Below is the text version of the video "Overview of Life Cycle Impacts of Buildings." See the video.

Cedar Blazek:
Hi everyone. Welcome to the first in a series of webinars related to Life Cycle Energy and Other Related Impacts of Buildings brought to you by the US Department of Energy's Building Technologies Office. Today's webinar will give an introduction and overview of Life Cycle Impacts of Buildings and will begin to answer the questions where do buildings come from and where do they go when they die. My name is Cedar Blazek and I'll be your moderator for today's event. As a disclaimer, please note this call is being recorded and may be posted on DOE's website or used internally. All attendees will be muted for the duration of the webinar. However, if you do speak during the call or use a video connection, you are presumed consent to recording and use of your voice or image as well as your questions.

To kick things off today, you'll hear from the Director of the Building Technologies Office here at the Department of Energy David Nemtzow who will give a quick welcome and introduction. After that, Lyla Fadali, a AAAS Policy Fellow in the Building Technologies Office will, give an Introduction to Life Cycle Carbon and we'll introduce the current questions facing our office as begin to explore LCA for Buildings. Lyla has been instrumental in setting up this webinar series. We'll then hear from our three distinguished guest speakers Ed Mazria, Kate Simonen and Michael Deru. 

I'd like to take a moment to tell you about each of them. Edward Mazria is an internationally recognized architect, author, researcher, and educator. Over the past decade, his seminal research into the sustainability, resilience, energy consumption, and greenhouse gas emissions of the built environment has redefined the role of architecture, planning, design, and building in reshaping our world. He is the founder of Architecture 2030, a think tank developing real world solutions for 21st century problems. Thanks for being here Ed. Next up is Kate Simonen who is the Founding Director of the Carbon Leadership Forum. She's an Associate Professor at the University of Washington, a writer and a researcher with significant professional experience in high performance buildings architecture and structural engineering. She authored "The Authoritative Life Cycle Assessment" and "The LCA Practice Guide" and is co-chair of the Embodied Carbon Network, a global open access communications and action network. Thanks so much for being here Kate. And finally, we hear from Michael Deru. Michael manages the Systems Performance section in the Commercial Buildings research group at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. He leads projects on the development and testing of novel HVAC systems, building performance simulations performance metrics for sustainability, source energy, and emissions factors - water and the US Life Cycle Inventory database. Dr. Deru received an R&D 100 Award in 2005 and is very active within ASHRAE. Thanks for being here Michael. Once our speakers are finished presenting today, we'll plan to answer your questions. Please type your questions directly into the Q&A feature of this webinar throughout the presentation and we'll get to as many as we can at the end.

Next slide. 

I'd like to remind you all that this webinar is the first in a series on this topic happening over the next few months. To build on the discussions today and to keep the conversations going, I encourage you all to sign up for the rest of the webinars in this series at the dates on the screen that you see. 

And with that... next slide.

We're going to jump into a quick poll question for our audience. We'd really like to know what industry you come from. You can select that.

You can go ahead and select other if you don't see your industry represented.

OK.

Great! So it looks like we have a good amount of representatives from federal, state, and local governments as well as the consulting and corporate world and some representation from labs and academic researchers. Great! And then we also want to know how familiar are you with Life Cycle Analysis? This is pretty broad, but we just want to gauge sort of who we're speaking to.

OK. So this is great! That's sort of what I was expecting. We definitely have some experts in the audience. Welcome. You can obviously correct us if we say anything wrong. But most of the folks - it looks like more than half - are "somewhat familiar." So hopefully you have a little bit of background maybe in LCA and hopefully you'll learn something on the webinar today.

OK. Well thanks for participating in that. It'll help us shape our presentation and with that I'm going to hand things off to our Director David Nemtzow. David take it away.

David Nemtzow:
Thanks very much, Cedar. I'm having... Can you hear me okay, Cedar? I'm having some bandwidth problems on my home machine is that okay?

Cedar Blazek:
Sounds good to me.

[Crosstalk]

David Nemtzow:
OK. And if I lose the bandwidth I might have to turn off my camera. So thanks very much Cedar and thank all of you for joining us today and for not letting webinar fatigue get the best of you these days and being part of this conversation. I'm going to talk about BTO in a moment. Before I do that, I want to tell you my views on Life Cycle Analysis... Giacomo Puccini. So in the first scene of La Boheme, the poor starving Bohemians of La Boheme, Marcello who's an artist and Rodolfo who's a poet - unless it's the other way around - are sitting in their frozen apartment in the winter in Paris - not even apartment, it a garret on the top of house. They're freezing. And so they don't have any money for fuel so they start breaking up the furniture and burning it. And when they run out of furniture to burn they start burning their own music and poetry. OK. That might be a rational decision. On the other hand, at the other end are the Iroquois people of what's now the Iroquois Native Americans who taught themselves and ask us to think about the impact of our decisions upon the seventh generation concept - I think we all know. So I'm not faulting Marcello and Rodolfo for freezing in there a garret, but I think the key part of Life Cycle Analysis and the work we want to do especially as climate change is such a key issue... a crisis around the world is to see, can we be more like the Iroquois people and less like Marcello and Rodolfo? Can we think about not just staying warm now at the expense of our work and our furniture, but can we think about seven generations worth of impact? And for Buildings it can be a lot more than seven generations, as we know. It can... buildings last hundreds of years or thousands of years. And if we think about that and, you know, pick your pick your favorite building. 

