial buildings (NZEBs).
CBI works with researchers at DOE National Laboratories, as well as
with public and private partners, to achieve the goal of marketable
NZEBs by 2025.
In support of the CBI, DOE's key commercial buildings research
includes whole building system integration, indoor environmental
quality, control strategies and diagnostics, space conditioning, and
process and miscellaneous equipment. Another major area is the
development of technology solutions for achieving 30-50 percent savings
at the building system level (lighting, heating, and cooling). The
first technology solution, Commercial Lighting Solutions web tool
design aid, launches in May 2009. We expect that designs for retail
building that use this tool could save 30-40 percent on energy use
compared with ASHRAE/IESNA Standard 90.1-2004.
Working with industry representatives and partners is critical to
achieving the goal of marketable net-zero energy commercial buildings
by 2025. We are engaged with building industry leaders through energy
alliances and research partnerships to move us toward that goal. The
key CBI alliances and partnerships include:
Commercial Building Energy Alliances--Informal
associations of commercial building owners and operators who
work to significantly reduce energy consumption and carbon
emissions. Currently, alliances exist for retail, commercial
real estate, and hospitals.
Commercial Building National Accounts (NAs)--
Companies and organizations partnering with DOE to conduct
cost-shared research, development, and deployment. NAs will
construct buildings that achieve savings of 50 percent or
retrofit buildings that achieve 30 percent savings above
ASHRAE/IESNA Standard 90.1-2004, and deploy this knowledge
through their portfolios. In FY 2008, 23 National Account
partners agreed to work with DOE. Another 100 National Accounts
are planned in FY 2009.
High-Performance Green Building Consortium--DOE-
selected building industry groups that work with DOE to
accelerate the commercialization of high-performance building
technologies by disseminating information on new technologies
within the commercial building community. A high-performance
commercial building offers improved energy, economic, and
environmental performance compared to standard practice. See
the appendix for progress on related sections of EISA.
Building Energy Codes and Standards
The Department works closely with the American Society of
Refrigeration and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) on its standard
90.1 and with the International Code Council (ICC) on its International
Energy Conservation Code (IECC) in response to Title III of the Energy
Conservation and Production Act, as amended (42 U.S.C. 6831 et seq.).
In 2007, DOE challenged ASHRAE to upgrade standard 90.1 to be 30
percent more stringent than its 2004 edition by 2010 and has been
actively engaged in the ASHRAE standards process by providing technical
assistance to support the upgrade of standard 90.1. ASHRAE reports that
it is on track to achieve the 30 percent goal.
The Department has also joined many stakeholders in the
International Energy Conservation Code process to upgrade the 2006
edition of the IECC by 30 percent by 2012. Significant progress has
been made in the 2009 edition, upgrading it by about 15 percent. The
Department is an active participant in the codes development process by
providing engineering, economic and energy analyses of improvements to
the code as well as specific code proposals.
Appliance Standards
In the 1970s, there was a debate over whether to set energy
conservation standards for consumer products, including refrigerators.
Many were concerned that standards would be too expensive to meet and
that they would lead to higher prices for consumers. The Appliance
Standards Program was established with the passage of the Energy Policy
and Conservation Act of 1975 (EPCA), which designated test procedures,
conservation targets, and labeling requirements for certain major
household appliances. The Act has been amended several times, changing
the conservation targets to mandatory standards and adding many
additional products to eventually include a broad range of residential
and commercial products. As amended, the appliance standards
requirements are among the broadest and most stringent of any country
in the world. Once the standards passed, manufacturers put their
engineers to work developing new products to meet the standards.
Manufacturers were successful and developed new, energy efficient
products that met the requirements.
For example, today, refrigerators cost less than they did before
DOE's ENERGY STAR, research, and energy conservation standards
programs. Yet, today's refrigerators are larger, have more features and
use less than one-third as much energy as those earlier designs. DOE
estimates DOE's programs have contributed to a decrease in refrigerator
energy consumption on the order of 0.25 quads compared 1975, even
though the number of refrigerators grew by 35 percent. This energy
savings is equivalent to the amount produced by 58 coal power
plants.\6\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\6\ Source: 1975 to 2005 energy use--DOE refrigerator standards
rule-making data developed by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory;
2015 projection--EIA's Annual Energy Outlook 2005; number of
households--Buildings Energy Data Book Table 2.1.1.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
President Obama showed his interest and expectations for the
Appliance Standards Program just 17 days after his inauguration. The
President visited DOE and set out his expectations for the Appliance
Standards Program in a memorandum to Secretary Chu. The memorandum
requests that the Department take all necessary steps to finalize
legally required energy conservation standards rule-makings as
expeditiously as possible and consistent with all applicable judicial
and statutory deadlines. The Department is committed to fulfilling the
President's request, and the Secretary has reinforced the importance of
this program through expressing his support in ensuing public
statements.
Builders Challenge and Home Performance with ENERGY STAR
The goal of Builders Challenge is to build 220,000 new high-
performance homes by 2012. These homes exceed the energy efficiency of
ENERGY STAR Homes by approximately 20 percent. To date, more than 1,000
homes have been qualified as meeting the Builders Challenge and 200
builders have agreed to build to meet the Builders Challenge in the
future.
Home Performance with ENERGY STAR (HPwES) focuses on significantly
increasing energy efficiency in existing homes. HPwES promotes
improvements through home performance contracting, which includes
comprehensive whole-house assessments. HPwES is implemented by
utilities, State energy offices, and not-for-profits that recruit and
train home improvement contractors. Qualified contractors conduct a
comprehensive assessment using diagnostic equipment. Based on this
assessment, contractors offer a prioritized list of solutions; they
then complete the needed renovations or work closely with other
participating contractors. Common improvements suggested are sealing
air leaks and ductwork, adding insulation, improving the heating-
cooling system, and upgrading lighting. To date, more than 50,000
assessments and 15,000 installations have been completed since 2002.
Buildings Efficiency and Economic Recovery
The Department's Building Technologies Program is planning to
address research focused on the systems design, integration and control
of buildings for both new and existing buildings with Recovery Act
funding. This project will move beyond component-only driven research
and address the interactions among the many different aspects of
buildings, approaching it as a whole, in order to progress development
of integrated, high-performance buildings. Buildings need to be
designed, built, operated, and maintained as an integrated system in
order to achieve the greatest potential of energy efficient and
eventually net zero-energy buildings. High-performance buildings will
apply technology to improve the internal built environment through
managing energy use, improving comfort, safety and environmental
factors through integrating all the various systems of the building.
The Recovery Act places significant focus on buildings and building
energy codes.\7\ The Act provides $3.2 billion for Energy Efficiency
and Conservation Block Grants for such activities as the enforcement of
building energy codes; conducting building audits; establishing
financial incentives for efficiency; and installing LEDs. It provides
$5 billion for Weatherization assistance and $3.1 billion for the State
Energy Program.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\7\ See Section 410 of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act
of 2009.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
In response to Recovery Act requirements, the overwhelming majority
of governors have advised the Secretary that they have take actions to
ensure, within the authority of the governor's office, the
implementation of the 2009 International Energy Conservation Code or
equivalent for residential buildings, and Standard 90.1-2007 for
commercial buildings. They have provided similar assurances that the
state will implement a plan to achieve 90 percent compliance with their
new codes by 2017. The relevant State Energy Program solicitation has
been issued, and comprehensive applications from the states are due May
12, 2009.\8\
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\8\ See http://www.energycodes.gov/news/arra/
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
DOE is gearing up to provide technical assistance to the states to
implement these new codes and to implement, enforce, and evaluate
compliance.
The Department is committed to improving energy efficiency through
innovative R&D, public outreach, and collaborative partnerships.
Improved energy efficiency in buildings generally is a fast, low risk,
and economical way to reduce energy consumption and associated
environmental emissions, including greenhouse gases. We look forward to
working with Congress to continue to realize short-term energy and cost
savings, and to contribute to the goal of achieving net-zero energy
residential and commercial buildings in the future.
Thank you for the opportunity to appear before you today, and I am
happy to answer any questions.
Biography for Steven Chalk
Steven Chalk is the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary in the
Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) at the U.S.
Department of Energy. In this capacity, Mr. Chalk is responsible for
managing the programs, staff and policies of EERE and interfacing with
constituent groups in the efficiency and renewable energy sectors.
Mr. Chalk recently held the position of EERE's Deputy Assistant
Secretary for Renewable Energy, where he was responsible for the
management of the government's research, development, and
commercialization efforts in solar, wind, geothermal, biomass, and
hydrogen technologies. Mr. Chalk also previously managed EERE's
Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Technologies Program, the Solar Energy
Technologies Program and Buildings Technologies Program.
In September 2008, Steve was honored with a Service to America
Medal in the Science and Environment category. This award recognized
his management of several innovative clean energy projects, as well as
his leadership in the Federal Government's efforts to expand the use of
renewable energy and energy efficiency, particularly in the communities
of New Orleans and Greensburg, Kansas.
While leading the Solar Energy Technologies Program, Mr. Chalk was
responsible for planning and implementing the Solar America Initiative,
which aims to make solar technologies cost competitive by 2015. In the
building technologies area, Mr. Chalk led DOE's efforts toward net zero
energy homes and buildings. The portfolio includes component research
such as solid state lighting, market transformation activities such as
EnergyStar, and appliance standards regulations. Before this, Mr. Chalk
led the President's Hydrogen Fuel Initiative where he oversaw
development of a five-year, $1.2 billion research investment in
hydrogen production, delivery, storage, and fuel cells. This portfolio
also includes hydrogen safety, codes and standards, and education
activities. In his early career at DOE, Mr. Chalk managed technology
development programs in fuel cells, diesel emissions control, and
materials for DOE's advanced automotive technology office. Steve also
worked in the nuclear energy field where he oversaw DOE test programs
for tritium production. Steve started his career with the Navy
developing propellants and explosives for conventional weapons.
Mr. Chalk holds a Bachelor of Science in Chemical Engineering from
the University of Maryland and a Master of Science in Mechanical
Engineering from the George Washington University.
Chairman Baird. Mr. Coad.
STATEMENT OF MR. WILLIAM J. COAD, PRESIDENT, COAD ENGINEERING
ENTERPRISES, AND CHAIR, HIGH-PERFORMANCE BUILDING COUNCIL,
NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF BUILDING SCIENCES
Mr. Coad. Mr. Chairman, Mr. Ranking Member and other
Members of the Subcommittee, as Mr. Carnahan said, my name is
Bill Coad. I am a practicing mechanical engineer. I have been
designing heating, refrigerating and air conditioning systems
and electrical systems for large buildings for my entire
career.
I am here this morning representing the National Institute
of Building Sciences, acronym NIBS. NIBS is a private
organization. It is not for profit. It was founded by this
Congress in 1974 to coordinate the improvement in buildings and
building systems in the United States for both public and
private buildings. Our annual report goes to the President of
the United States and to the Congress and you all will receive
this year's report in another couple of weeks.
I would like to introduce Henry Green. Henry is the
President of NIBS. He joined us in 2008, last year. Prior to
that he was the president of the International Code Council,
who is the developer of the International Building Code, which
is used almost universally in the United States in our private-
sector buildings. And when this Congress passed the Energy
Policy Act of 2005, in that Act, section 914, they mandated
that NIBS should form a council or a group to try to coordinate
all the standards that were available in the United States, all
our consensus standards, and look at those standards and see if
we had the information in any one place that we could use to
expand the concept of high-performance buildings.
Now, we have heard some different definitions of high-
performance buildings but I would like to give you just a very
quick slant on what a high-performance building really is. As
Mr. Chalk said, there are a lot of things going on out here in
energy and the environment but it really boils down to one
simple matter. It has to do with economics and the intrinsic
link between economics and energy. The foundation for any
economy is human productivity, and when this country was
founded, human productivity had been pretty flat for hundreds
of years and something happened in 1775 when George Washington
was trying to stay out of the way of the British, something was
happening on the other side of the world, the other side of the
Atlantic. James Watt perfected his steam engine in 1775. He was
able for the first time to take heat and turn it into work, and
work for mankind and increase his productivity. Within about
100 years, that steam engine was driving locomotives across the
continents. We had the steam engines in factories driving line
shafts, manufacturing for people. One steam engine and one
person could do the work of about 500 people. That is
productivity and that happened through the entire 19th century,
kept increasing productivity, and guess what happened? The
economy kept getting stronger and stronger. In the 20th
century, we really switched into high gear. Today we have
machines to light the darkness, to preserve our food, to carry
us wherever we want to go at any speed, exceeding the speed of
sound, to refrigerate and preserve our food, to cook our food,
to clean our house, to run our factories. It is all--every one
of these things increases human productivity, keep our records,
do our calculations, and today we have--because of this
productivity, we have the strongest economy that mankind has
ever had before.
Anybody 100 years ago couldn't possibly have predicted what
was going to happen with this kind of productivity and we can
be very proud of ourselves, but guess what? We made a little
mistake. When we started building these machines that our total
economy depends upon, there was a lot of fossil energy around.
First we did it with wood and then we needed the wood for other
things so we turned to coal, then oil in about the mid-19th
century, and these are all fossil fuels. These fossil fuels
took millions of years to generate into the Earth. Now, we have
only been using them for about 150 years and we are using them
at an exponentially increasing rate. It doesn't take anything
beyond high school mathematics to realize if you have a limited
resource and you are using it at a continually exponentially
increasing rate, some day it is going to run out, and guess
what happens? That some day--world production of oil is
predicted now to run out\1\ before the year 2010. That is next
year. So we are in trouble. We are in big trouble with our
economy because without the energy, we can't support the
economy to keep the world running the way it is running. We are
talking about the end of man on Earth if we can't support our
economy.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\1\ Mr. Coad asked that ``run out'' be changed to read ``peak.''
See attached June 19, 2009 letter.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Now, what can we do about that? That is why we are here
today. This committee, this subcommittee is here handling what
I think is the most important problem that this Congress and
this country faces today, and that is the fact that we are
going to run out of energy if we don't do something about it.
Now, what can we do about it?
Chairman Baird. Mr. Coad, we try to keep the testimony to
about five minutes. I know that is a minimum time but I am
going to ask you to try to summarize at this point.
Mr. Coad. I am just now ready to, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman Baird. Great. Thank you very much. Go ahead.
Mr. Coad. I have lost my train of thought now. I am sorry.
What we have to do, the only thing we can do is energy
efficiency. Mr. Chalk said--no, Mr. Chairman, you said that
buildings consume 40 percent of the energy roughly. They
consume it but they don't use it. The efficiency is horrible in
anything we do with energy. We have to redesign our complete
structure of technology to consume much, much, much less
energy. So efficiency is number one.
So with that, I am going to stop, Mr. Chairman, and I would
be glad to handle any questions.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Coad follows:]
Prepared Statement of William J. Coad
Mr. Chairman and Members of the Committee,
My name is William J. Coad. I am testifying before this committee
as a member of the National Institute of Building Sciences Board of
Directors. I am a volunteer member of the Board. I am also President of
Coad Engineering Enterprises and a consulting principal and past
Chairman/CEO of The McClure Corporation.
I am a registered professional engineer in 38 states and a past
President of the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air
Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE). For 17 years I was an Affiliate
Professor at Washington University in St. Louis, teaching graduate
courses in Mechanical Engineering and served as a thesis advisor in
building environmental systems design.
I am here today to testify on expanding the effort you identified
in Section 914 of the Energy Policy Act of 2005.
The National Institute of Building Sciences is a private, non-
profit organization established by Congress as a single authoritative
national source to make findings and advise both the public and private
sectors on the use of building science and technology to achieve
national goals and benefits. It is truly a public/private sector
partnership, governed by a Board of Directors that represents all
sectors of the building community, including appointees by the
President of the United States.
I would like to introduce Henry L. Green, Hon. AIA, President of
the Institute. Before coming to the Institute in 2008, Mr. Green was
Director of the Bureau of Construction Codes for the State of Michigan.
He is also a past President of the International Code Council,
developer of the International Building Code.
The Energy Policy Act of 2005 (EPACT) and the Energy Independence
and Security Act of 2007 (EISA) seek to reduce building-related energy
consumption and dependence on foreign energy sources.
Title IX, Subtitle A, Section 914 of EPACT specifically directed
the National Institute of Building Sciences to explore the potential
for accelerating development of consensus-based voluntary standards to
set requirements for less resource-intensive, more energy-efficient,
high-performance buildings.
As a result of this Congressional directive, the Institute formed
the High-Performance Building Council in 2007. In 2008, the Council
issued a report entitled, ``Assessment to the U.S. Congress and U.S.
Department of Energy on High-Performance Buildings.'' My testimony
today is based on the conclusions and recommendations of this report.
The Council currently has over 75 associations and federal agencies
as members. They represent all the major sectors of the building
community and including
The American Institute of Architects,
ASHRAE,
ASTM International,
The Associated General Contractors of America and
The International Code Council, as well as many
others.
Section 914 included no specific funding authorization, however,
based on a small amount of funding from the Department of Energy the
Council performed an initial assessment of the current knowledge, with
the help of standards development organizations, professional
societies, governmental agencies, and major trade associations.
Representatives examined hundreds of existing standards to judge their
relevance to high-performance buildings.
The Council was charged in Section 914 with determining what was
needed to accelerate the development of voluntary, consensus-based
standards for high-performance buildings. As our report demonstrates,
many of the existing standards, guidelines, and recommended practices
are developed independently, addressing only one aspect of the
building, without communicating across disciplines or parties, or
looking at the building as a whole.
Implementing the High-Performance Building Council's
recommendations--based on a harmonized definition of high-performance
buildings--would greatly accelerate the development and use of uniform
voluntary consensus-based industry standards for new construction and
renovation.
As Congress considers new legislation focused on implementing high-
performance buildings, the High-Performance Building Council offers its
technical expertise and guidance to help reach the Nation's goals.
At the time of EPACT the industry was fragmented in terms of
performance requirements for high-performance buildings. That is still
the case today. However we now have an organization ready to bring the
industry together. The Council's vision is harmonized standards--in
place and used--that result in high performing buildings. The mission
of the Council is to seek industry consensus to establish and update
the definition of high-performance buildings and to promote the
harmonization of industry standards to meet that definition and
encourage the production of high-performance buildings throughout the
United States. The Council would develop an industry consensus model
which would identify the range of metrics and benchmarks to define
High-Performance. Federal agency research would assist in providing for
these metrics and benchmarks and private voluntary standard development
organizations would use the model to develop their individual standards
and to harmonize these together for the final realization of whole
high-performance buildings.
Congress can help by implementing the recommendations made in our
report. I ask your support to implement the activities envisioned and
authorized by section 914 of the Energy Policy Act of 2005 through the
High-Performance Building Council of the National Institute of Building
Sciences.
New high-performance building standards have the potential to
enable designers, developers, and owners to construct buildings that
significantly exceed the minimum requirements of current codes and
standards. The results could lead to high-performance buildings that
use substantially less energy, and even potentially improve the health,
comfort, and productivity of their occupants.
Thank you.
Biography for William J. Coad
William J. Coad, President of Coad Engineering Enterprises is a
consulting principal and past Chairman/CEO of The McClure Corporation
(dba McClure Engineering Associates). Mr. Coad was President of the
American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air Conditioning
Engineers (ASHRAE) in 2001-2002. He received his degree in Mechanical
Engineering from Washington University in 1957. Prior to forming Coad
Engineering Enterprises, Inc., he had been with McClure Engineering
Associates, a Mechanical/Electrical Consulting Firm, for 40 years
(following five years as a design engineer, estimator, and corporate
officer of a mechanical contracting company). He is a registered
professional engineer in 38 states. He is a member of the Board of
Directors of Mestek Corporation of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Exergen
Corporation of Watertown, Massachusetts, and the National Institute of
Building Sciences (NIBS) of Washington D.C.
As an educator, Mr. Coad served as a Lecturer in Mechanical
Engineering for 12 years at Washington University in St. Louis. For 17
years he was an Affiliate Professor at Washington University, teaching
graduate courses in Mechanical Engineering and serving as a thesis
advisor in building environmental systems design.
Mr. Coad is a member of the Consulting Engineer's Council, the
American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) and a Fellow in the
American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air Conditioning
Engineers (ASHRAE). His positions in ASHRAE have included terms as
President (2001-2002), Vice President, Treasurer, and member of the
Society's Board of Directors. He has also served on numerous Technical
Committees and Task Groups, on the Nominating Committee, the
Presidential Committee on Energy Resource Evaluation, Panel 12 Standard
90-75, Finance Committee, Energy Council, Technology Council, Members
Council, Publishing Council, Research & Technical Committee, Education
Committee, and the Continuing Education Committee. (Often, he has
served as Chairman or Vice Chairman of the above committees and
councils). He served in all offices of the St. Louis Chapter of ASHRAE,
(President, 1971-72).
Mr. Coad received the Society's Distinguished Service Award in
1980, the Crosby Field Award for the best paper published by ASHRAE in
1985, the Louise & Bill Holladay Distinguished Fellow Award in 1989,
the award for Best Journal Article (1991), ASHRAE's highest award for
technical achievement, the F. Paul Anderson Award in 1996, the
Exceptional Service Award in 2001, and the Andrew T. Boggs Service
Award in 2002.
Mr. Coad is an Honorary Member of Pi Tau Sigma (Mechanical
Engineering Honorary Society), a (1992) recipient of the Washington
University Alumni Achievement Award, and the (2001) recipient of the
Donald Julius Groen Prize of the British Institute of Mechanical
Engineers (ImechE). He has published several Symposium Papers and has
authored numerous articles on Engineering Philosophy and Building
Environmental Systems (including, for 15 years, a monthly column
entitled ``Fundamentals to Frontiers'' in HPAC Engineering Magazine).
