The Sustainable Evolution

As Green Builder Media celebrates its 20th Anniversary, a look back—and forward—is in order. Come along as we assess the evolution of sustainable innovation.

Every industry has to evolve to survive. Just as we have seen the automobile industry transition from diesel to petroleum to electric, the built environment is going through a similar transition. From outside the automotive industry, I can say they have had an easier transition, because the number of parts that go into a car are fewer and it all happens in one factory by one manufacturer. 

Since 1997 when Toyota Prius was the first mass produced electric vehicle, the landscape has changed dramatically, directly impacting the user experience and even stretching into other industries, like housing design and operations.  

In the built environment, there are not only existing structures to address by bringing them up to code, but new construction needs to be reimagined in many cases. Both have numerous stakeholders involved—from the architect to the engineer, from the builder to the developer—and every added piece and every added player multiplies the complexity of the process, slowing it down as well. 

But there has been progress, slow and steady progress, through regulatory practices, through manufacturing, through societal shifts, and beyond. 

In the United States, leaders started thinking about energy efficiency in the built environment in the 1950s and established the first standards. Those standards launched the country into an ongoing improvement plan of regulations, very often inspired by other countries that were leading the way in sustainable practices. 

That evolution has started to create a daisy chain of innovative practices and processes inspiring ambitious goals and objectives, yet all without the necessary scale to gain traction. 

“We still aren’t serious about it, but we’re using the words,” says Johanna Partin, former deputy director at the Building Decarbonization Coalition and principal at Transformative Strategies Consulting.

“We need a phase out strategy that includes moving from fossil fuel to thermal energy. That would be a game changer and that’s where we need to go. Timeline is that it has to happen now.”

Currently, few states have addressed this from a regulatory or policy making standpoint, but some have started. Massachusetts and Washington are both phasing out gas for thermal energy, with proposals in discussion in California, New York and Minnesota. 

Partin believes that the Paris Climate Change Conference in 2016 was a semi-turning point, when climate vanguards pivoted from talking about a 30 or 40% GHG reduction to getting to zero emissions or net positive. 

“Even then, when they said carbon neutral, they were saying an 80% reduction, which isn’t carbon neutral,” she said. “It didn’t happen until a couple years after that. It takes political courage, and it takes a very meaningful collaboration between the fossil fuel companies and workers and the decarbonization people. The utilities are starting to get this, and they know that there isn’t a place for fossil fuels in a clean energy future.” 

The Sustainable Future 

“A meaningful, phased transition means working in ways that we haven’t been working in the past,” Partin said. “From a policy making perspective, it requires courage and investment in time to have conversations that there will not be fossil fuels in our future. 

For example, I spend a lot of time looking at network geothermal capturing waste heat from different buildings and sharing it with others. The skills required for those pipes are the same skills to drill for natural gas–very transferable skills from natural gas to geothermal. It’s a meaningful transition conversation; we don’t have to put people out of jobs. If we care about people and care about climate change, we have to do better.”

Many others are pushing the agenda and lived the slow pace of the evolution. 

“Funny enough HEET started out as an energy efficiency organization 16 years ago and went through our own evolution to scaling building decarbonization,” said Zeyneb Magavi, executive director of HEET, an organization building collaborative geothermal networks. “I’m glad we are all at the point when we can reflect on this evolution!”

She explained the history of the organization; it was centered around solving a local issue in a just way that includes workforce and stabilizes the rates of the energy systems. They started by working on reducing emissions from gas leaks, which created the need for a new pipe infrastructure. But new pipes would cost billions of dollars, so it put the public in a hard place because millions of people relied on the system but replacing it would cause a financial hazard. 

“It was at that point that we decided to tackle decarbonization,” Magavi said. “Can we invest in infrastructure that continues to provide reliable, safe, and sustainable energy? We started to create a thoughtful, human-centered, managed approach to decarbonization. We tried to think about this as a question of envisioning what future we all want; to combat that combination of energy efficiency, weatherization and delayed maintenance, and aging infrastructure.” 

HEET approaches climate as a systems-based problem with an approach between people and technology. The people, processes, and rules are what determine whether the technology works. 

Her advice is to keep moving with the world as it changes, while it keeps changing faster and faster. Personally, I get frustrated attending events and listening to builders talk about how impossible it is to think about electrification and how impossible it is to heat a home without fossil fuels. We didn’t have a road or highway system in place when we started using cars. We didn’t have WiFi when we started using cell phones. We have to be willing to be flexible and innovate to adopt better practices. 

Magavi said, “Agility for us means reprioritizing as we go. People know and feel that reprioritization can happen in the context of their engagement. People don’t know what their heat systems are–they care about the impact, affordability, reliability, safety. Just reframing the way we talk to be centered around the way people feel is an important and continuous learning.”

Results from Green Builder’s COGNITION Survey show this trend and can truly help address the way people feel. Consumers report that they will invest in upgrades like energy efficiency, electrification, resiliency, healthy home, connected living, water conservation, and solar and storage, if those upgrades will lower their ongoing cost of homeownership over time, reflecting the reprioritization that Magavi’s group is experiencing. 

Slow, Steady Progress to Better Building

Accelerating Decarbonization in the United States, a report from National Academies, says decarbonization isn’t just critical, it’s also possible. To make it a reality, the report recommends more rebates for residential decarbonization extending beyond 2040, along with regulation and standards. It also recommends developing rules to increase access to energy programs at various price points, while decreasing the costs to participate. 

In addition, it suggests improving building departments’ capacity to enforce codes, along with adopting mandatory appliance and equipment electrification in new buildings by 2035.

Some of these solutions look forward more than 20 years. Looking back, this year marks Green Builder Media’s 20th anniversary advocating for better building practices. Starting with this issue, we’ll highlight critical topics in this journey through a monthly series of articles. 

We’ll look at how homebuilding compares to other industries, how while changes have been slow, there have been some fantastic innovations. We’ll look at new voices, leading edge technologies, and transformative products in more detail. 

Join us, share with us, and discover how you can help make a more positive impact in making the next 20 years a pivotal point in the journey.