So that's the topic we want to discuss: How do we think about that long term? I, like many of us at BTO and perhaps many of you, tend to focus more on operational energy issues. I want to talk about that in a moment I think we've made some good progress there as a nation. A lot more progress to go. 

So I have a couple of slides. I'm not quite sure, Lyla, where my slides end and yours start so you tell me when I'm stepping on your turf. Is somebody clicking? 

Look we have 125 million buildings in this country they consume just under 40 percent. This is all operational now. Just under 40 of annual energy consumption in this country - that's more than industry; more than transportation. And if I showed the slide for CO2, it would be 35% - just under transportation for electricity. It's 74% and for peak electricity it's closer to 80%. So it's a big deal.

Next please. Very big deal this is where we work. I'll let you go to our home page and take a look at this. While you're on our homepage by the way also take a look we have two new Funding Opportunities. They're competitive, they're on the street right now. One is our annual R&D focus but it's a lot more than R&D of a competitive FOA - we call them - called BENEFIT that's 80 million dollars and the deadline is in several weeks. And the other the Secretary of Energy just announced the other day Connected Communities looking at a collection of buildings and grid enabled and services that's 65 million. So please take a look at those and I hope you'll consider applying. But we work at BTO on this whole spectrum from R&D - early stage R&D, at the left end of the spectrum. Do integration into buildings with consumer facing tools in the middle. And then to the right, locking that into building codes and appliance standards. Again, we have a focus on operational and we're going to change that over time.

Next please.

And think more about embodied life cycle this is - we're just showing off now, but again on operational our favorite example - and if we had 15 examples like the refrigerator in this country we can all retire and I'll buy the champagne. Because the the typical the average refrigerator purchase today consumes only one quarter of the annual operational energy of one from 40 years ago one quarter. And what sacrifice did the American public make to save that much energy the average freeze today is bigger than it was 40 years ago? The average fridge has more features than it did more for 40 years ago and the average fridge is half - corrected for inflation - half the average purchase price. And so that's the kind of success that we're so delighted about that the country has made on operational efficiency. We don't have 15 examples like this unfortunately, but we have others.

If you can click through this slide. 

Keep going.

Keep going.

All right. So this is focusing on standards. I suspect you all know this to try to a lot like Buildings trying to lock in those savings on the operational side.

Next please.

All right.

[Crosstalk]

Yeah! I think we're going to turn it to Lyla. So as you can imagine, what we want to do is continue our focus on operational energy efficiency and I want to say this: This conversation, I suspect they know from conversations within our office with the national labs with experts like Kate and Ed and others and Michael, is it's very easy to get all twisted up on absolute numbers versus percentages. The point is - and Lyla will talk about that - the point is we are making some progress on operational. We're making some great progress on operational energy efficiency. We need to make a lot more. The demands we face demand that. So I recommend when we have this conversation we don't get hung up on relative shares; we get hung up on that we have two big problems in this country in terms of buildings energy use. One is how do we improve operational performance and the other is how do we improve life cycle energy performance. That's my view on it. I'm sure we'll have a chance to have a conversation. Thank you.

Lyla.

Lyla Fadali:
Thanks.  Can everyone hear me?

OK. So, thank you very much for your remarks David. I'm really excited to see where this goes in BTO. So as as David said, we've had an impact on operational energy. We've been doing well, but there's something that we have been missing; which is the emissions that come from before a building is up and running and asks what happens after it ends. So you can see a pretty big slice of the pie - a pretty significant size of the pie is associated with Building Construction.

Next slide.

So if we look at the whole picture thinking about life cycle carbon, that refers to carbon emissions associated with all stages of a building's life from extracting raw materials and manufacturing them to construction and the actual operating life of the building to when it's demolished or reused and recycled. So lifecycle carbon includes both the operational carbon that has been our office's traditional focus and embody carbon which is the carbon associated with all the other stages.

Next slide.

So you're going to hear a lot more about this from our panelists I'm sure, but one reason that this is a very urgent question is that global building stock is expected to more than double. So if we want to be able to address the carbon emissions associated from all those new buildings being built, we need to work on this right now!

Next slide.

So this - then the question is: Where should we be focusing? Where is our office needed? What types of buildings should we be thinking about? What types of materials? What parts of the life cycle? This webinar is about exploring those and other questions.

Next slide.