William Coad authored ``Energy Engineering and Management for
Building Systems,'' published by Van Nostrand Reinhold, and is a co-
author of ``Principles of Heating, Ventilating, and Air Conditioning''
published by ASHRAE. He is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of
HPAC Engineering Magazine. He has served on the St. Louis Professional
Code Committee, and the Missouri State Building Code Steering
Committee. Mr. Coad has been Chairman of the Building Technology
Advisory Committee to the Missouri Energy Agency, a member of the
Building and Grounds Committee of the Washington University Board of
Trustees, the Board of Directors of St. Elizabeth Academy in St. Louis,
and the Energy Conservation Committee of the American Consulting
Engineer's Council.
Chairman Baird. We will have plenty for you, Mr. Coad.
Mr. Coad. Sorry I ran over time.
Chairman Baird. That is fine. You know, you folks have
invested your entire lives in this and then we are foolish
enough to ask you only five minutes, but we will get more. I
just have to commend your association. To have someone in your
role named Coad and your new President named Green, you guys
are in marketing, not just engineering and then we have got
Ehrhardt here to lead the way as well.
Mr. Cicio, thank you very much and we look forward to your
comments.
STATEMENT OF MR. PAUL N. CICIO, PRESIDENT, INDUSTRIAL ENERGY
CONSUMERS OF AMERICA
Mr. Cicio. Chairman Baird, Ranking Member Inglis, my name
is Paul Cicio and I am the President of the Industrial Energy
Consumers of America. Thank you for the opportunity to testify
on the Department of Energy Industrial Technologies Program.
The Industrial Energy Consumers of America is a trade
association of leading manufacturing companies with more than
$510 billion in annual revenues. We employ 850,000 employees
across the country, and we are an organization created to
promote the interests of manufacturing companies for which the
availability, the use and cost of energy, and power and
feedstock play a significant role in our ability to complete
globally.
The manufacturing sector is a vital sector to the welfare
of the country. We provide the largest contribution to GDP at
12 percent, over 60 percent of the exports. We employ 14
million people and nearly of the quarter of the world's
manufacturing output.
Mr. Chairman, the speed at which the world around us is
changing is accelerating and we face enormous challenges
competing for domestic and offshore markets and unfortunately
it looks like we are losing ground. From 2000 to 2008, imports
are up 29 percent and manufacturing employment fell 22 percent,
a loss of 3.8 million jobs, and that does not count 2009. Of
great concern is that new manufacturing investment in the
United States as a percent of GDP has been on a decline since
the late 1990s. At the same time, significant new capital
investment, often with the latest technology, has made
companies in developing countries top in class competitors.
Many of these companies are State owned and are subsidized. Our
competitors are third world countries with first-rate
manufacturing technology.
Of new competitive concern is the upcoming requirement to
reduce greenhouse gas emissions that could add substantial cost
that our competitors in developing countries will not bear.
This brings me to my point. There has never been a time in our
history where new technology and best practices are needed more
to increase manufacturing competitiveness, reduce energy
consumption, reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
The Industrial Technologies Program mission to improve
national energy security, climate, environment and economic
competitiveness by transforming the way U.S. industry uses
energy is needed more than ever before. As noted, U.S.
manufacturing is losing competitiveness. Our manufacturing
processes are operating at their technical limits, which should
urgently place a priority on these private-public partnerships
for research and development. In talking to various companies
and trade associations in advance of this hearing, I feel
confident to report to you that this program is on sound
ground. It is well run and it is creating value for the
industrial sector. The only criticism that is consistent among
everyone is that it is woefully underfunded. The R&D program by
sector, the R&D crosscutting technologies, the best practices,
the industrial assessment centers, and the Save Energy Now
Program are all effective and they are desirable.
The fiscal year 2008 funding of $64 million and the fiscal
year 2009 funding of $62 million is completely insufficient to
meet the competitiveness challenges. For perspective, $62
million is an amount less than one ten-thousandth the amount
spent on the stimulus package. Surely we can afford to invest
more than $62 million.
In contrast, developing countries are placing a high value
on manufacturing and they are investing in it. They understand
that it creates good-paying jobs and needed exports. For
example, our stimulus package has negligible spending directed
towards manufacturing while China's stimulus package places
manufacturing at the heart of their investment in their
economic recovery.
In closing, Mr. Chairman, given the enormous and growing
challenges that we face, we no longer can take the
manufacturing sector for granted. It is important for this body
to understand the enormous value that this sector brings and
that it is time for investing to take it seriously. Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Cicio follows:]
Prepared Statement of Paul N. Cicio
Chairman Baird, Ranking Member Inglis, my name is Paul Cicio and I
am the president of the Industrial Energy Consumers of America. Thank
you for the opportunity to testify before you on the Department of
Energy, Industrial Technologies Program.
The Industrial Energy Consumers of America is an association of
leading manufacturing companies with $510 billion in annual sales and
with more than 850,000 employees nationwide. It is an organization
created to promote the interests of manufacturing companies for which
the availability, use and cost of energy, power or feedstock play a
significant role in their ability to compete in domestic and world
markets. IECA membership represents a diverse set of industries
including: plastics, cement, paper, food processing, brick, chemicals,
fertilizer, insulation, steel, glass, industrial gases, pharmaceutical,
aluminum and brewing.
The manufacturing sector is vital to the economic and security
welfare of this country. We provide the largest contribution to GDP at
12 percent, over 60 percent of the exports; employ over 14 million
people and nearly a quarter of the worlds manufacturing output.
Mr. Chairman, the speed at which the world around us is changing is
accelerating and we face enormous challenges competing for domestic and
offshore markets. Unfortunately, it looks like we are losing ground.
From 2000 to 2008 imports are up 29 percent and manufacturing
employment fell 22 percent, a loss of 3.8 million high paying jobs. Of
great concern is that manufacturing investment in the U.S. as a percent
of GDP has been on a decline since the late 1990s. At the same time,
significant new capital investment, often with the latest technology
has made companies in developing countries top in class competitors.
Many of these companies are State owned and are subsidized.
A new competitive concern and/or opportunity is the upcoming
requirements to reduce GHG emissions. This could add substantial costs
that our competitors in developing countries will not have to bear.
This brings me to my point. There has never been a time in our
history where new technology and best practices is needed more to
increase manufacturing competitiveness, reduce energy consumption and
GHG emissions than like today.
The Industrial Technologies Program (ITP) mission to improve
national energy security, climate, environment and economic
competitiveness by transforming the way U.S. industry uses energy is
needed more than ever. As noted, U.S. manufacturing seems to be losing
competitiveness. Our manufacturing processes are operating at their
technical limits which should urgently place a priority on private
public partnerships in research and development like this program.
In talking to various companies and trade associations in advance
of this hearing, I feel confident to report to you that the program is
on sound ground, well run and creating value for the industrial sector.
The only criticism is the lack of federal funding.
The R&D programs by sector, the R&D crosscutting technologies, best
practices, the Industrial Assessment Centers and the Save Energy Now
Program are all effective and desirable.
The FY 2008 funding of $64 million and the FY 2009 of $62 million
is completely insufficient to meet the competitiveness challenges. In
comparison, from 1998 to 2001 well over $120 million was spent
annually.
Mr. Chairman, given the enormous and growing challenges that we
face, we can longer take the manufacturing sector for granted. It is
important for this body to understand the enormous value that this
sector brings and that it is time to take investing in this sector
seriously by vastly expanding this program.
Thank you.
Biography for Paul N. Cicio
Paul N. Cicio has been the President of the Industrial Energy
Consumers of America (IECA) since its founding six years ago. IECA is a
non-profit trade association created to promote the interests of
manufacturing companies for which the availability, use and cost of
energy, power or feedstock play a significant role in their ability to
compete in domestic and world markets. Membership represents a diverse
set of energy intensive industries including: plastics, cement,
aluminum, paper, food processing, brick, chemicals, fertilizer, rubber,
steel, glass, industrial gases, pharmaceutical and brewing.
Mr. Cicio is a well known consumer advocate for the industrial
sector on issues related to energy and the environment and is
recognized for his efforts within national and international circles.
He has testified seven times before the U.S. House of Representatives;
three times before the U.S. Senate; and twice before the Federal Energy
Regulatory Commission on issues regarding natural gas supply; natural
gas market oversight; climate policy and energy efficiency. He has also
intervened at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.
In 2008, the Chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission
appointed Mr. Cicio to the newly created Energy Markets Advisory
Committee (EMAC) representing industrial energy consumers.
In 2006 and again in 2008, the Secretary of the Interior appointed
Mr. Cicio to the U.S. Department of Interior Outer Continental Shelf
Policy Advisory Committee. In 2007, the Secretary of Energy appointed
him to the National Coal Council, an advisory council to the Secretary.
In both appointments, Mr. Cicio became the first energy consumer
advocate.
Mr. Cicio moved to Washington DC from Houston, Texas in 1991. Since
that time he has served in several leadership positions within a host
of trade associations that include the National Association of
Manufacturers, the American Chemistry Council, the Electricity
Consumers Resource Council and the International Federation of
Industrial Energy Consumers. Leadership positions in European trade
associations include the International Chamber of Commerce; the
Business and Industry Advisory Committee to the DECD; and the
International Federation of Industrial Energy Consumers-World.
Previous to IECA, Mr. Cicio was employed by The Dow Chemical
Company where he held a number of diverse responsibilities including:
hydrocarbons and energy global issues management and Federal Government
affairs, hydrocarbons and energy senior commercial manager, marketing
manager, district sales manager, product sales manager. He retired from
Dow Chemical with almost 30 years of service.
Mr. Cicio graduated from Youngstown State University with a BS in
Business Administration and Economics.
Chairman Baird. Thank you, Mr. Cicio.
Dr. Ehrhardt-Martinez.
STATEMENT OF DR. KAREN EHRHARDT-MARTINEZ, RESEARCH ASSOCIATE,
AMERICAN COUNCIL FOR AN ENERGY-EFFICIENT ECONOMY (ACEEE)
Dr. Ehrhardt-Martinez. Thank you. My name is Karen
Ehrhardt-Martinez and I am a research associate with the
American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, and I am also
the Chairman of the 2009 Behavior Energy and Climate Change
conference, which will be held here in D.C. in November, and I
have to add that I am a resident of Bowie, Maryland.
My testimony responds to a request to provide information
about the role of social and behavioral sciences in reducing
energy consumption in buildings and how these sciences could be
included in the DOE's research programs. As discussed in detail
in my written testimony, insights from the social and
behavioral sciences really do offer an important opportunity to
enable a significantly greater level of energy savings in
buildings as well as other energy sectors. They can help
maximize potential technology-based savings. They can improve
decision-making and reveal social, behavioral and cultural
means of motivating and facilitating smart energy behaviors.
Let me start by saying that behavior-oriented programs and
research can help us understand, explain and address two of the
most persistent gaps that continue to limit energy savings and
energy efficiency. The first gap is the energy efficiency gap,
or the gap between the potential cost-effective energy
efficiency investments on one hand and the investments that are
actually made on the other. The second gap is what I call the
attitude behavior gap, and this gap divides favorable attitudes
on the one hand from what might be best characterized as less
than favorable behaviors on the other.
The energy efficiency gap is large. According to several
ACEEE studies, this first gap represents lost energy savings of
roughly 30 percent or more. Similarly, studies of prevailing
attitudes and behaviors suggest that while people are often
aware of the economic and environmental benefits of investing
in energy-efficient technologies and behaviors, a variety of
social, cultural and economic factors actually frequently
intervene so as to severely limit the amount of follow-through
that actually occurs, whether by individuals, households or
businesses. A great example ``gap'' is provided by some recent
Gallup Poll research that reveals that while roughly 85 percent
of Americans have actually reported that they should be
spending thousands of dollars to increase the energy efficiency
of their homes, in reality, only a very small percentage
actually are acting on these concerns in any way significant
way.
So what is going on? That is what social and behavior
research can really help us to understand. We need to improve
our understanding and application of social and behavioral and
even cultural factors that can help us deliver more of the
potential energy savings that are available through new and
existing technologies. We also need to use this information to
reduce social and cultural barriers and to motivate people to
take the actions that they readily recognize as important to
achieving energy savings. My written testimony provides many
examples of how social science insights have been able to
narrow these gaps.
Next I would like to talk about what I call designing a new
looking glass, a new way to imagine human behavior and why it
matters. While our culture generally likes to think of people
as rational actors, social scientists tend to work with a more
complete understanding of human behavior. Unfortunately,
traditional approaches of achieving energy savings and energy
efficiency use what I call a distorted looking glass. They use
what is most commonly referred to as a techno-economic
framework, and this approach is primarily focused on a rational
actor model that seeks to increase energy efficiency and
increase energy savings exclusively through technological and
economic means. Unfortunately from this purview, reducing
energy consumption is as simple as designing a more energy-
efficient product and then ensuring the product is economical
and its replacement is cost-effective. The logic in that regard
is sound but only as far as it goes. Programs built around this
logic assume that people typically act in economically rational
ways. Unfortunately, real-world experience suggests otherwise.
In fact, research suggests that in the residential sector,
people seldom act accordingly to the rational economic actor
model, and our understanding of the decision-making processes
in business and industry also tend to fall short. As such, the
performance of energy and efficiency programs requires that we
gain and apply an improved understanding of what actually
motivates energy-smart behaviors.
Two mechanisms I suggest could help develop a better
looking glass and more effective programs. One is a substantial
increase in the involvement of social and behavioral scientists
in the variety of processes, and the second is the development
and application of a behavioral toolkit that effectively
identifies key concerns and behavioral insights that have
proven effective in addressing behavioral change.
Finally, I would like to conclude by mentioning the need
for a broad integration of social and behavioral science
throughout DOE's work. It is important to recognize the
significance of behavior-related approaches as an essential
piece of a multi-part strategy for addressing energy issues and
climate change efforts. As noted in a recent New York Times
article, the principal drivers of our current energy and
climate challenges are human choices, behaviors and lifestyles.
As such, the success of our efforts depends on our ability to
give these issues more prominence through behavior-smart
policies, through an improved understanding of the ways in
which people both shape and are shaped by their physical
environment, by a recognition of the opportunities and
constraints associated with existing social structures,
cultural norms and values and other sociocultural
considerations, and finally, a recognition of interpersonal and
psychological factors associated with motivating and
constraining behavioral change. By moving in this direction, we
can make important strides in closing both the energy
efficiency gap and the gap between consumer attitudes and
behaviors. In short, mobilizing our population to adopt energy-
smart behaviors and technologies will require the insights
provided by social and behavioral scientists and these insights
need to become a larger part of the efforts of the U.S.
Department of Energy. Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Ehrhardt-Martinez follows:]
Prepared Statement of Karen Ehrhardt-Martinez
Summary
This testimony responds to an invitation from the House Energy and
Environment Subcommittee of the Committee on Science and Technology to
inform Committee Members about the role of the Department of Energy's
research programs in:
developing technologies and standards to enable
deployment of net-zero energy buildings,
support sustainability in domestic industries, and
highlight R&D areas which need continued attention to
achieve the goals of the DOE net-zero energy buildings program
and beyond.
This testimony specifically addresses the need for increased
research support to investigate and apply insights from the social and
behavioral sciences. As discussed in this testimony, insights from the
social and behavioral sciences offer an important opportunity to enable
a significantly greater level of energy savings in buildings, industry,
the residential sector, and transportation. More specifically, social
science insights can help maximize potential technology-based savings;
improve decision-making; and reveal social, behavioral, and cultural
means of motivating and facilitating smart energy behaviors.
Without the development and application of insights from the social
and behavioral sciences, energy efficiency programs and policies will
be constrained by the persistence of two important gaps:
the gap between the potential energy savings of
existing technologies and the actual energy savings achieved,
and
the gap between the good intentions of individuals,
businesses, and institutions and the less-than-adequate
translation of those intentions into smart energy behaviors.
According to several ACEEE studies of the unrealized energy
efficiency potential associated with existing technologies, the first
gap represents lost energy savings of 30 percent or more with current
technologies. Similarly, studies of prevailing attitudes and behaviors
suggest that while people are often aware of the economic and
environmental benefits of investing in energy-efficient technologies
and behaviors, a variety of social, cultural, and economic factors
frequently intervene so as to severely limit the number of individuals,
households, and businesses that actually follow through on their
intended actions. A better understanding and application of social and
behavioral factors could deliver more of the potential energy savings
available through new and existing technologies. They could also help
reduce existing social and cultural barriers and motivate people to
take the actions that they readily recognize as important to achieving
energy savings and stabilizing (and then reducing) carbon emissions.
Unfortunately, traditional approaches to energy efficiency
typically apply what is most commonly referred to as a techno-economic
framework. This approach is primarily focused on achieving energy
efficiency through technological and economic means. From this purview,
reducing energy consumption is as simple as designing a more energy-
efficient product (furnace, television, refrigerator, computer, motor,
etc.) and then ensuring that the products are economical and their
replacement is cost-effective. The logic is sound--as far as it goes.
Programs built around this logic assume that people who are given the
choice to invest in a product that is more energy efficient, with
little risk and a short payback period, should adopt the superior
technology. Unfortunately, however, real world experience tells a
different story. In fact, research suggests that people seldom act
according to the rational economic actor model. As such, we need a
better means of understanding what actually motivates energy-smart
behaviors, otherwise many government programs are likely to continue to
under-perform. Fortunately, the development and application of a
behavioral toolkit could go a long way toward substantially improving
upon the more traditional approaches to energy efficiency and result in
greater energy productivity and energy savings.
Of equal importance, however, is the need to recognize the
potential scope of energy savings associated with social and behavioral
initiatives. Such initiatives offer the potential of large energy
savings. In fact, two recent studies (Gardner and Stern, 2008; Laitner
et al., 2009) suggest that the potential behavior-related energy
savings in the residential sector alone represent roughly 25 percent of
current residential sector energy consumption. By applying insights
from the social and behavioral sciences to improve our understanding of
decision-making, organizational behavior, and the influence of social
and cultural norms in business and industrial processes, greater energy
savings could also be achieved in the commercial and industrial
sectors.
Finally, it is important to recognize the significance of behavior-
related approaches as an essential piece of energy and climate change
efforts. In fact, the principal drivers of our current energy and
climate challenges are human choices, behaviors, and lifestyles. As
such, they must also be an essential part of any attempt to address
these challenges, if we hope to be successful in our efforts. In other
words, human and organizational behavior is a critical component of
both cause and solution. The DOE's efforts would undoubtedly benefit
greatly from a more systematic and widespread incorporation of social
and behavioral insights. However, funding for these types of
initiatives is woefully inadequate and needs to be greatly expanded in
order to realize the full magnitude of potential behavior-related
energy savings. Such an effort would go a long way toward closing the
gaps that currently exist between: potential and actual energy savings
on the one hand and between attitudes and behaviors on the other. In
short, mobilizing our population to adopt energy-smart behaviors and
technologies will require the insights provided by social and
behavioral scientists. These insights need to become a larger part of
the efforts at the U.S. Department of Energy.
Such an approach should provide widespread and accelerated
research, experimentation, and application of behavior-related
initiatives as well as policy initiatives that recognize the well-
documented limitations of the techno-economic model and the need to
integrate behavioral considerations broadly into existing programs and
policies.
Introduction
My name is Karen Ehrhardt-Martinez. I am a Research Associate in
the Economic and Social Analysis Program at the American Council for an
Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE), a nonprofit organization dedicated to
increasing energy efficiency as a means of promoting economic
prosperity, energy security, and environmental protection. I am here
today at the invitation of the House Science and Technology
Subcommittee on Energy and Environment to discuss the role of the
Department of Energy's research programs in developing technologies and
standards to enable deployment of net-zero energy buildings and, in
particular, to highlight R&D areas which need continued attention to
achieve the goals of the DOE net-zero energy buildings program and
beyond.
I would like thank you for the opportunity to testify here today
and I applaud the Committee for its interest in identifying R&D areas
that need continued attention to achieve the goals of the DOE's
programs.
There is no question that the DOE Building Technologies Program has
achieved significant energy savings through its unique combination of
efforts, including (but not limited to) their work on developing
standards for appliances and commercial equipment, and establishing
building energy codes, and more recent efforts at achieving marketable
net-zero energy commercial buildings by 2025. Nevertheless, today's
buildings continue to consume more energy than any other sector of the
U.S. economy--more than transportation and more than industry. And the
potential building-related energy savings continue to be large. Whether
we are talking about improving the energy efficiency of existing
buildings or new construction, the efforts of the DOE Building
Technologies Program offer the opportunity of substantial energy
savings.
An important part of what makes the Building Technologies Program
work so well is their active partnership with the private sector, State
and local governments, national laboratories, and universities, and
their work to not only improve the efficiency of buildings but also the
equipment, components, and systems within them. These efforts include
developing more energy-efficient technologies associated with building
envelopes, equipment, lighting, and windows, as well as the use of
advanced sensors and controls and other high-tech means of managing
energy use (DOE, 2008).
The primary driver of the Program's activities is the DOE's zero
energy building research initiative.\1\ Importantly, the goal of
achieving zero energy buildings necessarily requires extreme energy
efficiency in all aspects of building design and construction,
equipment choice, and building and equipment operation. Unless all of
these areas are adequately addressed, the concept of zero energy
buildings is unlikely to be achieved in practice.
