Agenda:

Speaker(s):

Brad Jacobson currently leads some of EHDD’s high performance projects including a zero energy, LEED Platinum office building for the David & Lucile Packard Foundation and the carbon neutral Nevada State College Master Plan. He served as Project Architect on Carnegie Institution’s Global Ecology Research Center, an interdisciplinary research center at Stanford University that reduced carbon emissions from energy and materials by over 60% and was named a National AIA Top Ten Green Building in 2007. Brad was Project Manager on Stanford’s Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology, a 25,000 square-foot research facility featuring exceptional daylighting and an underfloor air distribution system, and completed a feasibility study, sponsored by Stanford University’s School of Engineering, for an innovative dormitory and research laboratory designed to test and demonstrate sustainable building methods and technologies. Brad received his Bachelors of Arts in Urban Studies from Stanford University and a Masters of Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania. He is co-founder of Bay Area Leadership in Sustainable Architecture, or BALSA, which brings together leading architects to accelerate progress towards a sustainable future and was until recently a Visiting Lecturer at Stanford University where he taught a course in “Green Architecture” for the five years.

Presentation
Summary:

Getting to Zero: Lessons Learned from Design & Operation of Zero Energy Buildings
Scientific consensus is that in order to halt the worst impacts of climate change, economy-wide energy efficiency gains need to be 80% or more by 2050. Since the building sector is widely identified as the easiest and cheapest place to make dramatic and rapid gains, buildings will need to lead the rest of the economy. For this reason, Zero Energy Buildings are a fundamental building block of federal, state and institutional carbon reduction plans. The California Public Utilities Commission’s Strategic Energy Efficiency Plan, for example, targets net zero energy consumption for all new buildings by 2030 as a key component of the state’s AB32 compliance strategy. Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory have established that to meet AB32 targets all new buildings must be zero energy by 2030 coupled with aggressive energy retrofitting of existing buildings. Yet there are few built examples today that demonstrate the technical and financial viability of Zero Energy Buildings. Brad Jacobson will present lessons learned from several EHDD Zero Energy buildings in design and operation. While these buildings differ in important ways from more conventional “green” buildings, the concepts covered will be applicable to all interested in closing the loop between high-efficiency building design and real world results.