OK, so I guess here I'm going to go ahead and hand it over to Ed to tell us about what's going on here.

Ed Mazria:
OK can you see my screen?

Cedar Blazek:
Yes.

Ed Mazria:
OK great. Alright so let's start.

First, just this is a quick overview and then our other panelists will dive into many of the details and then we can have a conversation.

First, about budgets. We keep hearing about budgets. So what is our carbon budget? Not that many people know. It's 340 gigatons of CO2; that gives us a good probability 67% chance of staying under the 1.5 degrees c. Right now we emit about 40 gigatons globally. If we peak emissions this year - we probably will this year actually because of the pandemic - and phase out all CO2 emissions, we're at 600 gigatons. We're way over and that gives us a less than a 50 chance. So how do we meet the 1.5 now, because actually since Paris we haven't reduced our emissions? So to meet the 340, we need a 65% reduction from what we're doing today and then a total phase out by 2040. So the 2050 date doesn't hold anymore. So if you hear people talking about net zero emissions by 205, that's outdated.

OK so the built environment: How do we get a handle on the built environment - which we're talking about mostly buildings? We have New Building operations, Existing Buildings operations, and then Materials, Construction, and Infrastructure. For new buildings and existing buildings - we have a handle on that. We have Zero Codes, we have Zero Carbon codes, - we have great code standards, we have to get them implemented - and we have all sorts of policies for big buildings - which are not that many actually date certain. New York City is implementing those now and we have intervention points for other buildings. So we know how to get a handle on these two. Well what about Materials, Construction, and Infrastructure? That is a big issue. There are literally hundreds of thousands or hundreds of millions of building products out there. Building in infrastructure products you not only have so many products, but then you have, "Where do you start where do you begin?," you have extraction transportation manufacturing. It's daunting. So how do we get a handle on that? Well this is how we see global of the emissions divided up: Building Operations 28 percent. Then all the rest, the construction and everything else and infrastructure and every other product that's out there that's not building related falls into the 43% of industry. About two years ago we had a breakthrough. The GlobalABC put out some statistics. And we saw building materials and construction. Essentially, core and shell was 11%. So we got... we started to get a handle on that, but that's everything also steel, cement, brick, glass, you know - you name it, wood all falls in that 11%. So it's still difficult to get your arms around this. So we took a shot at re-defining the pie and we see Building Operations still 28%, Transportation 23%. But now we see two materials: concrete and steel. Roughly half of all industrial emissions, 21.2 percent of total emissions. And if you throw aluminum in there you get over the 50% in terms of industrial emissions. So if we get a handle on just those two we can make huge reductions in the industrial sector and the building construction and materials sector and then phase in all the other hundreds of millions of materials; start phasing those of phasing those down. So it's not that daunting all of a sudden if we focus on two materials. The built environment with buildings and infrastructure represents now over 50 percent of total greenhouse gas emissions.

So now what do we do?  Well Architect 2030 calls for three options: reuse, reduce, and sequester. 

The first, obviously, reuse is big if you reuse you're not creating new, therefore using a heck of a lot less than body carbon and that's a planning design, specifications, and policy issue. It's everything from repurposing existing urban areas - rather than tearing them down and building new - repurpose them. Renovate them. Adapt them use local materials. And design to deconstruct; that's starting to become a big issue now in our industry. So we keep using those those products over and over again. 

The second is reduce. That's the same planning design specs and policy. That's everything from growth boundaries - so we don't have sprawl, to infill - there's tons of places to infill in existing cities, optimizing structure - the engineers have a big role to play, specifying low carbon materials, and then a policy - which we're now beginning to see in embodied carbon.

And the last is sequester - actually draw down. And that's everything from using sustainable wood that's sustainably forested, cross laminate, glue laminated wood and bamboo now - which is very fast growing and it's an incredible material and very strong and you can laminate it into big members, carbon positive aggregate - injecting CO2 into concrete using biomaterial, and the landscape architects are now really getting involved in terms of drawdown and urban agriculture so we don't take up that much [inaudible]. 

So what Architecture 2030 calls for, in order to meet the 1.5 degrees c target, this is what must happen. Right now we need a 40% reduction below the average when you're specifying materials. There are all sorts of tools available for that. By 2030, it needs to go to 65%. By 2040, the products we use need to be zero and how we construct need to be zero CO2 emissions. And we're saying: Companies now - we want some companies to really step out in front go to a 50% minimum now and get to zero by by 2030. 

We have now all tools are coming on the market like you wouldn't believe. You can go to carbon-positive.org. That was a a global teaching we just held and you can click on any of these links and go to all these various tools that are available now. You can, also, go to materialspalette.org where we have information on the major carbon intensive materials.

So the question is that we keep asking ourselves and that you see all over the the newspapers now and in print and on video: Can we meet the 1.5 degrees c carbon budget? The answer is of course we can; we just need to put our mind to it, get a handle around it, and begin doing it.