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\1\ Zero energy buildings produce as much energy as they use over
the course of a year.
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While the strengths of the existing program are many, there are
unfortunately also some weaknesses. And as is common to most programs
at DOE, there is an substantially insufficient amount of attention paid
to the human dimensions of energy consumption and energy efficiency.
This shortcoming is associated with a long history of technology-
centric programs that have failed to achieve their technological
potential in terms of energy savings. A more effective approach must
recognize the importance of the human element and work with social and
behavioral scientists to effectively address it through behavior-
oriented programs.
The Two Gaps: Efficiency Potential, Attitudes, and Behaviors
Among the potential benefits of behavior-oriented programs and
research is the promise it holds for explaining, understanding, and
addressing the two most important gaps that persist in maximizing
energy efficiency and reducing energy consumption. More specifically,
behavior-based programs can help identify solutions for closing: (1)
the energy efficiency gap (the gap between the potential, cost-
effective, energy efficiency investments and those investments actually
made); and (2) the attitude-behavior gap (the gap between favorable
attitudes toward energy efficiency and less favorable behaviors).
According to several ACEEE studies of the unrealized energy
efficiency potential associated with existing technologies, the first
gap represents lost energy savings of 30 percent or more with current
technologies. Similarly, studies of prevailing attitudes and behaviors
suggest that while people are often aware of the economic and
environmental benefits of investing in energy-efficient technologies
and behaviors, a variety of social, cultural, and economic factors
frequently intervene so as to severely limit the number of individuals,
households, and businesses that actually follow through on their
intended actions, resulting in additional efficiency losses. For
roughly 30 years, numerous researchers have attempted to identify the
causes behind the energy efficiency gap (although primarily from an
economic perspective) attributing the gap to various market barriers,
transaction costs, and (in part) to consumer attitudes and preferences
(Sanstad et al., 2006; Stern and Aronson, 1984). Among social
scientists there has been a parallel effort to explain the gap between
favorable environmental attitudes and less favorable behaviors (Dunlap,
2008). An example of this second gap can be illustrated using recent
Gallup poll research that indicates that while more than three-quarters
(77 percent) of Americans personally worry (either a fair amount or a
great deal) about the availability and affordability of energy and 85
percent report that they ``should be spending thousands of dollars to
increase the energy efficiency of their homes,'' less than two percent
of the population is actually acting on these concerns in any
significant way. Despite the high level of concern about energy and
global climate change, people aren't taking advantage of the potential
for cost-effective energy savings.
Rational Economic Actors and the Need for a Behavioral Toolkit
Most efforts to date have approached the challenge of maximizing
potential energy savings exclusively through a techno-economic
framework of change (Parnell and Popovic Larsen, 2005). Since 1970,
both theoretical and practical models of energy-related behavior have
focused on reducing energy use as a function of developing the right
technologies, making them available at the right price and then
promoting them to consumers by espousing their ``rational'' economic
benefits.\2\ Underlying the techno-economic model are the assumptions
that growth in energy consumption is best solved through the
application of new technologies and that energy consumption and
technology adoption behaviors are best understood in terms of a set of
economic calculations involving the price of energy, the cost of
technologies, and the level of disposable income. In this context,
people are portrayed as rational economic decision-makers who will
behave in predictable ways when confronted with changes in energy
prices within a given market setting. Moreover, the model also suggests
that the prevalence of energy-efficient behaviors and choices may be
enhanced most effectively through the introduction of carefully crafted
economic incentives and disincentives (Archer et al., 1987). Finally,
the model suggests that consumers, when presented with information
about the economically-desirable package, will act to increase their
net benefit.
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\2\ Note: One especially interesting observation is that although
most people easily recognize that social and behavioral approaches to
energy savings are more complex than traditional technology-based
approaches, behavior-based approaches have consistently received
substantially less funding.
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According to the techno-economic model, the primary barriers to the
transfer of energy-efficient technologies are 1) the lack of more
efficient technologies, 2) the lack of sufficient economic incentives,
and/or 3) the lack of timely, sufficient, or even accurate and complete
information. While these factors are undoubtedly important, and while a
cursory evaluation suggests that programs using this approach have
achieved some success, their success has been significantly limited as
a result of the narrow focus on the techno-economic model and the
flawed assumptions on which it is based (Parnell and Popovic Larsen,
2005).
Not surprisingly, the assumption that individuals are economically-
rational actors has been regularly called into question. For example,
in a study of solar technology adoption, Archer et al. (1987, p. 78)
found that, ``information indispensable to even gross cost calculations
was, in fact, absent'' in people's assessments. Similarly, in a study
of vehicle purchase decisions, Turentine and Kurani (2006) found that
``even the most financially skilled'' consumers did not use payback
calculations as part of their vehicle purchase decision-making. Archer
et al. (1987) concluded that ``this result appears to contradict a
central tenet of the rational model''--namely, the economic rationality
of the decision-making process. Similarly, in a study of consumer
intentions to conserve energy, Feldman (1987, p. 39) finds that,
``avoided costs and implicit discount rates are probably not useful
concepts for describing the behavior of the general public . . .'' and
concludes that it is dangerous to assume that energy consumers operate
as rational investors. Moreover, Stern and Aronson (1984, p. 61) argue
that ``there is a problem with the very notion of users as investors''
because people generally don't conceptualize energy and energy-using
equipment only as investments. For example, when people purchase a car,
they are concerned with a variety of characteristics including
performance, reliability, safety, styling, status, resale value and
fuel-efficiency, but the primary emphasis may be on any one of these
factors. As an example, evaluations of utility-sponsored incentive
programs promoting home retrofits have shown that even when utilities
offered rebates that covered as much as 93 percent of the retrofit
costs, only five percent of people actually decided in favor of having
the retrofits done.
The persistent and overly narrow focus on economic considerations
often results in the oversimplification of the decision-making process
and the exclusion of social, psychological and other variables that
have proven essential in understanding individual and organizational
behavior. In fact, social and behavioral research consistently shows
that people and organizations are both overtly and subconsciously
influenced by a variety of non-economic variables including their
values, beliefs, and attitudes, as well as prevailing social norms,
group norms and interpersonal dynamics. As such, the need for increased
behavioral research is real and the potential energy savings are
significant.
In order to unlock these potential savings, research on energy-
efficient technologies and practices would clearly benefit greatly from
the adoption of a behavioral toolkit. Such a toolkit would include the
use of insights from a variety of social and behavioral fields
including sociology, psychology, anthropology, demography, public
policy, behavioral economics, marketing, and communications. Notably,
these types of insights are increasingly being shared among those
people working in these fields of study. In fact their efforts to
develop more extensive networks of collaboration have recently been
catalyzed through the development of an annual conference on Behavior,
Energy and Climate Change (BECC). This year will mark the third annual
BECC Conference that will bring together more than 700 policy-makers,
social scientists, and researchers, as well as representatives of
government agencies, utilities, cities, businesses and non-profits to
focus on understanding human behavior and decision-making in order to
improve energy efficiency research, policy design and program
effectiveness and to accelerate our transition to a low-carbon economy.
Importantly, this year's conference will be held in Washington, D.C.,
allowing for the broad participation and involvement of national
policy-makers, Hill staff, DOE and EPA staff, and representatives of
the many national labs. This is a unique opportunity to catalyze DOE's
work in this area. This year's BECC Conference will be held at the
Marriott Wardman Park Hotel on November 15-18, 2009.\3\ An overview of
prior conference insights in provided by Ehrhardt-Martinez (2008).
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\3\ More information is available on the BECC Conference web site
at www.BECCconference.org
The Behavior Continuum and the Size of Potential Behavior-Related
Savings
An amazing variety of behavioral influences have contributed to the
historical gains in energy efficiency that have already been achieved,
but to what degree can a more concerted effort to integrate behavioral
insights achieve even greater returns in terms of additional energy
savings? This section (1) provides an example of the dramatic behavior-
related energy savings achieved in Juneau, Alaska; (2) describes the
range of relevant, energy-smart behaviors that comprise what we call
the Behavior Energy Response Continuum; and (3) discusses the range of
potential savings associated with energy-smart behaviors--behaviors
that both drive new innovations and that change the patterns of
technology adoption and energy service demands.
Powering Down in Juneau, Alaska
What can we learn from actions taking during energy emergencies?
The experiences of the city and residents of Juneau, Alaska can teach
us how large and how quickly energy savings can be achieved through
behavioral change when people get serious about the task at hand. In
April 2008, an avalanche damaged a major electrical power line near
Juneau, cutting power to the city's 30,000 residents. Following the
avalanche, the city was forced to rely on a bank of diesel-powered
generators to supply its power. Within two weeks, Juneau had cut its
energy consumption by about 20 percent, and by the end of May
electricity use was down 40 percent (Berkeley Lab News Center, 2008).
The massive and coordinated effort to cut electricity consumption
included quick energy audits of the city's low-income housing and local
businesses, a public campaign to engage people in the cause, an effort
to identify and unplug items that needlessly draw power even when
turned off, a campaign to replace incandescent bulbs with compact
fluorescents, and identification of unnecessary municipal electricity
use. In addition, the local utility provided regular feedback to the
public, charting the city's progress in reducing energy use (Berkeley
Lab News Center, 2008).
These efforts were geared toward making energy conservation more
than just socially acceptable--instead they attempted ``to suggest that
conservation was expected.'' The essential message was that in order to
be a good citizen, you needed to conserve energy (Berkeley Lab News
Center, 2008).
The lesson? A city of 30,000 people was able to cut electricity
consumption by 40 percent in approximately six weeks. So, what might be
possible society-wide given the right motivation, the right programs,
and the right incentives? Even five months after the power lines were
restored, the city's electricity consumption remained eight percent
below consumption levels for the prior year (NPR, 2008). A variety of
similar examples of dramatic, behavior-based energy savings have been
documented by Alan Meier in his book, Saving Energy in a Hurry (Meier,
2005). While these examples are useful for illustrating the scope of
potential behavior-related savings, the exceptional circumstances are
likely to influence consumers' general willingness to participate in
energy saving behaviors. Nevertheless, the examples do suggest that
more concerted programs could significantly increase energy savings.
The Behavior Continuum
The real debate isn't about whether behavior has contributed to the
dramatic reductions in energy consumption growth rates in the U.S.
Instead it is about the need to recognize behavior as an important but
often overlooked resource for achieving large-scale reductions in
energy consumption and carbon emissions. Unfortunately, some energy
professionals continue to suggest that while behavior-oriented programs
may provide a useful way to help deploy smart technologies, they are
best thought of as boutique or niche strategies which are most suitably
employed to enhance an otherwise technology-focused deployment of more
energy-productive investments. Nevertheless, research on this topic
suggests that sizable energy savings and efficiency gains are likely to
be achieved by addressing the human dimensions of energy consumption,
energy efficiency and energy conservation.
In fact, past analyses by the American Council for an Energy-
Efficient Economy (ACEEE), and by well-known researchers like Gerald
Gardner, Paul Stern, and others suggest that understanding and shaping
behaviors can provide a significant savings. (See Gardner and Stern et
al., 2008; and Laitner et al., 2009.) Indeed, recent, albeit
preliminary, assessments by ACEEE researchers indicate that ``the
behavioral resource'' might provide as much as a 25 percent efficiency
gain (possibly more) above normal productivity improvements. Similarly,
utilities and energy research organizations are increasingly working to
integrate behavior-change programs and practices into their larger
portfolio of activities with the goal of reducing costly energy
production and consumption and carbon emissions.
As such, the Behavior Continuum was designed to illustrate the
range and potential impact of changed habits, lifestyles and
technology-based behaviors in terms of the potential energy savings
within the United States. Although the recent implementation of the
Behavior Continuum has been focused on identifying and assessing
energy-smart behaviors in the residential sector (including personal
transportation uses within the control of households), future
assessment will also include behavior-related energy saving in the
commercial and industrial sectors as well.
The Behavior Energy Response Continuum is a means of estimating the
energy savings that could be achieved if new energy-wise habits (i.e.,
building and equipment operation practices and maintenance) became the
norm, and if new energy-wise lifestyles and choices were encouraged by
smart policies oriented toward reducing energy consumption. The
Behavior Continuum ranges from habits and lifestyles on one end, to
technology choices on the other. The middle of the Continuum includes a
variety of infrequent, low-cost and no-cost behaviors that can reduce
energy consumption including weather-stripping and caulking and
insulating ducts or ensuring adequate space between the refrigerator
and the wall (Ehrhardt-Martinez et al., 2009). See Figure 1 below.
In terms of the residential sector alone, preliminary research at
the national level suggests that changed behaviors offer potential
reductions of 20-25 percent of current levels of residential energy
consumption over perhaps a five- to eight-year period within the United
States.
Moreover, in a recent application of the Behavior Energy Response
Continuum for the State of Wisconsin, the potential impact of behavior-
oriented programs (focused on addressing individual habits, lifestyles,
and technology choices) indicated a potential doubling of the projected
residential sector energy savings opportunities (Ehrhardt-Martinez et
al., 2009). More specifically, the Wisconsin estimates (based on
Wisconsin-specific energy data) indicated that behavior-oriented
programs held the potential of reducing residential energy consumption
in Wisconsin by as much as 18 percent by 2012, or 38 trillion Btus. As
such, a more comprehensive behavior program could result in savings
that are more than twice as large as those associated with standard,
technology-oriented approaches by generating a broader range of energy-
smart behaviors, by eliciting a greater level of responsiveness among
``traditional program'' participants, and by driving a greater level of
spill-over among non-participants throughout Wisconsin.
The use of the behavior continuum is one means of identifying the
numerous types of behavior-related energy savings opportunities and
developing a more comprehensive estimate of potential behavior-related
energy saving. Importantly, the Behavior Continuum and the results from
the associated analysis challenge traditional approaches to energy
efficiency programs that tend to marginalize behavior-oriented programs
by characterizing them as boutique or niche strategies that can only
round out a technology-based deployment of more energy-productive
investments. The application of the Behavior Continuum suggests the
contrary; that behavior-related programs offer potential energy savings
on a surprisingly large scale--one that rivals a pure technology based
perspective in terms of expected efficiency gains.
Levels of Intervention and Recommendations
Even with all this good news about the potential for using social
and behavioral insights for generating larger reductions in energy use,
it is important to recognize that these savings will not occur without
consciously and deliberately incorporating social and behavioral change
as an explicit initiative within D.O.E. programs.
Such an initiative would ideally apply relevant behavioral insights
through a variety of intervention levels including:
behavior-smart policies,
an improved understanding of the ways in which people
both shape and are shaped by their physical environment,
a recognition of the opportunities and constraints
associated with existing social structures, cultural norms and
values, and other socio-cultural considerations,
a recognition of interpersonal and psychological
factors associated with motivating and constraining behavioral
change.
At the policy level, for example, behavioral interventions could
help design more effective policies by taking advantage of the current
cognitive dispositions that have been shown to be prevalent across the
population. Many of these approaches are explored in the field of
behavioral economics. For example, when faced with making a decision
about which building features or equipment to include in various
builders packages, the structure of those decisions is likely to play
an important role in the ultimate decision made by the consumer. By
structuring the decision such that consumers need to opt-out as oppose
to opt-in to the choice of energy efficient designs and equipment, a
much larger proportion of new home buyers are likely to incorporate
energy efficient features in their new homes. The work of Carrie Armel
(at the Precourt Energy Efficiency Center at Stanford University), Cass
Sunstein (Thaler and Sunstein, 2008) and other researchers suggest that
people tend to have a lot of inertia when it comes to decision-making.
Armel uses the example of automobile drivers faced with the decision of
donating their organs. Participation in such programs tends to be about
20 percent in countries where the default option is NOT donating
(therefore participants are required to opt-in) compared to a
participation rate of 80 to 90 percent in countries where the default
option is to participate (therefore participants are required to opt-
out). See Thaler and Sunstein (2008) for additional examples.
In terms of the built environment and buildings in particular,
social and behavioral insights can play an important role in
determining and emphasizing the many non-energy benefits of energy-
efficient designs and equipment. For example, natural daylighting and
greenery have been shown to increase productivity, while equipment
designed from the users perspective (with the help of social and
anthropological insights) have been shown to reduce operator error,
increase the proper usage, and maximize energy savings. According to
Armel (2008), there is an enormous body of literature in cognitive
science speaking to issues of how we can improve users' performance,
yet often this knowledge fails to be incorporated into design.
Socio-cultural and interpersonal interventions recognize the
importance of social institutions and culture, norms, and networks in
the shaping of individual and organizational behaviors. And there are
an increasing number of examples of energy programs that are
successfully incorporating some of these socio-cultural insights into
their efforts to increase the adoption and diffusion of energy-
efficient technologies. Some examples include Project Porchlight which
uses several different social insights to encourage the adoption of
compact fluorescent light bulbs in Canada, and the ENERGY STAR
program's Change a Light Campaign. Interestingly, both of these
programs use social networks, commitment, norms, and feedback to
promote the adoption of energy-efficient light bulbs. And both have
been structured using the principles of community-based social
marketing which readily overlap with elements of an approach rooted in
a concern for social, rather than economic, rationality. (See Ehrhardt-
Martinez et al., 2009).
The ENERGY STAR Change a Light Campaign, led by the U.S. EPA,
requires participants to pledge to change at least one light bulb in
their house with one that has earned the ENERGY STAR. Individuals and
organizations can participate by logging on to the ENERGY STAR web
site\4\ and specifying how many light bulbs they plan to change.
Individuals can also become ``pledge drivers'' by committing to get
their community or organization involved in the campaign and committing
to promoting the change of at least 100 light bulbs. Participants
provide their name, zip code and organizational affiliation, allowing
pledge drivers and EPA staff to track their progress and access
established social networks to promote change and establish new social
norms. The progress of each organization is tracked online-observable
for all to see. The public tracking prompts passive competition among
pledge drivers and presents an opportunity to recognize top performers.
Moreover, the web site offers special resources for teachers, retailers
and government leaders to work with students, consumers, and
communities.
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\4\ http://www.energystar.gov/index.cfm?fuseaction=cal.showPledge
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Project Porchlight is a similar initiative run by a Canadian non-
profit organization called One Change based in Ottawa, Ontario. The
campaign works with Hydro Ottawa, the City of Ottawa, volunteers and
other partners to effect social and environmental change. The original
goal of the campaign was to get 200,000 households in Ottawa to change
at least one inefficient incandescent light bulb to one energy-
efficient CFL by providing residents with a free light bulb. By using
existing networks, the project encourages local action in neighborhoods
and within groups by working with group members who deliver light bulbs
door to door. Light bulb recipients make a commitment to their
neighbors that they will install the light bulb (preferably in a
prominent place) as a symbol of their commitment to the effort; an
action which also provides a first step in shaping their identity as
someone who is willing to take action to reduce their environmental
impact (One Change, 2008). Early in 2008, the project successfully
surpassed their revised goal of delivering more than one million
energy-efficient bulbs.
According to McKenzie-Mohr and Smith (2007), direct appeals that
ask people to commit to take a specific action achieve higher levels of
behavior change. If a person agrees to take a specific action, they are
likely to follow through on it, especially if the commitment has been
made publicly. They state that because human beings have a need to
appear consistent, we are likely to agree to future similar requests
for our commitment as well. This holds true even if the next request is
larger, occurs after much time has passed, and comes from a different
group than that of the initial request. Agreeing to the first request
is actually thought to alter how one sees oneself, and in an enduring
way.
Social and behavioral insights can also be used to change behaviors
associated with habits and lifestyles. For example, several studies
have explored the role of social norms in determining environmentally
responsible behaviors. In 1990, Cialdini et al. investigated the effect
of norms on individuals' decisions to despoil the environment. In the
study, ``participants were given the opportunity to litter in either a
previously clean or fully littered environment after first witnessing a
confederate who either dropped trash into the environment or simply
walked through it.'' Cialdini et al. hypothesized that: 1) participants
would be more likely to litter in the already littered environment than
into a clean one; 2) participants who witnessed the confederate drop
trash into a fully littered environment would be the most likely to
litter there themselves because their attention would be drawn to the
pro-littering descriptive norm; and 3) participants who saw the
confederate drop trash into a clean environment would be least likely
to litter there, because their attention would be drawn to evidence of
an anti-littering descriptive norm. In fact, the study found that 32
percent of the participants littered in the littered environment
without the confederate while 54 percent of participants littered in
the same environment when the confederate did litter. The third
hypothesis was also supported by the finding that only 14 percent of
participants littered in the clean environment when the confederate did
not litter, while a mere six percent of participants littered in the
same environment when the confederate littered.
In a more recent study of energy conservation, Schultz et al.
(2007) investigated ``respondents' views of their reasons for
conserving energy at home as well as reports of their actual
residential energy saving activities such as installing energy-
efficient appliances and light bulbs, adjusting thermostats, and
turning off lights.'' A study of the relationship between participants'
stated reasons for saving energy and their energy saving actions
indicated that conservation behaviors were most strongly correlated
with the perception that other people were participating. According to
Schultz, ``this belief that others were conserving correlated twice as
highly with reported energy saving efforts than did any of the reasons
that had been rated as more important personal motivators.'' This work
has recently been taken one step further through a number of innovative
program designs being implemented through some electric utilities. In a
recent review of Positive Energy's work in this area, the application
of social norms and other behavioral insights was found to be effective
in generating a two to three percent reduction in energy consumption
during a nine-month implementation period.
Social and behavioral insights can both enable technology-based
energy savings and provide additional savings through the development
of energy-wise habits, decisions and lifestyles. Importantly, these
types of approaches offer low-cost options for achieving dramatic
energy savings. Unfortunately they are largely missing from existing
DOE initiatives.