With that, I'll hand it over to Kate Simonen.

Kate Simonen:
Thank you. Ed. Can you now see my screen?

Ed Mazria:
Yep!

Kate Simonen:
OK, let me get set here.

So I'm thrilled to be here, following after one of my inspirations and mentors. So thank you so much Ed. I direct the Carbon Leadership Forum and we work to decarbonize the built environment with a focus on body carbon or the emissions from building material manufacturing and use. So we're using Life Cycle Thinking. So Life Cycle Thinking is both a perspective and methodology. So when you look at the total life cycle of a building or a product, you're thinking about it from its cradle when it is materials are extracted from the ground, manufactured all the way through its use and end of life. And ideally thinking of it from a circular perspective; that the end of life of materials become new materials again. Life Cycle Thinking can be thought of from a cost perspective. So life cycle cost analysis looks at the cost to not just build an asset like a building, but also to operate it throughout its life. A Life Cycle Assessment, or LCA, is doing the same, but from environmental impact perspective. So a Life Cycle Assessment as an accounting method, is tracking the extractions from nature. So removal of coal or other, water, and resources. And then the emissions to nature. So greenhouse gas emissions, methane, nitric oxide, all of those emissions that happen when we burn things or have chemical reactions. And aggregating those emissions to environmental impacts such as greenhouse gas emissions or carbon or impacts that impact water like eutrophication where you see the algae blooms. So Life Cycle Assessment is a method that tracks these impacts and converts... tracks emissions and converts them to impacts and that method goes into a framework of a thinking about the total life cycle impacts of an asset. So we're talking here about those environmental impacts. The same thinking can be done from costing as well. 

So as brought up, if we look at the total decarbonization of the building sector. We need to look at both the operating impacts where we need to make buildings energy efficient decarbonize the electrical grid and eliminate combustion of fossil fuels on site. And then when we look at the embodied impacts, those impacts happen from a wide range of sources. They come from driving trucks and to extract materials.

They're the high heats that are needed to make things like cement and steel. There are chemical reactions that take place in the manufacturing process so these industrial sector has some real challenges of decarbonization. They're... it's not just about efficiency and electrical grid decarbonization, because many of these manufacturing processes take so much heat that it's difficult to do with electricity. So there's innovation that's required at the manufacturing process to decarbonize the industrial sector and that's one of the really important parts of R&D that's needed to enable us to meet these decarbonization goals. So as Ed mentioned, we really need to drive down to zero or in fact be drawing down more carbon out of the atmosphere than we emit. We can talk about, as David mentioned, there's different numbers that are getting thrown around, but what the big picture is is we have to make massive reductions in the near term in order to meet global climate targets and we need to do that in a way that enables a healthy equitable and just society. We're doing this work because we want a future in which people have clean water, clean air, healthy, and happy places to thrive. So we're doing this for those seven generations in the future.

When we look at decarbonization it's really important to recognize that accounting methods don't always track all of the emissions. So this is a plot of greenhouse grass emissions in California and really exciting to see that as a population and the GDP are increasing California is seeing a decrease in greenhouse gas emissions. The decrease comes from energy efficiency upgrades and cleaning of the electrical grid, but it's really important that we don't miss a Carbon Loophole and that we don't we need to track where the emissions from manufacturing take place. So often a region will track their greenhouse gas emissions that occur in a region but embody impacts or manufacturing impacts are often imported, but because they're coming from other states or other countries and so we we don't want to avoid that - we don't want to miss that the consumption emissions are the responsibility of those who consume them; the goods. 

If we're looking at embodied carbon reduction strategies, there's three main strategies - similar to how Ed framed them. The first one is: you have to optimize the project. So that means don't build something if you don't need it, reuse existing buildings and materials, and build smaller and use less altogether. And a lot of those decisions really can be made by rules of thumb. If you build half as much building you have half as much embodied carbon.

Second strategy is around optimizing the systems. That's making sure that... deciding between whether or not you're using different types of structural systems, or how you're enclosing the building and - or configuring the building. And there you need to use a Life Cycle Assessment approach to make sure that you're not making unintended trade-offs between upfront emissions - with the materials you purchase upfront - and the overall operating and end-of-life impacts.

And then the third strategy is around by buying materials - or procurement - and this is when you're choosing a material, "I know I want to buy steel. How do I buy the lower carbon footprint steel?" And there are emerging policies such as Buy Clean and resources such as environmental product declarations that help you get there.

So later on in this session you'll see a range of speakers talking about decarbonization strategies at both the building and the material scale. At the Carbon Leadership Forum, we conducted a study to try and understand the order of magnitude of impacts of embodied carbon. So here are some results of this study. We're seeing a high degree of variation that's both in the the method of doing the calculation, but also in the type of construction. This helps us understand that the order of magnitude is, you know, between 4 and 600 kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalent per square meter. And this type of study allows us to put in context the order of magnitude of operating and embodied impacts. And start to understand that the scale of these impacts are on par or is perhaps more important to be addressing in the near term.