As stated in the introduction to this testimony, the primary driver
of the Building Technologies Program activities is the D.O.E. zero
energy building research initiative.\5\ In order to meet the
initiative's goal of achieving zero energy buildings, every effort will
need to be made to achieve the extreme energy efficiency goals in
building design and construction, equipment choice, and building and
equipment operation. Social and behavioral research and insights will
be a critical component in meeting these goals. As such, it is
imperative that:
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\5\ Zero energy buildings produce as much energy as they use over
the course of a year.
D.O.E.'s work more adequately address the human
elements that are integral to achieving their energy-efficiency
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
goals,
support and learn from the work of social and
behavioral scientists,
develop a social and behavioral initiative as part of
their own work, and
provide financial support in order to expand on
existing research in this field of study.
The long history of technology-centric programs has failed to
substantially narrow the gap between the energy saving potential of
existing cost-effective technologies and actual levels of energy
savings. Social and behavioral insights can help close that gap if
we're willing to invest in them.
Conclusions
The full array of evidence provided in this testimony suggests that
more research and development is needed to explore, develop and apply
social and behavioral insights and interventions. Similarly, evidence
provided herein also suggests that such insights and initiatives offer
the possibility of a significantly improved effectiveness of D.O.E.'s
building technologies initiatives as well as increased energy savings.
Behavior-related approaches represent an essential component of
energy and climate change efforts. In fact, the principal drivers of
our current energy and climate challenges are human choices, behaviors,
and lifestyles. As such, they must also be an essential part of any
attempt to address these challenges, if we hope to be successful in our
efforts. In other words, human and organizational behavior are a
critical component of both the causes of, and solutions to, our energy
and climate problems.
While the DOE's initiatives will undoubtedly benefit greatly from a
more systematic and widespread incorporation of social and behavioral
insights, this will not happen without increased funding for associated
research and development.
Such an effort would go a long way toward closing the gaps that
currently exist between: potential and actual energy savings on the one
hand and between favorable attitudes and less-favorable behaviors on
the other. In short, mobilizing our population to adopt energy smart
behaviors and technologies will require the insights provided by social
and behavioral scientists. These insights need to become a larger part
of the efforts at the U.S. Department of Energy.
References
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White. 1987. ``Energy Conservation and Public Policy: The
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Armel, Carrie. 2008. ``Behavior and Energy.'' A presentation prepared
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Berkeley Lab News Center. 2008. ``Powering Down in Juneau.'' Berkeley
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Energy Efficient Economy.
Gardner, Gerald T. and Paul C. Stern. 2008. ``The Short List: The Most
Effective Actions U.S. Households can take to Curb Climate
Change.'' Environment 50(5), 12-24.
Laitner, John A. ``Skip,'' Ehrhardt-Martinez, Karen, and Vanessa
McKinney. 2009. ``Examining the Scale of the Behavior Energy
Efficiency Continuum.'' ECEEE Summer Study paper. Stockholm,
Sweden: European Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy.
McKenzie-Mohr, Doug and William Smith. 2007. Fostering Sustainable
Behavior: An Introduction to Community-Based Social Marketing.
Gabriola Island, British Columbia: New Society Publishers.
Meier, Allen. 2005. Saving Energy in a Hurry: Dealing with Temporary
Shortfalls on Electricity Suppliers. International Energy
Agency: OECD Publishing.
[NPR] National Public Radio. 2008. ``With Juneau's Power Restored,
Conservation Drops.'' Morning Edition. (August 15, 2008)
Washington, D.C.: National Public Radio.
One Change. 2008. ``Project Porchlight.'' Available online at: http://
www.projectporchlight.com/
Parnell, R. and O. Popovic Larsen. 2005. ``Informing the Development of
Domestic Energy Efficiency Initiatives: An Everyday
Householder-Centered Framework.'' Environment and Behavior
37(6):787-807.
Sanstad, Alan, W. Michael Hanemann, and Maximillian Auffhammer. 2006.
``End Use Energy Efficiency in a ``Post Carbon'' California
Economy'' (Ch 6) in Managing Greenhouse Gas Emissions in
California. Berkeley, CA: The California Climate Change Center,
UC-Berkeley.
Schultz P.W., J.M. Nolan, R.B. Cialdini, N.J. Goldstein, and V.
Griskevicius. 2007. ``The Constructive, Destructive, and
Reconstructive Power of Social Norms.'' Psychological Science
(May).
Stern, P.C. and E. Aronson. 1984. Energy Use: The Human Dimension. New
York, NY: W.H. Freeman and Company.
Thaler, Richard H. and Cass R. Sunstein. 2008. Nudge: Improving
Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness. New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press.
Turrentine , Thomas S. and Kenneth S. Kurani. 2006. ``Car Buyers and
fuel economy?'' Energy Policy 35:1213-1223.
Biography for Karen Ehrhardt-Martinez
Karen Ehrhardt-Martinez is a Research Associate with the American
Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE). With more than 15
years of experience in academic and applied research, Karen currently
works in the Economic and Social Analysis Program at ACEEE were she is
responsible for leading the organization's efforts on the social and
behavioral dimensions of energy efficiency and environmental change.
Karen is currently serving as the Conference Chairman for the 2009
Behavior, Energy and Climate Change Conference to be held November
15th-18th in Washington, D.C. Karen has a Ph.D. and M.A. in Sociology
from The Ohio State University and a Bachelor's degree in International
Studies.
Chairman Baird. Thank you very much, Doctor.
Dr. McQuade.
STATEMENT OF DR. J. MICHAEL MCQUADE, SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT,
SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY, UNITED TECHNOLOGIES CORPORATION
Dr. McQuade. Good morning, Mr. Chairman, Ranking Member
Inglis and Members of the Committee. Thank you for the
opportunity to be here today. I am Michael McQuade, Senior Vice
President for Science and Technology from United Technologies
Corporation. I am pleased to share my thoughts about the need
and opportunity to invest in basic research in building system
science to dramatically reduce the energy consumed and carbon
emitted by buildings.
We are very pleased with President Obama's commitment to a
robust R&D agenda as expressed in his remarks yesterday at the
National Academy of Sciences. We believe that the investments
in building system science described here align directly with
his vision and can be aggressively accomplished within the DOE
portfolio of ARPA-E, EERE and the Office of Science.
We believe it is vital to pursue basic research in
mathematical and computational capabilities to optimize the
design, construction, commissioning and operation of complex
buildings, in systems, sciences and whole-building approaches
and in multi-institutional national laboratory, academia and
industrial partnerships to prototype and demonstrate this
science and technology in real buildings across multiple real
applications. Investments in the range of $50 million per year
for five years will lead to deployable science, technology and
products that will ensure that the full potential of energy
savings are captured over the useful life of buildings. This is
a critical initiative to reducing energy consumption, decrease
greenhouse gas emissions and improve this country's energy
security.
United Technologies is a $55 billion global aerospace and
building infrastructure technology-driven company. As one of
the leading suppliers to the built environment, we are keenly
aware of, and interested in, the role that buildings play in
energy and climate. As we have said multiple times today,
buildings consume about 40 percent of the energy used in the
United States and are responsible for nearly 40 percent of the
greenhouse gas emissions. To put this in perspective, a 50
percent reduction in building energy consumption in the United
States is equivalent to removing the carbon emissions from
every car and light truck on the road today in the United
States. These are very big numbers and they represent very big
opportunities.
UTC is a co-chair of the 14-company World Business Council
for Sustainable Development Project on Energy Efficiency in
Buildings. Yesterday this project released the first results
from a landmark study on actions needed for reducing building
energy consumption and the resulting carbon emissions. Among
the key findings is that a transformation of the building
industry is essential and achievable if we are to reach the
nearly 80 percent reduction in carbon emissions called for by
the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. This study
documents that significant progress can be made against this
goal with cost-effective deployment of energy-efficient
components based on known technologies at market-acceptable
investment costs. However, if we are to reach the full 80
percent reduction goal, we need new science that treats
buildings as complex systems of interactive components coupled
to their occupants and to their external environment.
A recent DOE study cited six examples of high-performance
buildings whose design intent was to deliver as much as 80
percent more efficient energy use than standard buildings.
Through sub-optimal integration during the construction and
operation phase, these buildings actually delivered less than
half this desired performance. UTC recommends that DOE continue
its vital public-private partnerships to address energy-
efficient building components, and at the same time it is
essential to increase the research, development and deployment
of the science needed to understand and optimize buildings as
whole systems. With a deeper scientific base enabled by
mathematics, computational science and control sciences, it is
possible to combine energy-efficient components into
intelligent and even more efficient systems so that whole
buildings perform as designed and sustain that performance
during a lifetime of operation.
UTC is a major supplier of energy-efficient products, but
we also are engaged in early-stage research in optimizing
building systems. For example, UTC is part of a collaboration
of national laboratory, academia and industry partners working
to demonstrate advanced control and information systems on the
campus of the University of California Merced's campus. This
program, partially sponsored by the DOE's EERE office, is
showing that through the use of advanced building control
algorithms, an additional 10 to 15 percent energy consumption
reduction in the campus cooling delivery system and up to a 20
percent additional energy savings for campus building HVAC
systems can be achieved.
We believe that a vigorous investment in the range of $50
million per year for five years will deliver significant new
science that can be deployed into public and private built
environments. This technology will serve as the basis for
products that the private sector will develop to make highly
efficient energy-efficient buildings the norm in the commercial
marketplace.
Energy efficiency and carbon reduction are critical
strategies for climate control and energy security. The
building sector represents a larger opportunity for greenhouse
gas emission reductions than either the transportation or
industry sectors. An enhanced national research strategy in
building sciences coupled with the already strong DOE program
in energy-efficient components for buildings will provide the
foundation for industry to deploy market-driven solutions to
reduce building energy. We look forward to working with
Congress and the DOE to advance this critical national need.
Thank you for the opportunity to be here today.
[The prepared statement of Dr. McQuade follows:]
Prepared Statement of J. Michael McQuade
Summary
The building sector consumes about 40 percent of the energy used in
the United States and is responsible for nearly 40 percent of
greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.
In addressing GHG reductions in the building sector the Department
of Energy (DOE), in collaboration with the private sector, should
continue to develop and deploy energy efficient building components
(lighting, heating, ventilation, air conditioning and other elements).
At the same time, there is an important push for research and
development in science and technology to understand and optimize a
whole building via a ``systems'' approach that ensures that efficiency
gains are properly designed and also sustained during building
operation.
UTC is one of the largest capital suppliers to the building
industry worldwide. As such, the development of both sustainable and
energy efficient products is of critical importance to UTC, its
suppliers and the markets and customers that it serves. UTC takes an
active industry role in addressing building energy usage. Key findings
of the three-year World Business Council for Sustainable Development
(WBCSD) project on Energy Efficiency in Buildings (EEB), for which UTC
is a co-chair, are that transformation of the building industry is
essential to achieving the 77 percent reduction of carbon emissions
called for by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The
transformation of the building sector to reach the carbon emissions
goal can occur only through a combination of public policies,
technological innovation and informed customer choices. These
reductions require:
Mandated federal building codes that recast
regulation for increased transparency on energy use; and
Ensuring buildings operate as designed by developing
and using smart technology to enable and assure continued
energy saving behaviors.
Among the key recommendations are:
Creation and enforcement of building energy
efficiency codes and labeling standards
Incentivizing energy-efficient investments
Encouraging integrated design approaches and
innovations
Funding energy savings technology development
programs
Developing workforce capacity for energy saving
Mobilizing for an energy-aware culture
The current design, construction, commissioning and operation
phases of the delivery process for buildings allows for efficiency
decay that often fails to deliver optimal energy savings. Achieving
approximately 80 percent energy reduction in buildings requires new
research and development (R&D) investments in a systems approach to
design and operations.
Two types of R&D investments are needed to attack the sources of
energy efficiency decay: (1) investments in computational capabilities
with specific attention to modeling, analysis, simulation and control
of buildings and (2) targeted programs to combine fundamental science &
technology with market impact to address specific market verticals in a
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) style model of
projects.
The R&D initiatives to enhance building efficiency and
functionality are only one element of a comprehensive national strategy
to achieve net zero energy buildings. Other elements should include:
the use of Energy Savings Performance Contracts (ESPC); mandated and
regular energy audits; implementation of a national performance-based
retrofit program; the establishment of a national energy efficiency
standard; support for demonstrations and deployment of emerging
technologies and products; education and workforce training;
development of a building technology roadmap; and financial incentives.
Introduction
As the House Science and Technology Committee considers R&D needs
for high-performance buildings, United Technologies Corporation (UTC)
offers recommendations on cost effective, innovative and
environmentally friendly ways to address energy efficiency using a
whole building or a ``systems'' approach.
UTC ranks #37 on the latest Fortune 500 listing and is one of 30
members of the Dow Jones Industrials. Our 2008 revenues were $58.7
billion. UTC products include: Carrier heating, air conditioning and
refrigeration; Otis elevators and escalators; Pratt & Whitney aircraft
engines; Sikorsky helicopter; Hamilton Sundstrand aerospace systems and
industrial products; UTC Fire & Security systems; and UTC Power fuel
cells. We are a company of innovators and pioneers. Elisha Otis
invented the safety elevator that made multi-story buildings usable;
Willis Carrier invented modern air conditioning--just to mention two
examples. So, as one of the largest suppliers to the global building
industry and a leader in energy reduction, both in our own operations
and through energy efficient innovations in our products and services,
UTC brings a credible voice to the policy debate.
UTC takes an active industry role in addressing building energy
usage. As a co-chair of the three-year long World Business Council for
Sustainable Development (WBCSD) project on Energy Efficiency in
Buildings (EEB), along with thirteen other major multinational
corporations representing various aspects of building design,
construction, delivery and operations, UTC is working to identify the
barriers, levers, and necessary actions to achieve market
transformation and a much needed pathway to net zero energy buildings
(NZEB)--those buildings that, over a period of a year, consume no
energy. Among other important findings is the fact that professionals
in the building industry have widely underestimated the impact of
buildings on carbon emissions (by a factor of two) while significantly
overestimating the cost of sustainable construction (by a factor of
three). This knowledge gap is just one of several barriers to market
transformation of the building sector.
The EEB report released on April 27, 2009 finds that transformation
of the building industry to achieve the IPCC 77 percent reduction of
carbon emissions would require:
Mandated building energy codes that recast regulation
for increased transparency on energy use; and
Ensuring buildings operate as designed by developing
and using smart technology to enable and assure continued
energy saving behaviors.
The EEB report recommendations can be summarized as:
Create and enforce building energy efficiency codes
and labeling standards
Extend current codes and tighten over time
Display energy performance labels
Conduct energy inspections and audits on a regular
basis (not one time). This supports the continuous
commissioning process now gaining favor among advanced
energy users.
Incentivize energy-efficient investments
Establish tax incentives, subsidies and creative
financial models to lower first-cost and technology
adoption hurdles
Encourage integrated design approaches and
innovations
Improve contractual terms to promote integrated
design teams
Incentivize integrated team formation
Fund energy savings technology development programs
Accelerate rates of efficiency improvement for
energy technologies
Improve building control systems to fully exploit
energy saving opportunities
Develop workforce capacity for energy saving
Create and prioritize training and vocational
programs
Develop ``system integrator'' profession
Mobilize for an energy-aware culture
Promote behavior change and improve understanding
across the sector
Businesses and governments lead by acting on their
building portfolios
Examples of UTC Energy Efficient Building Technologies
Increasing efficiency in buildings boosts productivity through the
reduction of energy costs. Developing better products that improve
energy efficiency offers new market opportunities. In 2006, George
David, at that time the CEO and Chairman of UTC, spoke at the WBCSD
meeting in Beijing:
``The lessons I bring from UTC are that we can always reduce
costs and increase productivity and performance. The same is
true for environmental impacts and potentially to an even
greater degree because companies generally haven't worked at
these as hard as they have at costs and corporate
profitability. Remember that more than 90 percent of the energy
coming out of the ground is wasted and doesn't end as useful.
This is the measure of what's in front of us and why we should
be excited.''
In addition to our collaborative efforts within the WBCSD, UTC is
also engaged in developing energy efficient products for buildings
including:
Otis' Gen2 elevators with regenerative drives: Up to
75 percent more energy efficient than comparable equipment a
decade ago, the Gen2 sends its excess power back to the
building's electrical grid.
Carrier's Evergreen tri-rotor screw chiller: The
world's most efficient water-cooled chiller delivers 40 percent
higher efficiency than current ASHRAE 90.1 efficiency
standards.
Carrier and UTC Power's combined heat and power (CHP)
products: These products put ``waste heat'' from prime movers,
such as fuel cells and micro-turbines, to productive use by
driving heating, ventilation and air conditioning equipment,
boosting efficiency from around 33 percent based on the
individual components to nearly 80 percent in the total
integrated system. Locating the system at the point of use
allows the building to productively use the waste heat and
avoid transmission line losses. The on-site attribute is a key
component of optimizing the system's performance.
A number of investments have been made at UTC and a number of
federal and State programs that can be utilized to move to increased
energy efficiency in buildings. The UTC experience in deploying and
supporting energy efficient products to the global building sector and
providing a range of energy services has convinced us that a systems
approach will result in even greater gains.
Understanding Energy Losses in the Delivery Process: Targeting R&D
Achieving energy savings through increasing building efficiency
gains represents a tremendous opportunity. The building sector consumes
about 40 percent of the energy used in the United States and is
responsible for nearly 40 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. For
comparison, the entire transport sector represents only 28 percent of
energy use. A 50 percent reduction in buildings' energy usage would be
equivalent to taking every passenger vehicle and small truck in the
United States off the road. A 70 percent reduction in buildings' energy
usage is equivalent to eliminating the energy consumption of the entire
U.S. transportation sector. These levels of energy reduction in
buildings are achievable but the United States today lacks the market
drivers as well as the underlying science and technology infrastructure
(including scientific and engineering workforce) to broadly realize
these levels of efficiency improvements in cost-effective ways. Setting
a targeted and aggressive R&D agenda is necessary to position the
United States effectively and a well-executed R&D agenda is critical to
increasing the competitive position of the United States.
The building sector is made up of multiple stakeholders and
decision-makers, including State & local government regulators,
builders, architects, service and repair companies, owners, realtors,
product manufacturers and energy suppliers. The delivery process for
buildings can be divided into design, construction, and maintenance
phases. It is important to highlight how energy efficiency losses occur
in this process.\1\
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\1\ Throughout each of these stages, the influence of federal,
State, and local regulation should be acknowledged. Current design and
construction protocols, implemented through myriad building and other
codes and regulations, can have an enormous impact on building energy
performance.
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Owners, architects and architecture & engineering firms set the
building design and consider their usage, aesthetics and the energy
consumption. The design stage has the highest leverage in the overall
delivery process by selecting the architecture and constraining the
overall design space. The selection of design elements can
significantly enhance--or limit--the ultimate performance depending on
how these elements interact. For example, increasing daylighting can
influence the amount of lighting that is needed which in turn affects
the overall heating and cooling load. These interactions can alter the
energy consumption in beneficial or detrimental ways.
The next stage of delivery is construction. Here, components are
considered against cost and schedule targets, and typically do not
capture the integrated elements of design that are key to efficient
energy performance of the whole building.
The last stage, or two stages, relate to the so-called
commissioning and post-occupancy, or operations phase of the building.
Commissioning should start during design and not just at the tail end
of construction. The point to highlight here is that the design intent
must be verified and the operations must ensure persistence of design
intent.
As a result the current delivery process has energy efficiency
losses at four points, outlined below, which represent major barriers
to achieving the energy performance transformation required in the
broad building stock:
1. Design: Inadequate design exploration and the efficacy of
the tools that can be deployed for critical trade studies;
2. Construction: Inadequate coupling of design intent to value
engineering needed to maintain the energy performance intended
by design;
3. Commissioning: Ensuring that the construction process and
installation have been faithful to the design intent with
respect to whole building energy performance and not just
functional tests at a component level;
4. Operations: Ensuring persistence of the design intent as
components age and the building changes usage due to movement
of tenants and different occupant needs and as operators
override the intended operating sequences.
It is critical to understand where energy efficiency is lost to be
able to target R&D.
R&D Elements For A Systems Approach
A systems approach can reduce the energy efficiency losses by
identifying and controlling the interactions among building subsystems.
In this way it is possible to drive down energy consumption
dramatically and to ensure that these energy savings persist. It is
critical, though, to understand that the substantial science and
technology base to reliably and in a cost effective manner realize such
savings in the market simply does not exist today.
Two basic flaws in the current design and operation of buildings
contribute to poor energy performance. First, the design and
construction of commercial buildings do not utilize metrics or tools to
identify and quantify critical interactions, or ``coupling,'' between
subsystems. Computational tools are not used initially in the design
phase nor are these couplings tracked during the changing construction
process. Second, the coupling between subsystems are neither monitored
nor controlled to avoid the erosion of performance in operation of the
building.
The reality of today's methodology and tools is that attempting to
couple subsystems--even using higher performance (efficient) components
than are routinely used today--does not regularly deliver the levels of
efficiency gains needed and, in some cases, produces negative effects
from improper integration. Case studies show that even new buildings
that are constructed with state-of-the-art ``energy efficient''
technologies can fail to achieve desired levels of efficiency due to
the detrimental coupling of modified subsystems. A study of high-
performance buildings by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory
(NREL) demonstrated that even with a range of advanced component
technology (ground source heat pumps, an under floor air distribution
system, daylighting, and high-performance windows), when the systems
were not properly integrated, the building measured a 44 percent
reduction ratio versus 80 percent when all components were fully
integrated. Unfortunately, the NREL results are not atypical and
represent a significant barrier to wide scale adoption of high-
performance integrated building systems.
The systems approach considers a building as a complex dynamic
system that has considerable uncertainty in both operating parameters
and the operating environment. Indeed, the Brown report\2\ states:
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\2\ D.L. Brown, J. Bell, D. Estep, W. Gropp, B. Hendrickson, S.
Keller-McNulty, D. Keyes, J.T. Oden, L. Petzold, and M. Wright. Applied
Mathematics: A Report by an Independent Panel from the Applied
Mathematics Research Community. Technical report, Lawrence Livermore
National Laboratory, 2008.
A complex system is a collection of multiple processes,
entities or nested subsystems where the overall system is
difficult to understand and analyze because of the following
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properties:
The system components do not necessarily have
mathematically similar structures and may involve
different scales in time or space;
The number of components may be large,
sometimes enormous;
Components can be connected in a variety of
different ways, most often nonlinearly and/or via a
network. Furthermore, local and system-wide phenomena
may depend on each other in complicated ways;
The behavior of the overall system can be
difficult to predict from the behavior of individual
components. Moreover, the overall system behavior may
evolve along qualitatively different pathways that may
display great sensitivity to small perturbations at any
stage.
Such systems are often described as ``multi-component
systems,'' or when the components are physics based, ``multi-
physics systems.'' When the components involve multiple spatial
or temporal scales, the adjective ``multi-scale'' can be used
as well.
The challenges for buildings reflect precisely those stated for
complex systems: to predict the overall behavior, which depends
critically on the coupling of the subsystems, and the uncertainties in
the built environment.
The coupling of components is difficult to achieve and requires the
development and use of new science and engineering approaches to avoid
the detrimental coupling discussed in the NREL work mentioned above.
New science, design methodologies and tools will then be used to
capture the complex couplings, enable the deployment of technologies
that can take advantage of the natural dynamics of the building (e.g.,
natural ventilation, free cooling, and thermal storage).
More specifically, what is needed for targeted R&D relative to the
picture of energy efficiency losses and the benefits of a systems
approach for complex dynamical systems. In our view several specific
R&D elements at the science & technology level should be established.
We believe these recommendations are necessary in order to meet the
challenge laid out by Secretary of Energy, Dr. Steven Chu, in his March
2009 testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on
Science and Technology wherein he states:
We need to do more transformational research at DOE to bring a
range of clean energy technologies to the point where the
private sector can pick them up, including: Computer design
tools for commercial and residential buildings that enable
reductions in energy consumption of up to 80 percent with
investments that will pay for themselves in less than 10 years;
and . . ..
Computational R&D Thrusts
The foundational elements UTC believes will support this vision are
computational support for design, optimization and control. Attention
to modeling, analysis, simulation and control is also advisable along
the following directions:
Systems Engineering and Design Methodologies
Rigorous and scalable process and tool environment
for building project requirements management & system
architecture exploration
Integrated mechanical and control design methodology
and simulation environment
Architectural exploration tools with rigorous
capture of performance uncertainties
Optimization and Control of Multi-scale Dynamics
Analytical techniques for system decomposition,
analysis and uncertainty propagation in heterogeneous,
networked, multi-scale building systems
Optimization and simulation techniques for multi-
scale computations
Nonlinear dynamical systems theory tools to exploit
natural dynamics
Robust Control and Decision Support Algorithms
Control and Commissioning Systems
Supervisory and de-centralized control theory and
algorithms
Estimation and machine learning techniques to
synthesize actionable information from heterogeneous,
asynchronous and uncertain data streams
Automated fault detection and diagnostic (FDD)
capabilities using building automation systems
The focus here is on computational capabilities. Hardware testbeds
should be used to validate models and capture the relevant physics for
sub-scale experiments to provide environments where subsystem
interactions can be captured in a controlled environment, and help
identify gaps in existing components. There should be a range of
testbeds which move from sub-scale to full scale systems. The testbeds
are also a critical element to enable teaming between academic,
National Laboratories and industry and to facilitate adoption of new
technologies by end-users.
It is worth emphasizing that these areas of R&D targets are not
unfamiliar to other industries.\3\ In the aerospace and automotive
sectors, performance requirements have driven both investments in
underlying science and technology along the lines of computational
support for design, optimization and control along the lines listed
above.
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\3\ See for example the PITAC report ``Computational Science:
Ensuring America's Competitiveness,'' June 2005.
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UTC has partnered with numerous federal and State agencies to
further technology and standards development. In particular the United
Technologies Research Center led, proposed and executed a National
Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Advanced Technology
Program project, ``Integrated Building Energy and Control Systems
(IBECS),'' that focused on system-level modeling and simulation
environments as a means of understanding and reducing building energy
consumption. UTC is developing advanced control and information systems
to improve energy efficiency in buildings using a systems approach to
building modeling and operation in collaboration with Lawrence Berkeley
National Laboratory, the University of California at Berkeley, and the
University of California at Santa Barbara, and seeks to demonstrate
those technologies on the University of California at Merced's campus.
This program, co-sponsored by DOE's Energy Efficiency & Renewable
Energy, the California Energy Commission, and UTC, represents an
example of multi-disciplinary teams composed of industry, academia and
National Laboratories. The program's work is also an example of full
scale demonstrations that must be carried out to enable risk reduction
of new technologies in building energy performance but that utilize
foundational science and technology.
In addition to the development of science & technology, a number of
UTC business units participate in standards bodies. Work in inter-
operability with the BACnet\4\ standard has been led by Automated Logic
Corporation (ALC) while engagement with the ASHRAE 90.1 standard has
been strongly engaged by Architectural Energy Corporation (AEC), both
of which are units of Carrier.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\4\ BACnet is a data communication protocol for building automation
and control networks. BACnet was developed by the American Society of
Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) to
create a protocol that would allow building systems from different
manufacturers to inter-operate.
R&D Thrusts to Fuse Foundational Science & Technology with Market
Transformation
The building industry in the area of energy consumption lags behind
other industries in the use of computation, theory and information
technology. Also, while the automotive and aerospace industries serve
as a starting point in what is needed for the science and technology
base, much work needs to be done to understand the relevant physics,
capture the physics into appropriate modeling tools, and develop
computational and analysis algorithms. Furthermore, additional work is
necessary to tailor research to the needs of buildings and to enable a
work force that can effectively use the new methodology and tool set.
These efforts transcend any one company and are therefore appropriate
for DOE investments.
Computational infrastructure is critical to remove points where
energy efficiency is potentially lost and to enabling cost effective
scaling of new design processes such as the Integrated Project Delivery
approach for concurrent engineering advocated by the industry.\5\ This
R&D thrust by itself, though, is not enough to achieve transformational
change. We believe that DARPA style investments, such as those that
could be accomplished within the Office of Science in the newly created
ARPA-E organization, are also necessary. We believe that large, multi-
institutional, focused teams with specific milestones and aggressive
metrics are necessary to advance energy performance enhancement
solutions. One area that could utilize such investments is the design
and operation of retrofits. In this area investments are needed that
develop and utilize science and technology but also include prototyping
and technology demonstration at scale.
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\5\ Integrated Project Delivery: A Guide, The American Institute of
Architects, 2007.
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In the area of retrofitting, R&D targets should include similar
elements to those recommended above for the computational development
but should target specific technologies and increase the performance of
targeted market verticals. Elements of such an R&D program should
include the following:
Building performance assessment
-- Need: Process and tools for rapid failure mode
assessment, sensing, model calibration, and analysis of
the lack of building performance.
-- Response: Mathematical tools, measurement systems,
scalable algorithms and application (for example
focusing on DOD, GSA, and university campuses).
Design of systems for effective and robust retrofits
-- Need: Process and tools for trade studies and
optimization of multi-scale dynamic systems (focusing
especially on emerging technologies: active facades,
natural ventilation, passive heating and cooling
technologies).
-- Response: Tools (integrated within BIM) and
application.
Robust and persistent implementation
-- Need: Modular platforms (equipment and controls)
and decision support (for rapid implementation and
performance persistence).
-- Response: Scalable, simple-to-use toolset, DOD/GSA/
campus implementation.
In summary there should be two types of R&D investments to attack
the sources of energy efficiency loss. One is investments in
computational infrastructure. The other is large, targeted programs to
attack specific issues and market verticals and to couple the science &
technology with demonstrations.
We believe that a heavier focus on fundamentals in the R&D
portfolio than has occurred in the recent DOE history is required to
move the needle on energy consumption in buildings. We believe that the
two specific thrusts above are needed in addition to tighter
coordination between elements of DOE, specifically, the computational
resources within the Office of Science and the building domain
expertise and demonstrations currently within the Energy Efficiency and
Renewable Energy office.
Policy Recommendations: Comprehensive National Strategy
The House Science and Technology Committee must address the
potential future contributions that can be made from supporting and
overseeing basic and applied scientific research, development,
demonstration, commercial application of advanced energy technologies,
and energy efficiency. But this is just one piece of the jigsaw puzzle.
In the short-term, Congress should take immediate steps to
encourage and enhance building efficiency. Specifically, Congress
should enact legislation that promotes investment in energy efficiency
in the buildings sector, for example The American Recovery and
Reinvestment Act of 2009 provided tax incentives to spur investment in
energy efficiency, funding for energy efficiency and green buildings
and support for various science and technology programs.
Congress should continue to focus on energy efficiency in buildings
as it considers comprehensive energy and climate change policy through
a number of relatively short-term measures including:
Use of Energy Savings Performance Contracts (ESPC)
that will multiply the job creation potential of recovery funds
used for energy efficiency projects, and will ensure those
funds are used in a transparent and verifiable manner.
Establishment of a national performance based
standard for building retrofits that measures success in energy
efficiency based on actual measured savings after a retrofit is
complete.
Energy audits for existing buildings should be
required to ensure that existing property is operating at the
highest level of efficiency. All commercial buildings should
commit to ongoing (i.e., at least every three years) energy
surveys to measure and monitor energy use, and to identify
opportunities for improvement.
Those who invest in reducing energy consumption and
demonstrate validated results should be eligible for
accelerated deprecation schedules or other financial
incentives.
Establishment of a national energy efficiency
standard either as a stand alone requirement or included as a
compliance mechanism as part of a national renewable
electricity standard to encourage low emission, high efficiency
base load energy resources.
A systems approach to tying these technologies
together in commercial buildings and removing regulatory
barriers to implementing near- and long-term cost-effective net
zero energy building approaches.
In the longer-term, UTC believes that in order for investments to
fully realize the benefits of whole building design and operation, the
DOE and other agencies must address a number of science and technology
issues including:
Recommendation I: Measurement and Transparency.
The Federal Government, especially the Department of Energy
and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, should
consider establishing measurement science for building energy
performance and devising common measurement standards and
metrics to ensure that building energy performance can be
effectively evaluated by the marketplace. Such evaluation
should include the measurement of energy efficiency at the
whole building level both in the design stage, using
computational methodologies, as well as in the commissioning
and operations stages.
Recommendation II: Technology and Organization.
The Federal Government should create specific research
programs implemented through private-public partnerships to
maximize the effectiveness of technology development and
transition. Research and technology investments must be made in
systems: the creation of system engineering practices and
associated design processes and tools. The newly established
Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) is supported
by UTC and the recommendation is to create an office within
ARPA-E whose investments would solely focus on systems
methodologies, tools and technologies for building energy
efficiency. Projects in the ARPA-E portfolio should be
conducted on a multi-year basis with joint university-National
Laboratory-industry teams.
Recommendation III: Computational Methodology and
Tools.
The Federal Government should initiate programs that build
foundational infrastructure in modeling, simulation, analysis
and controls focused on building systems. The portfolio should
include elements that address (a) capturing fundamental
physics, (b) developing simulation algorithms and computational
infrastructure tailored to building physics and (c) developing
analysis tailored to the specific dynamics of the built
environment. Automated fault detection and diagnostics would be
included in this set of tools.
Recommendation IV: Facilities.
The Federal Government should encourage public-private
partnerships with incentives to promote facilities that help
users validate and test the performance of hardware and
software in a real, integrated building environment to reduce
risk and enable wide-scale commercialization, particularly for
``systems'' technologies and solutions. Demonstration projects
to engage key stakeholders in the buildings industry will
reduce risk for deployment to the entire building stock. The
DOE Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy program portfolio
should be augmented with systems technology and methods should
be matured through relevant demonstration programs that are
planned and executed with joint multi-disciplinary university-
National Laboratory-industry teams.
Recommendation V: Talent.
The Federal Government should invest in education and
training carried out to define the new knowledge and skills
required by the methods, systems, and tools for deploying and
maintaining systems. University and government buildings and
facilities should be used as case studies and demonstration
sites for advanced monitoring, control, simulation models,
prototypes, component, and systems research. There must be
engagement with all components of post secondary education
including professional and vocational training with community
colleges and other organizations for building design,
construction, commissioning, energy analysis, energy
accounting, and operations to ensure a talent base that can
design, install and maintain building systems.
Thank you for the opportunity to submit this testimony to the
Committee. I would be delighted to respond to any follow up questions
regarding this testimony or the recommendations contained within.
Biography for J. Michael McQuade
J. Michael McQuade is Senior Vice President for Science &
Technology at United Technologies Corporation. His responsibilities
include providing strategic oversight and guidance for research,
engineering and development activities throughout the business units of
the Corporation and at the United Technologies Research Center. He also
provides leadership to UTC Power, UTC's business unit responsible for
the research, design, commercialization and after-market support of
stationary and transportation fuel cells.
McQuade has held senior positions with technology development and
business oversight at 3M, Imation and Eastman Kodak. Prior to joining
UTC in 2006 he served as Vice President of 3M's Medical Division.
Previously, he was President of Eastman Kodak's Health Imaging
Business. Earlier, McQuade held technology and business leadership
positions at Imation Corporation after its spin-off from 3M in 1996.
His early career at 3M was focused on research and development of high-
end acquisition, processing and display systems for health care,
industrial imaging and remote sensing. He has broad experience managing
basic technologies and the conversion of early stage research into
business growth.
McQuade holds doctorate, Master of Science and Bachelor of Science
degrees in physics from Carnegie Mellon University. He obtained his
Ph.D. in experimental high-energy physics for research on hadronic
charm quark production performed at the Fermi National Accelerator
Laboratory.
McQuade is a member of the American Physical Society and is a
member of the Boards of Directors of the Connecticut Science Center,
the Connecticut Technology Council and the advisory boards of the
Schools of Engineering at Yale University, the University of California
at Berkeley, the University of Connecticut and the Institute for Energy
Efficiency at the University of California at Santa Barbara. He is also
a member of the Board of Trustees for the Center for Excellence in
Education and Board of Directors of Project HOPE.
United Technologies Corp., based in Hartford, Conn., is a
diversified company providing high technology products and services to
the aerospace and building industries worldwide. Its businesses include
Pratt & Whitney aircraft engines, Sikorsky helicopters, Hamilton
Sundstrand commercial and military airplane and space-based systems,
Carrier heating, air conditioning and refrigeration equipment, Otis
elevators and escalators, Chubb and Kidde security and fire detection
and prevention systems, and the world leading fuel cell products from
UTC Power.
Discussion
Chairman Baird. Thank you very much. I thank all the
panelists for very, very informative and stimulating input. We
will now proceed with questioning. The procedure basically is
that each of us asks about five minutes' worth of questions and
then we alternate sides. We have been joined as well by Ms.
Edwards. You are right to be proud of your Representative. She
is a fantastic Member of this Congress. Ms. Giffords was here a
moment ago, Mr. Matheson and Mr. Tonko as well, all very
active, committed Members of the Committee, very interested in
this. We are grateful for their presence as well and we will
proceed then with questions.
An Integrated Approach to Energy Efficiency
What strikes me as I listen to you folks is that clearly
the 40 percent figure is a very, very prominent part of our
energy equation. It seems to me that all of you have a
fundamental role to play. To what extent--we have got this
great gathering of experts here on this committee. To what
extent do you actually work together in the real world? And by
that, I mean to what extent does DOE work with each of you, to
what extent does, for example, UT work with the social
behavioral side, does social behavioral side work with the code
side, with the industrial--talk to us a little bit about that.
Can you do more? Do you do enough? How can we facilitate that?
Mr. Coad.
Mr. Coad. Mr. Chairman, getting on Dr. Ehrhardt's subject,
I believe that energy and the proper use of energy is an ethic.
I think we have to find some way to get the public, the people
to adopt the ethic. Energy efficiency isn't--this isn't rocket
science. This is very simple. When you walk out of the room,
you turn off the light. When you are not using the building,
you put it on an idle mode and you don't leave it running 24
hours a day because you are only occupying it for eight. So I
think we work together. I learn a lot from being around people
like we have on the panel and this subcommittee. We are
continually learning. Energy efficiency is not rocket science.
Chairman Baird. But we still need this integrated approach.
Mr. Coad. It has to be integrated right on through but it
is not rocket science, and when we talk about efficiency, we
are talking about doing things more efficiently but doing the
same work, keeping the same productivity up. That is what the
high-performance is all about.
Chairman Baird. I have advocated, and some of my colleagues
tire of me saying this but after various trips around the world
and seeing what is happening to rain forests, icecaps, coral
reefs, my own belief is, we ought to make a national commitment
to a 20 percent reduction in energy in 20 weeks, not by 2020
but 20 weeks, and I think we have evidence that it can done if
there were an ethic and if we used behavioral sciences and if
we integrated with the technology, and by the way, as some of
you said, that is not true necessarily. We do have to use the
gee whiz new technologies, maybe solar, photovoltaic paint, et
cetera, things of that sort, but we could do this behaviorally
without additional costs and an enormous savings very promptly.
Dr. Ehrhardt-Martinez, talk to us a little bit about the
social scientists can integrate with some of the other
testimony we have heard today.
Dr. Ehrhardt-Martinez. Well, I think, you know, to a
certain degree it does happen. The problem is that to a large
degree it doesn't happen in a systematic way or a widespread
way, and particularly I think there is a lot to be gained
within the DOE programs for a more concerted effort to really
include the social sciences at all stages and throughout all of
the programs that they work on. You know, it has been--if you
look at all of the funding that has gone to climate change
research, two percent or less has gone to the social and
behavioral sciences. It is a minuscule amount, but yet, as I
said in my testimony, you know, there really--you know, if we
really--it really is a human problem. I mean, it is a human-
created problem, and if we really want to understand how to
address this problem, we really need to incorporate the social
and behavioral sciences to unlock, you know, the knowledge that
exists and apply it to these questions about why is there these
two persisting gaps between what the technology can provide in
terms of energy savings and what is really provided. It is a
human equation.
Chairman Baird. Let us ask Mr. Chalk then a little bit.
What Dr. Ehrhardt-Martinez has said I obviously agree with and
I think we have abundant evidence to it. Mr. Coad pointed out
there is an ethic, it is a behavioral element. Given that, to
what extent does DOE involve human behavioral sciences, whether
it is economics, psychology, sociology, et cetera, even
anthropology in some cases maybe, to these various programs
that it oversees on building industrial efficiency?
Mr. Chalk. Well, specifically, this is an important area.
In fact, we are in the process of hiring somebody with a
behavioral science background. But to answer your earlier
question about how we work, I mean, Mr. Cicio mentioned he is
pleased with our industrial program, which is another 33
percent----
Chairman Baird. Did you pay him to say that?
Mr. Chalk.--of the primary energy. So we are talking about
70 percent of the primary energy here today with industrial
plus the building efficiency. The other thing that we have done
in establishing our Commercial Buildings Initiative is worked
with code organizations, worked with companies like UTC on the
technology but also built alliances across the whole value
chain, working with the realtors, working with the building
owners, and the building owners are typically not the people
that occupy the buildings in the commercial space so sometimes
the building might be designed for another purpose than the
occupants are using it for or they decide to run two shifts
instead of one shift. So this gap that you have between design
intent and actual use of the building is very, very critical,
so we try to work with the whole value chain, if you will, of
retail associations and alliances. We have a national accounts
program that brings in big box developers and things like that.
So we try to work with the whole value chain until we get
everybody's input when we approach this from a systems
standpoint.
Chairman Baird. I want to acknowledge, Mr. Cicio, one brief
point about the realtors. One of my colleagues suggested or
actually a realtor back home, one of the prime opportunities
for doing residential retrofits on energy efficiency is at the
point of sale. So once the selling party has vacated the home
and the purchasing party hasn't moved in, that is when you hit
and we ought to have some way to target our incentives right at
that moment because you don't disrupt everybody's life. That is
when you really ought to--and we ought to be able to roll it
right into the mortgage, and if we are going to do some tax
incentives put that tax incentive right on at the point of the
transfer of the home or the business because that is when you
are most able to do that kind of work.
Mr. Cicio, you wanted to comment and then I will recognize
my colleagues.
Mr. Cicio. Yes. The cross-hair where we as manufacturers
cross over and work with the building people, we are suppliers
so when we improve the quality of the products, the diversities
of the products, whether it is for lighting or for simple
things like double-pane windows or glass insulation, we are the
providers of those materials for them. Where the ITP program
comes in is, it provides new technologies, breakthrough
technologies that help provide these new needed materials, but
also important is to help keep costs low because obviously you
have heard from Mr. Coad, it is about cost and it is about
economic return that helps drive energy efficiency.