So if you're wanting to do a whole building Life Cycle Assessment, you're needing to - and looking at embodied impacts - you're needing to understand the quantities of material that you use and the embodied carbon impacts of those materials. And then it's a simple math of multiplying quantities of material and the impacts to get a total embodied carbon. So there are tools and resources, as Ed was mentioning, of whole building assessment tools that help you quantify those material impacts and compare options and explore impacts over the full life cycle. 

You know when we look at the manufacturing impacts, the general assumption is that when we make things we emit carbon, but there are a lot of innovative manufacturing possibilities coming on to play in which we can actually use - extract - carbon from the atmosphere and store it into building materials. So that's really the sort of the vision of where building materials can be a key part of a climate solution if we can think about and innovate in ways in which we're using carbon storing materials in our built environment at greater levels storing carbon out of the atmosphere.

And so there are carbon storing materials that are available today from biogenic materials and there are also innovative bench scale materials being developed in which were more mineralization and innovation happening.

If we're looking at specification at a procurement scale, there are product labeling like environmental product declarations, that report the carbon footprint and other environmental impact results from a Life Cycle Assessment in an environmental product declaration. Similar to miles per gallon on a car, these third-party verified reports by manufacturers help us understand and compare between the options available.

There are tools available such as the Embodied Carbon and Construction Calculator that the Carbon Leadership Forum helped incubate. That's a free tool that is compiling the reported environmental product declarations; organizing them by product category and starting to show that there's a fairly wide swing between the high emitting material and the low emitting material. And so, from there you can start to see what options are available and then, as Ed was mentioning, make procurement decisions to favor the lower carbon options and that helps to provide a market pool for the investments that manufacturers need to do to decarbonize their industries. So later on through the webinar series you'll see more examples about how you can optimize embodied carbon from the project, the system, and the material scale.

If you're looking for additional information, I encourage you to join the Carbon Leadership Forum. We send out monthly webinars. Our monthly newsletters, as well, have research and resources available to you. And we're convening regional hubs. And so there's volunteer groups forming to advocate and for embody carbon reduction action and we welcome you to join. 

Thank-you and I will now hand it over to Michael.

Michael Deru:
Great. Thank-you, Kate and Ed and David. This is an honor to speak with all of you true leaders in this field and thank you all for joining today.

I'm going to talk a little bit about some of the challenges - Can everybody see my screen here? Some of the challenges and the opportunities that we have available in front of us here to address these challenges; these enormous challenges that have been... that are before us. So I'm going to get right in here. 

So one challenge it's... - we've already talked about, but a little bit - it's that we need massive new construction as Lyla said. We're expected to double our footprint of buildings by 2060 to meet these growing - and there's a massive growing and shifting populations. But we also need to do some major retrofits of existing buildings to meet our energy and climate goals. So there's a a great opportunity here to transform how we build our buildings to be more sustainable, economical, and equitable.

The second challenge I just want to talk about today is... - and it's been kind of the underpinning of everything we're talking about - is this growing environmental and economic impact of the energy consumption, the resource constraints that we're facing, and we have an aging infrastructure. So we have this opportunity to transform our energy generation, distribution, consumptions to be low... well to be zero carbon, we want it to be very efficient, resilient, and reliable and secure as well. I didn't put that in there, but...

So what solutions do we have? So the Department of Energy launched the Advanced Building Instruction initiative and this is a major initiative to transform construction industry. And we see great opportunities here to improve the energy performance of the buildings, increase the labor productivity, improve circularity that Kate was just talking about - as well as a big factor, and address our social and economic inequities. So we have the opportunity here to make major changes in how we build buildings so that we can reduce the energy consumption, reduce the materials consumption, we can make it a much more efficient process, and build in and change the materials we're using. So that we can use materials that Ed and Kate are talking about.

Then we want to, you know, thinking about building this circular economy for buildings and building materials. So - and I'm not going to go through all of these -, but one thing I do want to kind of... it's kind of funny to think that, you know, "Why is the world running out of sand?" This is... you wouldn't think - we have plenty of sand, right? But for all the concrete that we use in the world - which is a massive amount - we need quality sand. So you can't use sand that comes from a beach or it has, because it... the sand is not the sand grains are rounded they don't work well for concrete so they have to be - you have to mine sand. So there is this problem of running out of sand so we do need new ways of thinking about how we build buildings, what kind of materials we use, and in the united states alone we had just from buildings about 169 million tons of construction and demolition waste in 2015. That... now a lot of that, especially the concrete, does get recycled into new aggregate - or aggregate for new concrete -, but most the rest of the it goes to the landfill and it's just a huge waste of resources that we should be, you know, continually keeping in our economy.