Chairman Baird. So you are both consumers of energy in the
process of the manufacturing but producers of the new equipment
that is going to help us solve the problem?
Mr. Cicio. Absolutely.
Chairman Baird. Mr. Inglis.
Executing Best Practices in the Public
Mr. Inglis. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. You know, I was
talking to a physician recently about health care and he says
we all know what we need to do, we need to eat well, we need to
exercise, we need to sleep plenty, we need to drink plenty of
water, it is just we don't do it. And in the case of energy
usage, we all know what we need to do, right? It is just we
don't do it. So tell me how it is that we are going to do it. I
am hoping that one of you gives the secret answer. There is a
secret answer. So let us see if you know it. Yes, Dr. McQuade.
Dr. McQuade. Thank you very much. If I may, I think it is a
very true statement. I think in the energy efficiency building
study that was released yesterday, the sort of we know what we
should do and the economics of doing it come together for
something in the range of 40 to 50 percent of the reduction
that can be achieved. So today's technology, five-year
paybacks, market incentives to achieve that can really be
accomplished. I think to go beyond that to achieve the sort of
hyper-performance we want in buildings, the 80 percent
reduction is going to require a combination of new technologies
and new systems, and I would say that thinking about the things
I testified today about building systems, those combined with
human factors and behavioral sciences really to create
buildings, think about commercial buildings that actually tune
and optimize themselves. So it is one thing, for example, to
require or ask someone behaviorally to turn the lights off when
they leave the room, it is another thing to install motion
sensors to turn the lights off automatically. So we think there
is a key role that can be played by both the technology side
and the human factor side to achieve that. So back to your
question, I think a significant portion of the technology base
we have today can give us substantial reduction in building
energy consumption, 40 to 50 percent. To go beyond that to
achieve these really strong numbers is going to require the
kind of things that you heard today in terms of both technology
investment and human behavior investment.
Mr. Inglis. Mr. Cicio.
Mr. Cicio. Congressman Inglis, for the manufacturing
sector, it is we are different, I would differ with you. The
manufacturing sector's greenhouse gas emissions are only 2.6
percent above 1990 levels while the commercial, the
residential, the transportation and the power sector greenhouse
gas emissions are up on average about 30 percent, and the
reason that we have--for two reasons we have improved energy
efficiency, it is a cost, and without reducing energy costs, we
lose competitiveness. So we are the only sector. We have always
had the price signal to force down energy consumption. So we
would differ in perspective of the others but can we do more,
yes, and we have lots of different ideas on that but technology
is at the core of these things.
Mr. Inglis. Take my house, for example. The reason it
doesn't have a solar panel on the roof is because electricity
is just so cheap. I mean, it is not--the economics don't work
out for me to put even a simple solar hot water heater, which
isn't that something like 30 percent of my home's electricity
or some amazing number? And I have lived in South Carolina and
we have a beautiful southern exposure and we don't have a solar
hot water heater. But it is because the economics don't work
out, right? Ben Franklin, ``what we obtain too cheaply we
esteem too lightly,'' and so if I obtain electricity so
cheaply, I sure do esteem it lightly. Is that right, Dr.
Ehrhardt-Martinez?
Dr. Ehrhardt-Martinez. I think that is definitely part of
the answer. I guess I would respond by asking you, you know, if
in fact you were able to establish something like smart grid
technologies and you were able to feed your electricity
production from your solar panels back into the electric
system, how would that change the equation and change your
decision-making process?
Mr. Inglis. I think it clearly would. It would change the
economics. Because the secret answer I was looking for is, it
is about economics here. It is about making it so that this
works out for me to put that solar hot water heater on my roof
to make it so I want to have that technology, and if I decide I
want it because I am sort of aware of the price signal, I will
change my behavior. Is that right?
Dr. Ehrhardt-Martinez. Well, I would just add to that, I
would say that that is necessary but not sufficient. I think
that there are other factors that come into play. You know,
just because it is economical doesn't mean everybody is going
to go out and do it, and I think that we need to recognize that
there are a variety of other things, barriers, you know,
sociocultural barriers, a variety of things that also shape,
you know, people's decision-making process and their habits and
whatnot, and it is important to keep those in mind as well. So,
yes, it is one of the components but there are other things
going on as well.
Mr. Inglis. So I have a bigger view of economics than you
do maybe but it is basically this, that, you know, as Tom
Friedman has written, we found out what it is. It is $4 a
gallon changes behavior on gasoline because apparently one of
the reasons that GM killed the electric car is people didn't
want to plug in their car, they said. But in the midst of $4-a-
gallon gasoline, ask people in town meetings, would you mind
plugging in your car, there was nobody who resisted plugging in
their car at $4 a gallon. And so it sort of changes us, doesn't
it, when we realize gee, we must change. And so just a short
commercial with the Chairman's indulgence. That is why if we do
something better than cap-and-trade, a revenue-neutral carbon
tax, where you reduce taxes elsewhere so people have money in
their pocket to buy some of these fabulous technologies and
they have the price signal, they will do it. And of course, I
am sure there are some other barriers to be overcome but
necessity is the mother of invention, especially when it comes
to rising energy costs, and it would cause me to change my
behavior. I would be buying one of those solar hot water
heaters for my roof.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I am out of time.
Chairman Baird. I always appreciate the commercial
announcement for the alternative which by coincidence I happen
to support.
Ms. Edwards is recognized next for five minutes.
Ms. Edwards. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and I think I will
start out with a question for someone from Bowie, Maryland, Dr.
Ehrhardt-Martinez. Thank you all for your testimony today.
Consumer Education and Behavior
I am curious about this behavior question because I know in
my own home, I know plenty of things that I could do to reduce
my energy use in the home and to consume better, and I have
only done a couple of those things, and I often describe myself
as heating and cooling only my cat for all of the space, and I
think a lot of folks are like that and so I wonder what
realistically we can do from a public policy perspective to
push changes in behavior. I will just give you an example, that
a lot of our policy relies on things like tax credits and so if
you are, you know, in a working family, middle class family,
you know, to make the tradeoff between college tuition or daily
expenses and changing your energy consumption in your house in
exchange for a tax credit that is going to come later on, makes
that a very complicated decision and so I wonder if you could
talk from a policy perspective of things that we could do to
actually incentivize changes in consumer behavior.
Dr. Ehrhardt-Martinez. Okay. That is a tough question. I
think that it is important to keep in mind that a lot of these
investments in energy efficiency are, you know, cost effective
in that they do pay for themselves over time so I think that,
you know, that is where we need to begin is to make sure that
people are aware of that and then to come up with mechanisms to
help them overcome barriers whether it is financial barriers or
other types of barriers for the people who are interested in
actually pursuing those types of changes. But we also have to
recognize that there are--you know, that the world is full of
different kinds of people and that different people face
different barriers and live different lifestyles and, you know,
live in different conditions and have different resources at
their disposal and so I think it is also important to recognize
that while there are some people who like you are aware of, you
know, what needs to be done and perhaps need simply certain
incentives in order to do it, there are other people that maybe
need, you know, more information. And then it is also about how
we provide that information and how we go about providing
programs as to whether or not those programs are more or less
likely to be effective. So, for example, there is research on--
there is a very long history of research on home retrofits and,
you know, why some programs--and there is a huge amount of
variation in terms of how successful those programs have been
in actually getting consumers to have their homes retrofitted
and generate energy savings as a result, and one of the
insights from that research has been that, you know, the huge
variation is more a function of how the programs are being
implemented than they are of--I mean, so you can have the same
program that has the same incentive structure but the way in
which the program is implemented and the way that information
is, you know, distributed to people and things of that nature
have, you know, just a dramatic effect on the proportion of
people that actually participate in that program and are able
to reap the rewards.
Ms. Edwards. Thank you very much. And then my last question
for Mr. Chalk has to do with building efficiencies and the way
that buildings get described as being efficient. I know as kind
of a, you know, slightly outside--it is very confusing. I had
folks in my office just a week or so ago and they were
describing that they met some sort of environmental standard
for their building, and I had no clue what they were talking
about. I don't really understand the standards. I think there
is a wide variation in the ways in which people can describe
their buildings and the efficiencies of those buildings and I
think that we need to clear that up so that builders and
developers have some sort of and consumers comparing apples to
apples.
Mr. Chalk. Yes, we have a label much like buying an
appliance. It is an energy guide label. It tells you how much
electricity a refrigerator uses. So we have developed with the
building community a label that says this house is rated at
this energy use and you will pay approximately this much in
average utility bills for all your loads whether it is thermal
or electric.
Ms. Edwards. But what about commercial buildings?
Mr. Chalk. For commercial buildings, we are just beginning
the Commercial Buildings Initiative and there in reference to
your previous question it is very difficult because the owner
of the building who pays for the construction is not the one
that pays the energy bills so we need to work with both groups
then to decide how to incentivize, what are the right policy
mechanisms that need to be evaluated to incentivize greater
energy efficiency. But back to the home. When you buy a house,
you have to have a termite inspection. If you also had to see
the energy use of that house, then that would also be something
very valuable and that is what we working on so we would have
greater adoption in there so that consumers are informed as
they go and buy a house, you know, maybe they can afford the
mortgage, which is the first cost of the house, but the utility
bill is typically not included in that, in the mortgage, so we
need folks to realize what their energy bill is going to be as
they purchase the house.
Ms. Edwards. I think my time has expired. Thank you, Mr.
Chairman.
Chairman Baird. Dr. Ehlers.
Mr. Ehlers. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thanks to the
panel for being here. This is one of my favorite topics even
though I spent 35 years on it so far but it never ceases to
amaze me how difficult it is to get people to change their
behavior, so I am very pleased you have Dr. Ehrhardt-Martinez
here to enlighten us on that. I think one of the biggest
factors, and I am speaking now as a physicist, the public just
doesn't understand energy. They don't know what it is and how
it can happen, and a number of times I have given speeches
talking about how I wish energy were purple because if people
could see the energy, they would behave differently. If they
drove up to the house in the winter and saw purple oozing
through the walls and purple rivulets around the doors and
windows, they would say good grief, I have got to tighten up
this house, and similarly with other activities. As it is, the
only concrete evidence the average citizen sees about energy
costs is the price at the gas pump and utility bill at the end
of the month, and that is not enough. There have to be other
ways.
Mr. Chalk, this is not intended to criticize you because I
think the Energy Department is starting to change dramatically
but it was very frustrating to me in my 15 years here to see so
little being done by the Department of Energy to assist in this
problem. In fact, the only real program I am aware of during
the early years I was here was the EPA where they had their
Green Lights Program, went around to various businesses,
pointed out how they could save money if they put different
lighting in, and if you show a businessperson that there is a
payback time of about eight months, they put in a new lighting
system, and the EPA did a fantastic job of that. My only
criticism is that the Department of Energy, knowing the issue,
should have done it long before. I think we have to hit all of
these things and it is not easy. For example, I was upset with
a poorly insulated attic in a house we bought so I determined
to insulate it properly, and in a cold climate, part of that
means you fill up every hole, you know, rafters, beams and so
forth because when the electricians come through they just bore
a hole through, put the wire through and that only occupies
about a third of the size of the hole so that hole is leaking
all the time up into the attic. I could not for any reasonable
price get someone to come in and really do the insulation
correctly so I did it myself. Our utility bill or gas bill, I
should say, since we use gas for heat, was reduced by one-
third, and because I didn't count my labor, that meant in a
space of about a year I paid off the entire project. Now, that
is a really good return on investment, but until we educate or
require all those working on insulation to really understand
what insulation does--and it has been so frustrating to me over
the years to find how many people in the business don't really
understand it. And I loved the example of where someone was
building homes in a tract and somebody came by and noticed that
they put formaldehyde insulation on the outside of the concrete
shell but they stopped at ground level. They said why did you
do that; well, we don't need it up here, it is just you need it
down below to protect from all that cold in the ground. And
they had no recognition that even though concrete has a very
high heat capacity, in other words, it can store a lot of
energy, it is also a very good conductor of heat so 48 inches
of concrete is equivalent of 1 inch of formaldehyde foam
insulation. If you don't know that, you are going to build a
house the way he did. If he knew that, he would have built it
in a much more energy-efficient way. So I think education is
very important.
Now, the country is going to get much worse. We are always
talking here about carbon footprints and everyone in the
Congress is worried about that. That is not the real point. The
real point Mr. Coad alluded to. He said we are going to run out
of oil by 2010. Actually that is not right. That is when the
production peaks, the Hubbert curve. So then it is half gone.
But it does mean that it is going to be continually more
expensive as we go on, and if the public responds only to
money, then we are in bad shape because we are going to be
quite a ways down the peak before they start doing the things.
I really think it has to be a combination of the work you do,
the combination that we should be doing in the Congress to make
sure the public is well educated but through tax credits
persuade them to do something which is just marginally
effective. Thank you.
Chairman Baird. Excellent comments, Dr. Ehlers.
Mr. Matheson would be next and then followed by Mr. Tonko.
Mr. Matheson. I am happy to go, Mr. Chairman.
Retrofitting
Mr. Chalk, just a quick question. What do you--what would
you need to have a successful retrofit program at DOE? I know
funding is going to be one answer but I am looking for other
things in addition to funding that you think you need that
would help make that happen.
Mr. Chalk. A combination of things, and the retrofits are
very important because as we talked about earlier, we can do
30, 40 percent on a cost-neutral basis now for new
construction. Retrofits are much harder. Ms. Edwards was
talking about there are other priorities for homeowners and so
forth. So what we need, we have the R&D and we have been
investing much more in commercial buildings research. What we
need to do though is, we have been emphasizing and optimizing
individual components like the HVAC, lighting, windows and so
forth. We need to do more in integrating those components.
There are tradeoffs. So, you know, when the climate changes
outside, the windows are talking to the lights which are
talking to--communicating with the HVAC system so that all of
these things are working together for total optimization of the
building and it is tied to the occupants whether they are there
or not and to what type of activity. So systems control and
integration of all these components from an R&D standpoint is
the top priority, that with the right policy and finance
because it is always the first cost that is the barrier. So if
there are incentives for longer-term financing, that would be
very helpful because these technologies do pay back but they
may not pay back for eight, ten years. But that is okay. The
building is typically in the inventory for more than 50, so I
think we can do this. And the last piece is really workforce
training that has been mentioned to make sure that people know
how to install correctly, and as part of our weatherization
program where we weatherize low-income housing, we offer
training assistance so that people are doing that correctly and
we have inspectors and so forth. So the combination of R&D, the
right policies and financing as well as a strong deployment
effort where we can demonstrate these technologies to folks
where we actually--and one of the issues with the codes is,
when you start out with a code it is really the design intent.
We are not doing enough to follow up the actual measurement
verification of energy use. We need to do that, disseminate
that information and then combine that with workforce training,
not just for the installers but also the building operators so
they know how to change as the activity changes within the
building, that they are continuously optimizing. So we almost
need a brain or a CPU for the building, would be ideal, a
dashboard, so that people could--otherwise they are just paying
retroactively or a month behind what they used last month. They
don't see real-time energy use going to lights when there is
maybe nobody occupying or, you know, maybe there is a piece of
equipment that is malfunctioning and the energy level shoots
up. So those types of things need to be put in everyday
practice and then I think having those things for the building
operator will allow them to most efficiently operate their
building and decrease their cost.
Mr. Matheson. I appreciate that.
Mr. Coad, am I pronouncing your name correctly?
Mr. Coad. Yes.
Green Building Standards
Mr. Matheson. In your assessments report, you point out
that there is what you call a race to respond, a consumer
demand for green products. Do you think the capacity exists
within the building standards industry to effectively address
the need for new standards for all of these green products and
keep up what are undoubtedly going to be more and more products
coming into this expanding marketplace?
Mr. Coad. Yes. The High-Performance Building Council at
NIBS in their first--well, in their organizational year, they
had, like, 80 different organizations who wrote standards
assemble together for that year and they did an extensive study
of all the standards that were available and they are now
working on filling all the holes and they are working with Mr.
Carnahan's group to try to get that whole thing organized. It
is a massive undertaking but we have all the information out
there and we are finding out where the holes are, and as soon
as we find that out we are going to start trying to get various
standards-adopting organizations to start plugging those holes.
As I mentioned before, this is not--we make this thing too
complicated. It is not that complicated. And from an economics
perspective, and I am going to say something that nobody is
going to believe me: it costs less money to provide a more
energy-efficient product, it doesn't cost more money. It costs
less money because it all relates to money and power. Power is
how big something is and energy is how long you run it, and if
it is smaller you pay less for it and you use less energy while
you are doing it. That is an absolute fact. That is an
engineering problem, and the man on the street can't solve it
but the design engineers can solve it. You give me any machine
you want and if I work at it long enough, I can always figure
out how to make it smaller and use less energy. It is just a
matter of motivation. We have the technology. And if we don't
do the efficiency first, then we will never be able to solve
the problem with alternate fuels. We want to adopt a slogan,
efficiency first. That is the first order of business.
Mr. Matheson. Thanks, Mr. Coad.
Mr. Ehlers. Will the gentleman yield?
Mr. Matheson. I am happy to yield, yes.
Mr. Ehlers. Just one quick comment on that. We saw what
happened after the 1973 energy crisis. What I think really
soured a lot of the public on this since they didn't understand
it was all the shysters who got in the market selling all sorts
of products which they promised would save tremendous amounts
of energy. Most of them were not worth anything at all. And so
I just want to put in a plug, and I know you are working on
this but I will put in a plug to have really good standards so
the public doesn't get fooled because they have no way of
measuring energy. They have to be assured that when they buy
something that it actually is going to work and is going to
help.
Mr. Coad. I agree with you 100 percent.
Mr. Ehlers. Thank you. I yield back.
Chairman Baird. Ms. Giffords.
Ms. Giffords. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I thought Mr.
Carnahan was on our subcommittee. You should join our
subcommittee. It is a good one. Thank you for visiting.
Chairman Baird. We will get to Mr. Carnahan. We are not
being rude to Mr. Carnahan. We generally proceed in the order
of arrival but Mr. Carnahan is joining us as a guest today so
he is last. He bats cleanup for us today.
Ms. Giffords.
Efficiency in the Federal Government
Ms. Giffords. Mr. Chairman, thank you for holding this
hearing and for our panelists' incredible discussion. My first
question is for Mr. Chalk. I am very interested in what DOE can
do to help promote adoption of best practices in building
design and also retrofits throughout the Federal Government. I
thought it was pretty astounding that 80 percent of the energy
used by the Federal Government is used by the Department of
Defense. I serve on the House Armed Services Committee and I am
particularly interested in how we can help the military to
adopt best practices in energy efficiency and renewable energy
and operations and installations. So can you please tell me how
the DOE is working to help promote building efficiency within
GSA and also the DOD? Is there anything happening within DOD
that might also help inform research at the DOE and what
efforts are available for cross-pollination?
Mr. Chalk. We have a program within Energy Efficiency and
Renewable Energy called the Federal Energy Management Program,
which is responsible for overseeing energy across the Federal
Government, help get agencies the tools they need to save
energy, and one of the best mechanisms we have for that are
things called ESPC contracts, which are energy savings
performance contracts where, you know, typically if you want to
modernize your building or make it more energy efficient, you
have to have up-front appropriations to do that. What this ESPC
mechanism allows is private contractors to come in, they
specialize in energy efficiency. They will put all the up-front
money to switch out the lights from incandescent to fluorescent
or, you know, upgrade insulation, HVAC systems, chillers and so
forth. They will put all the up-front capital to modernize the
building and then they get paid through the actual savings in
the utility bill. So that is typically the primary mechanism
that the Department of Defense is using, and they are doing a
very good job at this. And actually if you look across all
federal agencies, the Department of Defense is one of the
leaders in terms of actual energy saved and in terms of putting
somebody in charge accountable for energy management. So they
are very, very good example. And so what our program does is,
it gives people the tools to do that.
Ms. Giffords. One of the specific problems we have, I come
from Tucson, Arizona, is the heat of the Southwest, and I know
specifically, well, not just with our military installations
but our other government buildings as well, we have a real
problem in keeping our buildings cool during the hot weather.
So I am curious about the unique research challenges for the
green building program. Is it insulation? What are the real
possibilities that we can develop when you are talking about a
climate that gets to be 115, 120 degrees?
Mr. Chalk. Well, the first thing to do is no air
infiltration, and so it is about the building envelope, how
well you are insulating it, making sure you don't have thermal
bridges and conductivity. But then I think the breakthrough
could be in new cooling technology and we are looking at
several different approaches at the Department of Energy
because cooling technology has advanced greatly. Heat pump
technology and so forth is much more efficient than it was even
10, 15 years ago, so if you have a heat pump that is 15 years
old, you can do a lot better today than that. But we can go
beyond that to new technology for cooling and I think that is
an area of emphasis going forward for our program, especially
in the commercial buildings area.
Implementing Demonstration Projects
Ms. Giffords. And finally, Mr. Chairman, for all the
witnesses, one of my great concerns that I have, and we sit
through a lot of these committee hearings, whether we talk to
NREL or the high-performance green building consortiums and
others and the work that is being done is very impressive, but
I think that we need to move beyond pilot programs, pilot
projects and demonstration projects to actually put what is
being done in little specific areas out for the entire building
industry. So if a couple people could please comment on how we
go from these little projects to really implementing more
national programs?
Mr. Chalk. I will comment just briefly. As we build these
alliances in the commercial buildings area, we are building a
database so every building that has demonstrated will go into
the database, how it is used, what its energy use is, and we
will take data on those buildings so this would be education
out there to other architects, other developers so they can see
what has been demonstrated at a much larger scale that goes
beyond the research and development.
Dr. Ehrhardt-Martinez. I would just like to add to that, I
think that it is really clear that, you know, the whole
question of distribution of technology and the diffusion of
technology again is very much rooted in understanding human
decision-making and, you know, when and why people decide to
adopt these technologies and so again I think that the social
and behavioral sciences need to play an important part in that
process.
Chairman Baird. I think Mr. Coad had a comment he wanted to
add.
Mr. Coad. I am the air conditioning guy. I can't not answer
that question. The first thing you do when you are in Tucson
and you are building a building is that you don't build a
building the same way you would build it if it were in San
Francisco. You don't build a building out of all glass with an
enormous cooling load. You build a building so it has less of a
cooling load. You use less glass and you use better insulation
and then your cooling system will be smaller, it will cost you
less money and it will use less energy. So the engineering and
the architecture is, I mean, that is where it all begins in
buildings. When you are building a new building, you reduce the
load just by configuring the building of the right materials
and so forth and then you are going to reduce the cost and the
energy from then on. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Ms. Giffords. And Mr. Chairman, just a comment. There was a
federal courthouse built in Phoenix a couple of years ago, a
glass building that is probably the most energy-inefficient
building ever constructed where the guards that sit down at the
entrance in the summer have fans blowing on them, in the winter
have little space heaters. I mean, it is a huge atrium that has
been constructed. And again, you know, it is a federal
building, beautiful by design but incredibly inefficient and
certainly is going in the wrong direction.
Mr. Coad. I certainly agree with you. I am very familiar
with the building and you are right.
Chairman Baird. Those buildings tend to be water
inefficient as well, as some of them cool by spraying water
into the air in a desert. It makes an awful lot of sense. As
you know, Ms. Giffords, the Chairman of the Transportation and
Infrastructure Committee, Mr. Oberstar, has been a passionate
advocate of green buildings for the Federal Government and in
fact the stimulus package had a substantial element in that but
it is only right that the Federal Government lead the way and
we need to find more and more opportunities. I thank you for
the line of questioning.
Mr. Tonko, as many of you know, has a long history in
energy from his work in New York State. Mr. Tonko, thank you.
Green Infrastructure Funding
Mr. Tonko. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. As was indicated, I had
past experience most recently prior to this job as president
and CEO of NYSERDA, the New York State Energy Research and
Development Authority, very much pronounced activities in
energy efficiency and retrofitting R&D investments. So my
question would be following on Mr. Matheson where you talked
about the successful retrofitting of programs through DOE. So
Mr. Chalk, the next question I would have of that is, are we
adequately funded within the building technologies program to
be aggressive with the building infrastructure across this
country? Are we at a level that is reasonable?
Mr. Chalk. Right now we have adequate funding, but I would
also add to that that building efficiency is one of Secretary
Chu's top priorities, so I think you will see more and more a
priority placed on this, as everybody has said here, the
significance of the energy consumption, greenhouse gases and
water use.
Mr. Tonko. So does that imply that we will just grow that
program with the human infrastructure needed at DOE?
Mr. Chalk. I think across the Federal Government we will
see so much more emphasis on building efficiency: within the
Department of Energy, within GSA, within EPA and so forth.
Mr. Tonko. I mentioned NYSERDA. The New York City office of
NYSERDA is a net-zero office, and based on the Energy
Independence Act of 2007, we are targeting 2025, I believe, as
aiming to provide the net-zero outcome to a full-scale
approach. Don't we need to be much more aggressive about that
targeted year?
Mr. Chalk. I think that there are quotas associated with
certain years in the Act. Right now with our funding levels we
are on track by 2025 to meet that and what we talk about--so it
is net zero now. But we talk about is affordable, you know,
widespread market adoption so we are talking about when the
commercial space about having a payback for that within five
years. That is still a challenge, affordability, the cost of
the technologies and we are going to get more elaborate
building controls because we can get more efficiency. That is
the emphasis of our R&D and we are still a ways from achieving
those goals for a five-year payback.
Mr. Tonko. In regard to the R&D, are we supportive enough
with the prototype stage? I know that we seem to be aggressive
about funding prototypes and then a number of nations pick up
on our R&D at that first stage and then we don't follow through
with the deployment into the practical and commercial stages.
Do we need to be more aggressive in the follow-up of prototype
investment?
Mr. Chalk. Yes, the Department actually does very little--
pays for very little demonstration. We pay for the R&D. We work
with the code organizations so that new construction or major
retrofits are more efficient and we actually don't demonstrate
a whole lot. Our partners actually do the demonstrations.
Mr. Tonko. So maybe to other members of the panel, is there
any reason to believe that we need to be ratcheting up the
investments made in the post-prototype stages?
Dr. McQuade. If I may, sir, I think there are two aspects
to the question, so the easy answer is yes because taking the
large investment that DOE is making and turning those into
deployable solutions is not happening fast enough.
Mr. Tonko. I think it is a real weakness in the energy
culture of this country, so what would you recommend we do and
where do we focus and target that?
Dr. McQuade. Yes, I think there is a second part of it, and
I will refer to Mr. Chalk's comments on where research and
development is spent. In some sense, I will use the word
``easy.'' It is easy to do a one-off building and make it
energy efficient. Part of where the research has to be focused
is making solutions that are easily deployable at scale so that
every building is not unique. We need tools that are deployable
across the design space. We need simulation and modeling
capabilities of buildings so that every building doesn't have
to start from ground zero as a new project that no one has ever
approached before and I think there is a significant investment
now and continuing investment at DOE in developing generic
tools that can provide generic building operating systems and
capability so that it is not just, 11let me do a demonstration
project and deploy that,'' it is, ``let me do a demonstration
project and deploy that to multiple classes and kinds of
buildings going forward.''
Mr. Tonko. And that that adjustment you believe can come
through DOE?
Dr. McQuade. Yes, I do.
Mr. Tonko. Okay. And if in fact our behavior here is driven
by economics and if the economics are played with by those who
supply us a fossil-based economy, is there a way to deal with
counter-economics where we provide the right incentives or the
punitive measures? It seems to me we can figure out an
efficient environment, the cost of an energy-efficient
environment. Should those who want to be gluttonous in their
usage pay beyond that reasonable amount?
Dr. McQuade. I think that--so the easy answer to the
question is that you need to recognize the energy cost in the
solutions you make, and that today the reasons some of the
economics don't play out over the long-term--we talked before
about the need to get that sort of last 20 or 30 percent of
building efficiency. Right now those come from solutions that
are economically unviable, and through a whole series of
mechanisms to increase energy costs or increase, you know,
recognize carbon costs, you can change that economics. I start
from a more basic assumption that says the way to change those
economics long-term is to invest in the technology that is
going to change that. That is a combination of public and
private partnership investment. Reducing the cost of those
technologies is the one constant that allows us to make more
efficient buildings in the future and change that economic
situation.
Mr. Tonko. What about aggressive energy code enforcement? I
mean, how are we letting buildings as that described by my
colleague a minute ago in the State of Arizona----
Chairman Baird. We are a bit over time. I want to make sure
I recognize Mr. Carnahan. We will get back to you, I hope.
Mr. Carnahan. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thanks to all
the panel for weighing in on this. I really think that this is
an exciting time for this issue and a lot of things have
aligned to get some big things done we haven't been able to in
the past. This issue has been around for a long time, as Mr.
Ehlers mentioned earlier, but I think working with the private
sector, the government has a key role in setting standards,
creating incentives to really motivate consumers to grow the
market but, also even to set an example in terms of our federal
building infrastructure, and just a couple of comments. I know
that Mr. Chalk mentioned this but one of the unique things that
we have heard mentioned is how we can build into whether it is
residential or commercial mortgages these kind of incentives
that take into account cost savings and operational cost of the
building. Because right now we are missing some of those things
and that will be an incentive for buyers that certainly want to
buy those kind of buildings that are more efficient but also to
incentivize that from the building and the lending perspective.
So that is just one good example.
High-Performance Building Standards
A couple of questions I wanted to throw out here to the
panel. There is certainly a need to define high-performance
building standards which potentially could be above and beyond
existing building codes, and if there was adequate funding,
what would these sort of enhanced high-performance building
models look like in terms of getting them out there for use
among the public and in the building sector? Dr. Coad.
Mr. Coad. I sound like a broken record but it is efficiency
first. A high-performance building must be a super-energy-
efficient building. That is the primary focus. The next thing
it has to be, and this is why it is high-performance, it has to
perform just as well as far as satisfying the needs of the
people that occupy the building and the needs for their comfort
and their productivity. So that is really where we are heading
with high-performance buildings and hopefully we are going to
get there, and to address the other question, I think the
private sector has to move the building technology forward
based on these standards for high-performance buildings.
Dr. Ehrhardt-Martinez. Could I add to that? I would also
argue that we really need to include in standards some kind of
provision that provides feedback to people with regard to their
energy consumption because the point that was made earlier
about the fact that people--I mean, people can't manage what
they don't see, and you know, you are trying to manage your
energy based on a bill that you get after the fact and the fact
that you don't really see how the energy is being consumed in
your home. You know, people are left really powerless, in a lot
of ways, to change their behavior in ways that matter because
they don't really see the effects of the changes that they
make. And there is already research evidence that strongly
suggests that just by providing these feedback mechanisms to
people in their homes, that simple step empowers people to
actually take on the challenge of changing their own behaviors
without any other kinds of incentives, without any other kinds
of--whether economic or non-economic types of incentives. So I
think that that really has to be an important part of the
equation.
Life Cycle Energy Pricing
Mr. Carnahan. Thank you. And I am going to jump to one more
question as my time is running out. One of the problems we have
also seen is the separation of the acquisition and operational
aspects of buildings and it is really a dichotomy that has been
difficult to bridge but in terms of taking into account the
full life cycle cost of buildings, can you all address that
issue?
Dr. McQuade. If I may, just a couple of statistics. First
of all, most modern commercial buildings today, more than 80
percent of the energy and carbon associated with those
buildings are in operation. They are not first costs on the
building. We think there is a very important role that is
needed in establishing labeling mechanisms. I am talking about
commercial buildings now as opposed to residential buildings,
sort of uniform labeling mechanisms that allow people to know
how buildings operate, not just as designed but over the life
of those buildings, so whether those are periodic auditing
programs that take into account real performance on buildings,
people who are buying space in new buildings need to know how
those buildings are functioning not as they were designed 10
years ago but as they function today and so we think there is a
very strong role for setting those kind of labeling standards.
In terms of regulating performance, I offer you one
statistic. In the United States over 100 years, we have
accepted certain codes and capabilities that make our buildings
safe, sprinkling systems, fire detection systems. Estimates are
that those add about four percent total to the cost of
buildings over what we have developed over time. The numbers we
are talking about here for making buildings 70, 80 percent
efficient likely add numbers of eight to ten percent. So it is
a comparable scale to achieve a national strategy of reducing
energy comparable to what we accept as a cost that our
buildings should bear in the marketplace over time. So we are
talking about numbers that are appropriate and conceivable in
the kind of challenges and tradeoffs we have already made for
something as important as the energy security of this country.
Chairman Baird. An outstanding line of questioning, and I
think the issue there is also the net cost at the end of the
day, and I appreciate Mr. Carnahan's reference to life cycle
costs. I have been told that, for example, LEED standards are
all about the energy efficiency of the building as an envelope
but they don't look at the net life cycle cost of the materials
that go into the building so hence wood, which is a much more
energy-efficient product to create than concrete or steel
generally, is not counted as extra credit and indeed may not be
counted as a structural material at all in LEED, and certainly
as someone from timber country, they believe, and I think with
justification, that life net total life cycle costs ought to be
factored in.
Mr. Carnahan also mentioned the issue of standards and that
leads to a question I want to ask in deference to my friend and
colleague, Mr. Wu, who heads the Subcommittee with jurisdiction
over NIST. I wonder if any of you have had interaction with
NIST as we look at standards and if we were to look towards
developing a standard metric for how we evaluate codes or
measure building technology and efficiency, what role does NIST
have or should NIST have in concert perhaps with DOE? And I
open that to the panel.
Mr. Chalk. Well, first I ought to speak on that. The
relationship with DOE and NIST is very good. In fact, DOE funds
NIST with about $1 million a year out of the DOE budget, and
they help us do the appliance test procedures. They help us an
awful lot on indoor air quality and ventilation and helping
setting standards and best practices in that area, and in fact
there is an overall interagency group that meets under OSTP
that NIST and DOE co-chair and they meet quarterly, so we are
at DOE working very closely with NIST on all of these issues
and especially in our new Commercial Buildings Initiative.
Chairman Baird. Mr. Coad.
Mr. Coad. Mr. Chairman, NIST is represented on the High-
Performance Building Council as is DOE.
Chairman Baird. So they work together with you?
Mr. Coad. Right. They are all part of the council.
Chairman Baird. Is that an effective partnership in your
judgment? Are there things that NIST ought----
Mr. Coad. Very effective, yes.
Chairman Baird. So that has been working for you?
Mr. Coad. Yes.
Chairman Baird. Mr. Cicio, did you have any comment on
NIST's role with your efforts?
Mr. Cicio. No, sir.
Chairman Baird. Dr. McQuade, did you have a comment on it?
Dr. McQuade. No comment.
Means of Informing Consumers
Chairman Baird. What do you think might be some of the
impact of--you know, when we buy cereal, it says you have got
vitamin A or D or whatever in it. When you buy a house, you
almost, you know--Mr. Inglis and I were talking. One would
think that as informed consumers one would ask what is the cost
of the heat of this house or the air conditioning of this house
if you are in Arizona. But to my knowledge there is no
mandatory reporting of the net energy usage of homes or
industrial buildings, again, recognizing the caveats about the
user function. What would be the impact of informing people as
part of the home purchase--you know, you fill out 100 damn
documents--pardon me--darn documents, you know, you are filling
these things out, you are signing them and you don't know what
they are. But something that says look, pal, you are going to
spend $400 a month over and above your mortgage cost just to
heat or cool this place. What are the--would there be merit to
that, to having to do that at point of purchase? Mr. Coad.
Mr. Coad. In commercial buildings, there is what we call
commissioning and retro-commissioning to where you go in and
you do like an audit each year on how the building is
performing, and one of the things you check is the energy
consumption. It would be very, very, very easy to require that
a building be retro-commissioned before a person buys it. I
would see nothing wrong with that at all. And it would seem
like with leadership from the Congress or the States or
somebody, these would be pretty simple instruments to implement
for the sale of a home.
Chairman Baird. Well, when you look at how many homes are
funded either through FHA or VHA, Freddie, Fannie, et cetera,
it ought to be fairly easy to require something like that and
then people could see. I think it makes an awful lot of sense.
Mr. Coad. And all the records are available through the
utility companies now instantaneously.
Mr. Chalk. The Department has developed a scale, and I
hesitate to hold it up because it is too small, but we have a
scale from zero to 100 as part of our Builders Challenge, which
is getting builders to build homes 30 percent more efficient.
So they would score a 70 on that. As you go to zero, you would
go towards net-zero-energy homes. So we have developed such a
scale and it is not mandatory, of course, but some tool like
this would definitely inform consumers and make that----
Chairman Baird. I think that is really good for new
buildings. I am not smart enough to know the answer but my
guess is 90 percent of home sales at least are existing
structures, and so my hope would be that when you shop
buildings, that homeowners would say--back to Mr. Inglis's
point, do you make the investment or not? If homeowners had
reliable, ready information about the energy efficiency of a
home, it would be part of their comparison shopping, and if it
were mandatory that that be given to people, now my investment
pays--otherwise it rolls off the tongue, well, I have got low E
double-pane windows and a new furnace and blah, blah, blah.
That is real money on top of your mortgage expense, and the one
house now, its monthly payment is much higher than the other
house because the other house has made the investment, that is
valuable with existing structures.
Mr. Chalk. Right now it is voluntary. We have a Home
Performance with Energy Star, DOE and EPA, where people can go
in and do the measurement and then tell you what efficiency
measures to take care of, but it is a voluntary program. It is
not mandatory.
Chairman Baird. Mr. Cicio.
Mr. Cicio. Mr. Chairman, I think you are absolutely on
point. The combination of knowledge and then transparency
empowers people to know the economics of choices, and just
referencing the industrial sector, before we invest in a new
electric motor, for example, we will know how many BTUs per
kilowatt, we are going to know how energy efficient. It is part
of the informed decision. And I think the residential sector
needs that same informed knowledge.
Chairman Baird. Dr. Ehrhardt-Martinez.
Dr. Ehrhardt-Martinez. Yeah, I would have to agree. I mean,
there is a lot of evidence to suggest that labeling programs
can be really effective and I think that integrating that kind
of program in terms of, you know, whether it occurs you know,
related to the inspection of a home or prior to that when the
home is up for sale, I think that could be a really effective
way of empowering, you know, home buyers to make wiser choices,
and that is part of, I think, you know, an effort associated
with the field of behavioral economics in terms of what they
call choice architecture which can go a long way to helping
people make smarter energy choices.
Chairman Baird. My guess would be it would have to--as a
behavioral scientist and somebody that has bought some homes,
my guess would be it needs to be listed on the MLS.
Dr. Ehrhardt-Martinez. That would be the preference.
Chairman Baird. So cost of home, cost of heat, you know, on
the transportation side. I think we ought to also frankly put
in information about the net cost of getting to and from work
because when people move way out to the 'burbs thinking they
are saving an awful lot of money on their home and then have an
hour-and-a-half commute in, that is a pretty false economy.
Dr. Ehrhardt-Martinez. Right, and there are other--I mean,
obviously with that particular example there are non-energy
benefits associated with, you know, living closer as well in
terms of time savings and whatnot.
Chairman Baird. But we don't quantify that in a way that is
meaningful to purchasers.
Dr. Ehrhardt-Martinez. Exactly.
Chairman Baird. Mr. Inglis.
Encouraging Efficiency at the Various Levels of Government
Mr. Inglis. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. We were just talking
about the first house that my wife and I bought. We were warned
in advance that it had resistant baseboard heaters but we
didn't really pay attention to that until that first bill came,
and then we were shocked what January in South Carolina does
when you have got resistant heaters on baseboard. But also I
went and watched the meter go around and that gave me an even
quicker feedback loop about, you know, the thing looked like it
was about to catch on fire as it spun. So the question I think
for us in a lot of these kinds of initiative is, who is going--
who does what? My view is that balancing the budget is a lot
about answering that question is who does what. If you get it
at the right level of government, then you get--you can
actually go toward balancing the budget. And in this case, the
question is, these great ideas we are talking about here that
really do sound pretty exciting to me, are they best done at
the federal level or are they best done through model codes
that then are adopted by, say, Greenville and Spartanburg
County, South Carolina, and enforced at Greenville and
Spartanburg level? What do you all think about that?
Mr. Chalk. Well, the Department, I think, one of the assets
it has is the R&D, the national laboratory, so I think the
proper federal role is to sponsor a lot of the R&D and we are
seeing that R&D, the fruits of that labor creep into building
codes, and to address the earlier comments, through the
Recovery Act, $3.1 billion was available to states for the
State Energy Program, but to receive that money, governors of
the states had to pledge to the Secretary that they would adopt
the 2007 commercial code and the 2006 residential code in order
to receive that money. So even though the standards are
voluntary, I think we are seeing mechanisms to incentivize
folks who are adopting those. And through a lot of our R&D, the
successes there actually creep into the code and then hit the
local level, so I think you are seeing a lot of that. I think
that has been pretty effective working with the code
organizations.
Chairman Baird. Mr. Coad, do you want to address that?
Mr. Coad. The voluntary consensus standards are pretty
powerful devices and virtually all the states that have a
building code have picked up ASHRAE standard 90 for commercial
buildings and they also have a standard for residential
buildings that is being promulgated. I think my personal
feeling is that the proper role of the Federal Government is in
leadership and education and incentivizing the states to do
these things rather than having other departments of the
Federal Government getting involved in something that really
are local issues. But the consensus standards are out there and
they are getting better all the time. And now we are starting
to have other kind of activities like doing so much better than
the standard because the standards aren't really as far as you
can go and we can do better than the standards, so that is a
lot of incentive in that direction. So they are being pretty
effective on that but it is just that we are not--we haven't
gotten real serious about it throughout the country. We need
better leadership, I think, or more leadership to realize that
this is a big problem.
Mr. Cicio. The local politics are often driven by builders
whose primary--I don't want to over-generalize--is very cost
conscious and have a history, I should say, of resisting any
costs including energy efficiency costs. So while
philosophically it sounds great to keep those decisions at the
local level, maybe possibly the only way you really are going
to get this done is through a federal mandate.
Dr. Ehrhardt-Martinez. I would have to agree with that
sentiment, although also provide the possibility of having a
Federal Government standard but also having a Federal
Government program that would provide incentives to states and
perhaps localities to, you know, exceed those standards so to
provide other means of encouraging that kind of behavior at the
local and State level.
Dr. McQuade. I would just add maybe slightly off the
subject that in addition to the leadership role that we talked
about before, there is a leadership role in the set of
buildings that are managed by the government, the GSA portfolio
and the DOD portfolio, and conversation about local versus
national standards, being out in front with energy-efficient
performance in federal buildings I think is a leadership role
that the government has to take as a way to demonstrate the
seriousness of the issue to people.
Mr. Inglis. Very helpful. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman Baird. We have about six more minutes left so I am
going to ask our colleagues be brief. Mr. Tonko has a question
and then Mr. Carnahan.