Alright. So we talk about the embodied energy in the building and body carbon in the building and then the operational carbon we think about, "Oh! You know, the energy consumption." But as a facility manager, you actually have a lot of opportunity to reduce - impact the carbon footprint of your building. And if we think about this in one way, we have this this is just a simple graphic thinking about the annual carbon emissions from your building over time and you have this operational consumption emissions from energy and water use and I'm just showing here as a decrease in that as we become more efficient use different energy sources. But then we also have this ongoing what I'm calling the operations and maintenance emissions. This is all the other materials that you bring into the building on a daily basis and how you operate the building, what kind of cleaning supplies you use, what kind of other operations that you do? And then, you have these event-based emissions. So you may buy new furniture in the building which - you know - what choices do you have to have zero emissions there? You may do an equipment replacement and you could potentially even get a, you know, a carbon credit, if you... depending on if we really want to count it that way. But there's lots of events throughout the life of the building and at the end of life, you're going to have end of life emissions or potentially credits depending on what you do at the end of life of that building. 

And so we're coming up with ways; tools to help building facility managers think about how they operate the building and how they can make zero carbon or very low carbon decisions. 

So another big solution we have ahead of us is transformation of our energy system. So right now our energy systems is carbon intensive it's aging infrastructure; we're moving toward a clean energy generation, smart and secure transmission and distribution. And our loads are... we're working on making them very smart and efficient loads and we have distributed energy resources. So this is a major transformation of energy systems that's ongoing here. And to make all of this work, they have to be connected and we're working on that a lot. So we're talking about the building so I'm going to go into the buildings part of this. 

So what we call the Grid-Interactive Efficient Buildings are buildings that are efficient. So we try to make them as - first of all work on efficiency as possible. We make them connected. So that we're connecting or communicating and we have energy flow to and from the grid, because we have storage on site, we have on-site generation, we have very flexible loads in the building that can... And then we, also, may have electric vehicle charging in the building. So that's another big shift where we have our buildings are becoming fuel stations for our transportation as well. So this is a tremendous opportunity and a big effort within the Department of Energy right now.

And then I just want to end on one big example here. The city of Los Angeles has a goal of going to 100 renewable energy. And think about that, for Los Angeles. This is one of our largest cities in the country. One of the largest cities in the world going to a hundred percent renewable energy. This is crazy thinking - right? But this is the kind of stuff that we need to do. So NREL is working with the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power and we're looking at how they can do this. So we're modeling their energy systems looking at all of the distribution systems, but then also looking at all of the buildings in Los Angeles. so we're modeling or doing representative models of all the buildings of Los Angeles and looking at all the optimization different technologies that we could put into those buildings, how we can link those together with this distributed energy resources, looking at the economic analysis, looking at the job creations... The, you know, there's a big job migration some, you know, there's going to be a lot of new jobs created, but there's also going to be a lot of jobs that are going to, you know, people that are going to be go out. And so we're going to have to figure out how all that works. And so this is a tremendous study that we're undertaking that hopefully we can replicate and learn from and improve on and move on to other cities and... because we're going to have to do this across the country and across the world.

Alright that is last of my slides and I will turn it back over to Cedar I believe.

Cedar Blazek:
Great! Thanks so much, Michael, and thank you so much to all of our presenters for that high level overview. I want to jump into a poll question before we get into the Q&A. So we want to hear from you: What aspect of life cycle carbon should the Building Technologies Office here at the US Department of Energy focus on?

If there's an answer that you don't see represented here, please feel free to type in the chat box.

OK. Looks like we have quite a few votes here. Doing pretty good "Gathering and sharing high quality data" followed really closely by "Establishing a standard for life cycle carbon assessment" then we're looking at "Lower embodied carbon materials and technology research and development" and then slightly fewer votes 25 and 21 for "Construction and installation" and "End of life or reduce, reuse, recycle. Thank you for all of that and I'm going to sort of turn that question back to our panelists and make it a little more focused. If each of you could provide sort of one word of advice or one area of focus that you think the Building Technologies Office should work on in this space, what would you recommend?

I will start with... Yeah, we'll go in order. We'll do Ed, Kate, then Michael.

Ed Mazria:
OK, yeah. I would say steel, concrete, and wood.

Kate Simonen:
OK, that was quick, Ed! I'm going to follow up with that and say that's R&D. So that's our... How do you scale hydrogen steel production? How do you make innovative heat sources work for cement production? How do you integrate effective carbon capture onto cement kilns and then turn that captured carbon into iron aggregate that we can use it as building materials? These are long-term... longer-term R&D projects that are ideally suited in my mind for the government to be investing in to bring up capacity both in the US and the world to make these manufacturing transformations.

Ed Mazria:
Let me just sort of jump in really quickly... why said steel, concrete and then and wood. Because what is a competitor to stealing concrete? And when you have a competitor, the other products move really, really quickly to zero carbon.