Mr. Tonko. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I couldn't agree more
with the sentiments about having a federal focus on a
comprehensive energy plan. If we are going to pick and choose
here, we will never accomplish the numbers we need. I would
hope that at the local level we would have the information
squad that would allow people to understand just what their
actions mean and the actions they can take.
The only line of questioning I wanted to pursue that I
didn't have time for earlier was on this whole buildings
agenda. How is it that the Federal Government occupies a
building that is energy inefficient? Was that building built by
the Federal Government or is it just rented space?
Mr. Coad. Which building?
Mr. Tonko. The one in Arizona that my colleague was
mentioning.
Mr. Coad. That was built by the Federal Government.
Mr. Tonko. So how is it that we don't have the coordination
at a federal level to even do our own infrastructure energy
efficient-wise?
Mr. Coad. I can't answer that.
Mr. Tonko. Who can?
Mr. Chalk. Right now through our Federal Energy Management
Program, there is a conscious effort across the Federal
Government to reduce water use, and increase energy efficiency
by 30 percent by 2015.
Mr. Tonko. How old is the building that my colleague cited?
Mr. Coad. It is a reasonably new building.
Mr. Tonko. So how is it in the midst of an energy crisis we
allowed a building like that to be built?
Mr. Coad. I would ask that question to----
Mr. Tonko. So we can start right at home with our own
buildings and certainly if we are providing federal funds for
any building construction, private sector and public, shouldn't
we have an energy code maintenance, a requirement, and can we
put in some sort of outside the public realm where there is no
public dollars, can we put some sort of incentive in that
addresses your mortgage or whatever just for being energy
efficient? It seems as though there are aggressive actions that
can be taken and there are commissions of negligence in recent
past history that need to be addressed by federal policy.
Mr. Chalk. I would say the federal buildings that would go
up now would have to comply with the codes, and the codes just
recently have become much more energy efficient than they were,
say, 10 years ago. So I think progress is being made when new
federal buildings are being built.
Mr. Tonko. Because of our gross neglect, I think we need to
get very aggressive about energy efficiency, see it as our fuel
of choice, give it our highest priority and move forward with a
plan that finally addresses the demand side of the equation
which has long been overdue.
Mr. Coad. Sir, I agree with you 100 percent.
Chairman Baird. Well said, Mr. Tonko.
Mr. Carnahan, no additional comments?
Closing
I think the take-home from this needs to be, many
industries have made a real effort in terms of marketing basic
numbers. I don't think if you ask the average American or
Member of Congress, for that matter, what percentage of our
energy consumption goes to the uses that we have talked about
today. Most of us would probably be well off that mark, and if
we are off that mark, then we are going to be off the mark in
terms of targeting our interventions. And we have learned today
the targeted interventions can be an--not can be, must be an
essential part of solving our nation's energy independence,
global warming, overheating and ocean acidification and our
economic woes because the money that is saved is money you get
to keep and so I applaud our witnesses for a very stimulating
and most informative discussion. I wish every American could
have tuned into this and all of our colleagues as well. I thank
my colleagues and friends on the panel. Mr. Carnahan wanted a
final remark and I recognize Mr. Carnahan.
Mr. Carnahan. Just one brief comment. I want to thank
Chairman Baird for his leadership on this issue, and it has
been one of my personal missions to be sure that when somebody
gets up and talks about energy policy in this country, they
don't leave out high-performance buildings because I have had
three-fourths of the people I see stand up and talk about our
energy policy and what we need to do as a country don't even
mention it. So we have to be sure this is involved in this
national conversation and I thank all the panel for what you
are doing to make that happen. Thank you.
Chairman Baird. Excellent point, Mr. Carnahan, and I
applaud your leadership. We talk about carbon sequestration and
electronic vehicles and fusion energy, et cetera, and making
our businesses and homes more efficient may be a whole lot more
efficient and affordable in the shorter-term, and I applaud
your leadership.
With that, the hearing stands adjourned. I thank our
panelists and witnesses, excellent testimony, and my
colleagues. I have to always say the record will remain open
for two weeks for additional statements from the Members and
for answers to any follow-up questions the Subcommittee may ask
of the witnesses. The witnesses are excused. Thank you.
[Whereupon, at 11:59 a.m., the Subcommittee was adjourned.]
Appendix:
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Answers to Post-Hearing Questions
Answers to Post-Hearing Questions
Responses by Steven Chalk, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary, Office
of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, U.S. Department of
Energy
Questions submitted by Chairman Brian Baird
Q1. During the question and answer period of the hearing you said that
DOE and National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have a
very good working relationship. Describe how DOE works with NIST on
building code development. What specifically does DOE fund NIST to do?
You also mentioned that you work with NIST on the new Commercial
Buildings Initiative, what are you working with them on?
A1. The Department of Energy (DOE) collaborates with the National
Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in several ways. For more
than 12 years, DOE and NIST have co-chaired a series of buildings-
related R&D subcommittees on the National Science and Technology
Council, Committee on Technology. This co-chair collaboration includes
development of R&D agendas, research, and other activities. NIST has
also provided technical expertise in support of International Energy
Agency work on building commissioning, and has made significant
contributions in evaluating the usefulness of building commissioning.
In addition, in accordance with section 324 of the Energy Policy and
Conservation Act (EPCA), since the mid-1970's DOE has worked closely
with NIST on the development and update of test procedures for consumer
products and certain commercial and industrial equipment under the
Energy Conservation Standards Program.
Q2. In your testimony you state that DOE is ``actively engaged in the
ASHRAE standards process by providing technical assistance to support
the upgrade of standard 90.1.'' Please describe how you work with these
voluntary consensus groups and what kind's research and development
activities you are involved in that helps inform the process?
A2. The Department staff participates as a voting member on the
Standing Standards Project Committee 90.1, recommends amendments to
standard 90.1, and seeks adoption of technologically feasible,
economically justified energy efficiency measures, as required by
section 307(a) of the Energy Conservation and Production Act (EPCA).
DOE shares its research and demonstration results from technology areas
and high-performance building alliances, such as information from the
Advanced Energy Design Guides. The design guides are jointly produced
by DOE; the American Institute of Architects; the American Society of
Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers; the Illuminating
Engineering Society of North America; and the U.S. Green Building
Council.
DOE also performs technical analysis and building energy modeling
which it shares with the Standing Standards Project Committee 90.1 in
its deliberations. This analysis and modeling has included development
of new regression equations for use in setting envelope requirements,
identification of new cost information, development of hourly load
profiles for building prototypes, technical analysis of lighting issues
dealing with lighting power densities, whole building simulation
support necessary to supply the Envelope and Mechanical subcommittees
with the results they need to develop changes, and modification of the
requirements in the energy cost budget chapter and appendices to
capture addenda such as new distribution transformer requirements and
new variable speed chiller efficiencies. The Department's Pacific
Northwest National Laboratory personnel chair the Lighting
Subcommittee, and participate on several other subcommittees as members
or consultants.
Q3. There are many specific R&D technologies and models identified in
the National Science and Technology Council report on net-zero
buildings issued last year. How does DOE prioritize what areas of
research to pursue?
A3. The prioritization of technology topics for funding occurs at
multiple organizational levels, and is driven by public policy goals
established through authorizing legislation, and national policy
documents and plans. For the Building Technologies Program (BTP), the
research agenda is designed to achieve the technical and economic basis
for marketable net-zero energy performance in residential construction
by 2020, and in commercial construction by 2025.
Additional goals for implementation in the commercial market were
established by the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 (EISA).
These goals include all new construction to be net-zero energy by 2030,
50 percent of commercial building stock to be net-zero by 2040, and 100
percent of commercial building stock to be net-zero by 2050. At this
time there are no time-specific goals for the retrofit of existing
housing stock analogous to the EISA goals for commercial buildings
retrofits.
The technical research goals of developing net-zero energy
buildings take into account costs to ensure broad applicability of
research results to the market. For example, residential net-zero
performance should have a net-zero cash flow on an annual basis to the
homeowner, based on a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage and benchmark energy
costs. Also, the BTP is working toward a five to seven year payback on
the incremental cost of achieving net-zero energy performance in
commercial buildings. The BTP conducts an annual multi-year planning
process to update its research agenda based on a number of factors,
including:
Current and projected funding levels;
Technical progress on funded work, informed by peer
review and StageGate reviews;
Technology roadmaps established and updated with
stakeholders;
Technology pathways (including risk assessment,
barriers to development and adoption) developed analytically;
External technology developments;
Projected gaps in technical performance and/or cost
of performance for whole-building systems-engineered net-zero
energy performance;
Market trends and analyses;
Stakeholder input;
Contingency plans for increased/decreased resources
(e.g., having a developed list of unaddressed opportunities)
Changes in Congressional authorizations,
Administration policies and/or priorities (including OMB budget
guidance, OSTP/NSTC guidance).
Each technology area (e.g., residential integration; commercial
integration; solid state lighting; Heating, Ventilation and Air-
Conditioning; Solar Heating and Cooling; thermal envelope and windows;
and analysis tools) also develops an individual multi-year plan. These
individual plans are then integrated in an annual workshop to ensure a
coordinated set of activities are being pursued that can deliver on the
long-term goals of the program. The integrated plan is published on the
Internet and can be found at http://www1.eere.energy.gov/buildings/
mypp.html. The multi-year plan, along with other analyses, drives the
development of annual operating plans to execute appropriated budgets,
and to drive budget proposals within the Department's Office of Energy
Efficiency and Renewable Energy and at the Departmental level as well.
Q4. The Department of Energy as well as other agencies fund several
different buildings consortiums. For example there is a High-
Performance Green Building Consortium, a High-Performance Building
Council and a Commercial Building Energy Alliance. How are these
partnerships coordinated? How does DOE choose which to participate in?
A4. As required by the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007
(EISA), the Department formally recognized 11 high-performance green
building consortia through a Federal Register Notice process, and
competitively selected a single supporting consortium with which to
consult in the implementation of the High-Performance Green Commercial
Building Initiative (CBI). The CBI is designed to achieve net-zero
energy performance in all commercial buildings by 2030 and in the
entire commercial building stock by 2050. The formally recognized
consortia have their contact information listed on the DOE web site and
act as informal resources for the CBI. The supporting consortium,
consisting of 150 organizations and stakeholders led by the National
Association of State Energy Officials, is funded to coordinate input on
CBI technical and planning topics, and to assist in communication and
outreach with industry stakeholders, manufacturers and NGOs, among
other activities.
The Department, through the CBI, engages the commercial buildings
marketplace through Commercial Building Energy Alliances (Retail,
Commercial Real Estate, Health Care, and two others in the planning
stages) to encourage sharing of best practices, engage with
manufacturers to identify common technology cost and performance needs,
and to exchange experiences with new technologies, retrofit and new
construction practices. In addition, research technical assistance is
being provided to 23 major building portfolio owners and operators who
commit to retrofitting a building at 30 percent better than the current
ASHRAE 90.1 model energy code, and to design, build and operate a new
building at 50 percent better than code. Targeted building technology,
systems, tools and practices research needed to contribute to the long-
term goals established by EISA, is informed by these activities.
The High-Performance Building Council was an ad hoc structure
formed by the National Institute of Building Standards (NIBS) to
produce a report required by Section 914 of the Energy Policy Act of
2005. The report was completed and delivered to Congress; it focused
primarily on the needs for improved voluntary consensus standards for
high-performance buildings. The Department provided funding to support
this effort. The Department continues to work with the International
Code Council and the American Society of Heating, Refrigeration and
Air-conditioning Engineers to develop the next generation of model
energy codes.
Q5. In your written testimony you talk about the work of the
Residential Integration program, and testing the results on a
community-scale. Have you been able to demonstrate community-scale
systems, and if so, where? If not, are discussions underway to set up
demonstrations of this size? How do you decide which technologies to
demonstrate?
A5. The Department's Building America Program Stage-Gates is working to
include: development of individual technologies and practices for
integration into whole-house solutions; proof of performance in
prototype research homes; and implementation in production housing
construction practice, i.e., at the community scale. The research
focuses on solutions for each of the five general climate zones in the
U.S.: cold, hot-dry, hot-humid, mixed humid, and marine. The
combination of technologies to be evaluated in a prototype home are
selected using the Building Optimization model, which compares
combinations of options based on performance and cost characteristics,
with results representing the best cost-optimized potential solutions
sets. It should be noted that solution sets include systems engineering
improvements, such as advanced quality controls protocols, and advanced
construction practices such as value engineered framing developed
through research projects with builders.
Once a prototype house is built per the initial design, the team
tests the prototype's systems for quality and energy use and makes
necessary changes to the design to increase efficiency and cost
effectiveness. The design must be tested and re-tested for total
performance before it is ready for use in production or community-scale
housing. Community-scale Stage-Gate criteria include a requirement that
a minimum of 10 homes be constructed in at least five geographically
dispersed locations within a climate zone. Usually the builder will
construct the whole development using these designs. These developments
typically have 150 to 300 homes. While the builders constructing these
homes receive technical support, the program provides no funds for
brick and mortar. Since the inception of the program, over 41,500
highly efficient research homes have been built. The locations and the
number of homes at each location can be found on the Building America
web site at http://apps1.eere.energy.gov/buildings/
building-america/cfm/project-locations.cfm
Questions submitted by Representative Lynn C. Woolsey
Q1. DOE's Building Technologies Program has adopted a goal of
developing net-zero energy buildings by 2025. In December 2007, the
National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL) issued ``Assessment of the
Technical Potential for Achieving Net-Zero Energy Buildings in the
Commercial Sector,'' a report to assess whether zero-energy buildings
are achievable (attached). The study looks at how low building energy
consumption can practically go. Our understanding is that this report
was good, but because of the limitations in certain software, such as
EnergyPlus, some significant energy saving options, were not able to be
considered. Two questions:
Q1a. Does NREL/DOE have any updates to the 2007 study that refine and/
or expand the study's conclusions?
A1a. Neither the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) nor the
Department have updated the ``Assessment of the Technical Potential for
Achieving Net-Zero Energy Buildings in the Commercial Sector'' study.
However, in April 2009, NREL issued a companion study, ``Assessment of
the Energy Impacts of Outside Air in the Commercial Sector,'' that
expanded the original analysis to address relatively narrow questions
surrounding the energy impacts of ventilation air needed for healthy
indoor environments.
Q1b. Is NREL planning to update the study at anytime in the near
future to take into account innovations in building technologies, new
tools to evaluate building performance, and other such developments?
A1b. The ``Assessment of the Technical Potential for Achieving Net-Zero
Energy Buildings in the Commercial Sector'' study uses data from the
Energy Information Administration's (EIA) 2003 CBECS and ANSI/ASHRAE/
IESNA Standard 90.1-2004 to model the commercial buildings sector. Once
EIA releases its 2007 CBECS data and ASHRAE releases 90.1-2010, the
Department will re-examine the need to update the study. The various
software tools used in the study are steadily being improved to allow
simulation of more technology options as their associated detailed
characteristics become available for incorporation into the models. The
Department is investing in the development of detailed performance
characteristics of new and emerging technologies on a continuous basis.
Q2. How can we accelerate the development of software and other
computational kinds of technologies to accelerate the design and
construction of ``green'' buildings? Are there opportunities for
cooperation with commercial software companies to improve the state-of-
the-art in energy analysis? Is this an area where public-private
partnerships can yield better results for everyone?
A2. While software and other computational technologies are essential
tools in constructing high-performance buildings, the decisions
designers make are only as good as the available data. In order to
achieve its goal of market-ready net-zero energy buildings by 2025, DOE
is actively seeking input data and accurate costs of different design
options which only the private sector can provide.
DOE currently collaborates with four major private sector companies
that create Building Information Modeling (BIM) systems (AutoDesk:
AutoCAD, REVIT; Bentley: Microstation, Hevacomp, TAS; Graphisoft:
ArchiCAD; and Google: SketchUp) to make energy simulations using DOE's
tool, EnergyPlus, more accessible. This year, DOE began a series of
educational workshops with Google and Bentley to explain how EnergyPlus
can be used within their applications and how designs are validated in
the real world.
In addition, university students have been creating new modules for
EnergyPlus as part of graduate studies (without funding from DOE). As a
result, in 2008 DOE brought more than 20 university professors together
to discuss enhancing simulation training in universities. One way that
DOE is embarking on such collaboration--in training and in extending
the capabilities of EnergyPlus--is through the Higher Education Energy
Alliance (HEEA). HEEA is one of five Commercial Building Energy
Alliances that DOE is forming as part of its Net-Zero Energy Commercial
Building Initiative (CBI), which aims to create market-ready net-zero
energy buildings by 2025.
DOE believes such collaborations are essential to the successful
and speedy development of energy simulation software required to
design, build and operate high-performance green buildings. DOE will
continue these highly productive partnerships and seek to expand its
partnerships going forward.
Answers to Post-Hearing Questions
Responses by Karen Ehrhardt-Martinez, Research Associate, American
Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE)
Questions submitted by Chairman Brian Baird
Q1. In your testimony you note that DOE building technology
initiatives would benefit from a more systemic and widespread
incorporation of social and behavioral insights. Within DOE, where and
how should this information be incorporated? Do you think social and
behavioral science should be supported by various initiatives or do you
think there needs to be a coordinated social science program within
EERE?
A1. A more systematic and widespread incorporation of social and
behavioral insights within the building technology initiatives at DOE
holds the promise of both deeper and faster energy savings. This effort
should consist of a coordinated social science program that integrates
social and behavioral insights throughout all of DOE's initiatives and
that creates a people-centered approach to energy savings.
To date, DOE has been primarily focused on the development and
dissemination of more energy-efficient technologies without giving
sufficient attention to:
the acceptability of those technologies,
consumer choices and issues of technology adoption,
or
the ways in which people maintain or use new
technologies and the energy implications of those choices,
habits and lifestyles.
A people-centered approach would recognize that what people choose
to do with any given technology or system of technologies is just as
important as the characteristics of the technology itself in
determining the amount of energy will be consumed or saved. As Internet
guru, Clay Shirky stated ``A revolution doesn't happen when society
adopts new tools, it happens when society adopts new behaviors.''
The Social Science initiative would ideally be housed within the
Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Offices and would require the
employment of sufficient senior level social scientists so as to
provide expertise and training to other DOE staff and staff at the
National Labs as well as to help build DOE's internal capacity in this
area.
Answers to Post-Hearing Questions
Responses by J. Michael McQuade, Senior Vice President, Science and
Technology, United Technologies Corporation
Questions submitted by Chairman Brian Baird
Q1. You pointed out that metrics need to be developed to achieve
better-performing buildings through systems integration. What role do
you think the Federal Government should play in the development of
metrics or tools to identify and quantify critical interactions between
systems?
A1. As noted in my testimony, there is a vigorous role for government-
sponsored research into the methodology and tools needed to model,
simulate and computationally control complex, integrated buildings.
These tools, using leading edge and yet to be developed computer
science, mathematics and physics-based modeling will allow us to
understand how subsystems interact within a building and how buildings
interact with their environment. These topics are major enablers to
allow us to create the highly efficient buildings we discussed at the
hearing.
Once these new buildings exist or existing buildings are
retrofitted with upgraded capability, we believe there is a necessary
role government should play in the establishment and deployment of
``whole building'' energy performance ratings and standards that
incorporate these advancements. In addition, we believe these
performance statistics should be publicly reported on a regular basis.
Standards for energy-efficient components can be useful but standards
for whole building energy performance are key to realizing energy-
efficient buildings. The analogy here is that while we recognize the
role engines play in automobile efficiency, we measure and apply mile-
per-gallon standards to automobiles, not to their components, thus
taking into account other technologies such as aerodynamic design,
energy harvesting or adaptive engine control.
Q2. In your testimony, you note the importance of computational
research and development in the design, optimization, and control of
energy use in buildings. Are the current activities in these areas at
DOE and NIST sufficient? Is there any way they can be improved? And
within the Department of Energy, could the buildings program in the
Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy make better use of the
significant computational capabilities stewarded by the Office of
Science?
A2. We do believe that the current programs at NIST and DOE have been
helpful but that a full-fledged program of basic building energy
sciences and tools development is needed beyond what these agencies
have been charged with in the past. In particular, existing programs do
not focus on the underlying thermal physics and dynamics of complex,
interconnected systems and they do not have, as a goal, the creation of
tools that can be applied by the building industry through the entire
cycle from design to build to continuous operation.
We believe that a focused program should cover three areas. These
areas are detailed in my written testimony. In summary they include:
Systems Engineering and Design Methodologies,
including rigorous and scalable process and tool environment
for building project requirements management & system
architecture exploration
Optimization and Control of Multi-scale Dynamics,
including analytical techniques for system decomposition,
analysis and uncertainty propagation in heterogeneous,
networked, multi-scale building systems and nonlinear dynamical
systems theory tools to exploit natural dynamics
Robust Control and Decision Support Algorithms,
including control and commissioning systems and automated fault
detection and diagnostic (FDD) capabilities using building
automation systems
This kind of systems-level research does not yet exist within EERE.
A vigorous program managed either by EERE or the newly forming ARPA-E
would certainly make use of the computational tools and capabilities
that exist within the DOE's Office of Science and especially its high-
performance computing initiative.
The United States needs a comprehensive energy strategy to ensure
we deliver to future generations a secure and livable world. Energy
efficiency, doing more with less, must be at the heart of such a
strategy, and reduction in energy consumption in our buildings can and
must be a priority element. I applaud the work of the Committee in
focusing on this issue and thank you again for the chance to testify on
how we might move a national agenda forward. Please feel free to
contact me if I may be of future assistance on this important topic.