Michael Deru:
Yeah. I'd like to add, I think there's probably, you know, new materials that could be developed as well that are, you know, we haven't even thought of that could replace those items. So I'd like to, you know, continue to see new material research and new construction methods and deconstruction methods and recycling and recovery methods.

Ed Mazria:
You can see we're shaking our head.

Michael Deru:
And, you know, new data - consistent reliable standard data that supports all of the analysis.

Cedar Blazek:
Great! Thanks, all. We've had quite a few questions come into the chat, one of the recurring themes is folks are just looking for data and information and comparisons around LCA and carbon accounting for different building types, so someone was looking at you know the difference between low and high rise and if there's a difference in LCA for a similar sort of superstructure foundation similar gross floor area. We have someone else who's looking for just an average single-family home if there's a general sort of carbon accounting or LCA that's been done there. And are there methods to generalize carbon and greenhouse gas emissions by building type? So that last one was directed to Kate and I just wanted to see if any of you all can recommend some good sources for that information that you're aware of.

Kate Simonen:
Well, I'll start by saying that there's sort of two scales of being able to answer that question. There's been lots of individual studies from residential scale to high-rise buildings. Each of those studies are unique and they're not necessarily done in a fully standardized way. So, you know, we can tell I can tell you that residential buildings tend to have a lower carbon footprint than larger commercial buildings. They typically are built out mostly out of wood and they're have less concrete and steel, as Ed was mentioning. So they're sort of in the range of 50 to 150 kilograms per square meter then you can you can see some of those results in the Embodied Carbon Benchmark Study which we have an interactive tool so you can sort the data set and if you want to look into that you could see that. There are from that data set and along with some work from researcher Catherine De Wolf tried to explore the impacts of building height and what happens as you get taller buildings and if you could see correlations between embodied carbon and different sizes of buildings. And, you know, statistically speaking, we don't yet have the data to have definitive assessments, but there are there, you know, it has to do with how much material you use and as you start to get super tall buildings you're having to use a lot of material just to stop them swaying in the wind. So super tall buildings can have higher embodied carbon generally speaking, but what we need right now is sort of two things I would say. One is action - so that's the most important thing is we need to be reducing embodied carbon today and so those are the strategies of, you know, material efficiency don't build unless you need have to. And then we also need better data - so we're kind of like where operating energy was 20 - 30 years ago in which we had an idea that buildings consumed a lot of energy, but we didn't have a standardized reporting. So what we need is more people doing the work to do the analysis and sharing that data in a way that we can get more refined baselines, but generally speaking we know the impacts are high we need to get them down... I'll stop there.

Ed Mazria:
Yeah. I'll just add that the people who've logged on can go to carbon-positive.org and go to the agenda page on that website. And if you scroll down there'll be a tools sessions and there are all sorts of tools available that deal with embodied carbon and they can log into the tutorials to see what those tools provide and get a good handle on what they can use in their practice.

Cedar Blazek:
Anything to add Michael?

Michael Deru:
Those are - not much except, those are great responses. And just reiterate Kate's call for action in the action. Now.

Kate Simonen:
It's like, "Don't worry too much of exactly the number." I think that falls a little bit to David's first step. You know, we could debate around the margins, but what we know is we need to make reductions.

[Crosstalk]

Ed Mazria:
Just really quickly. Is that there are alternatives. So if you're looking at a high embodied carbon material pretty much for every material that you specify you can find a low embodied carbon alternative if you can't get the data on that material or look and see within that category, you know, do a comparison. I mean EC3 is the best I think that we have in terms of... for the US and Canada in terms of comparing different different materials in different regions. 

Kate Simonen:
And I will also note - so that's the data-driven side, but the carbon smart materials palette that Architecture 2030 put together is a really good framework. Ed mentioned it in this presentation, but it really goes through a nice description of what are the sources of those impacts and how you might be able to use more of a almost a prescriptive based assessment of how you might get to lower carbon. You know, is the energy grid clean? You know, where it's manufactured for certain materials and things like that.

Cedar Blazek:
And Ed, if you can type in the web site that you mentioned into the chat a lot of folks I think want to visit and want to be able to have that link.

Ed Mazria:
OK.

Cedar Blazek:
Alright we had a few questions related to codes and standards. Are any of you familiar with sort of building codes that might be incorporating or thinking about LCA and and what those impacts might be? 

Kate Simonen:
You're looking at codes and standards for Life Cycle Assessment and Embodied Carbon?

Cedar Blazek:
Yes.

Kate Simonen:
So, you know, there are increasingly inclusion of embodied carbon in it... so that you can see it in green building programs from LEAN to other other green building programs that are encouraging a whole building approach or a material approach, but there - And then California has two embodied carbon policies one at a state level, Buy Clean which is setting caps on the emissions from certain materials that the state for state procurement so for universities and other government buildings they're requiring reporting of material impacts and then setting caps below them. And then Marin county along with some other counties in Northern California have adopted a low carbon concrete code which limits the carbon footprint of concrete that can be used in all buildings built in that area. 

So policy is, you know, there's also a private policy that's happening so large companies are setting climate targets and then they're integrating their purchasing - particularly around their building purchasing - into their climate targets and requesting data on the materials they purchase and also setting low... incentivizing the low carbon manufacturers.

Ed Mazria:
Yeah and I'll type in another website achievingzero.org, but I'll type it in. I think it's achieving-zero or I'll get that in a minute, but if you go to... under that is Embody Carbon. I think it's under Frameworks... it'll - if you scroll down all the way to the end. It gives you all those cities and counties that have embodied carbon policies. So you can begin to see what policies are - this is in its infancy, but policies are starting to emerge now and we're trying to keep up with them and post them on that website so that people can see what's coming and what's available now so they can possibly copy a policy and implement it in their jurisdiction. But I'll type that into the chat box too.

Cedar Blazek:
Thanks, Ed. I'm going to do one question...

[Crosstalk]

Oh, go ahead, Michael.

Michael Deru:
I was just going to say one more to mention is ASHRAE standard 189.1 which Does include embodied carbon and some Doesn't really include LCA, but some LCA type metrics in there and it's continually changing and adding more in this space.

David Nemtzow:
All right, I'll pile on. So let's just remember that ... mandatory building codes - not voluntary standards - but mandatory building codes are a slow moving beast by design and it's only been in the past three or four years that they've looked at EV charging and photovoltaics. So to the point everybody said before, it'll take a while till this gets enough, but well understood and into the mainstream before you know building codes will be the natural policy target and I think there will probably be other policy interventions that are better suited for this issue over the next couple few years.

Cedar Blazek:
Thanks, David and we have a lot of questions in here and we're coming up on our time so we're not going to be able to get to all of them. I just wanted to see if our panelists had any sort of parting thoughts that they'd like to leave our audience with. We'll go with Ed, Kate, Michael, and then David.

Ed Mazria:
Yeah. We know how to get a handle on operational carbon, as I said, the next elephant in the room is really embodied carbon. And the more folks working on it, Kate's been incredible putting together an entire global network of people working on this on this issue and we're beginning to see quite a bit of movement. So we obviously have some time, but we need to move very quickly.

Kate Simonen:
Yeah, so I think, first off it's great that this webinar series is putting together. So I encourage people to come back to the other sessions. I think... this if this is in some ways a new frontier of decarbonization, but in other ways there are things that we know how to do today. As Ed mentioned, there are low carbon products on the market today that people can specify and purchase. There are ability to evaluate impacts using Life Cycle Assessment. And so it's about the commitment to act and the understanding that each individual action builds up and through all of those we can have a profound effect. So let's, you know, we're working to the future that we want, not the future we're afraid of.

Ed Mazria:
Let me just interject one final thought: is that the design community - the design planning, architecture, landscape architecture community - are really the gatekeepers of the whole embodied carbon movement, because they're the ones who specify every product that goes into the built environment. And so they have to specify something and they have choice and when they have choice then you put pressure on those that aren't meeting the standards that we want to really step up to the plate.

Michael Deru:
And I'll defer my time to David so we can close it out.

David Nemtzow:
Oh! That's good to you.

I'll just say now you don't want to end on this now. You go after me, Michael. 

I'm just going to say there's good news and bad news. The good news is that we collectively as a community and the Department are focusing on this important issue and putting our time and talent into it. I think that's important news. The bad news, the hard news is there are... it's additional degree of complexity and the relationship to operational and embedded is a complex relationship and I'll just say photovoltaic panels and fiberglass insulation are both made out of melted sand which requires a lot of embodied energy and therefore carbon. So it's a complex relationship. They travel together often towards the same goal and sometimes they run a little more cross-purpose. So it's essential we work on it and got a lot of tools and we got to pull all those levers on that. Now Michael you can sort of see it you can say something really upbeat.

Michael Deru:
Yeah!

David Nemtzow:
I'm getting a headache thinking about how hard this issue is.

Michael Deru:
Yeah, it's definitely a big challenge out of us, but - you know - there has been tremendous new technologies and growth and opportunities in this space over the last five years and I think that is just going to accelerate and we will definitely see more positive outcomes in the future, so thank you all.

Ed Mazria:
Hey David! Can you end with your Winston Churchill quote? I thought that could be an appropriate ending to this.

David Nemtzow:
All right, good! Winston Churchill, thank you. The eminently quotable Winston Churchill said something very important about during the Battle of Britain in 1940. It's illogical, but I think it's our guidance for this. He said, "Sometimes doing our best isn't good enough. Sometimes we must do what is necessary." So on that note, thank you. Let's all do what is necessary here.

Michael Deru:
Yeah, thank you all.

Cedar Blazek:
Thanks, everybody. Thanks for joining. Please join us on the rest of our webinars.