Here is the text version of the Building America Technology-to-Market Roadmaps: Request for Information (RFI) webinar, presented April 7, 2015.
Eric Werling - U.S. Department of Energy
Jon Winkler - National Renewable Energy Laboratory
Iain Walker - Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Roderick Jackson - Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Gail Werren:
Hello, everyone! I am Gail Werren with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and I’d like to welcome you to today’s webinar hosted by the Building America program. We are excited to have Eric Werling here today to introduce the integrated Building America Technology-to-Market Roadmaps that will serve as a guide for research, development, and demonstration activities in the coming years and result in an integrated Research-to-Market Plan in 2015. He will also tell you about a new request for information just released that is soliciting feedback about the technology roadmaps for moisture-managed building envelope, comfort or HVAC systems, and indoor air quality. Also we have experts from three Department of Energy national laboratories to answer questions about each of the technology focus areas. Before we begin, I’ll quickly go over some of the webinar features. For audio, you have two options. You may either listen through your computer or telephone. If you choose to listen through your computer, please select the “mic and speakers” option in the audio pane. By doing so, we will eliminate the possibility of feedback and echo.
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We have an exciting program prepared for you today that will describe the integrated Building America Technology-to-Market Roadmaps that will serve as a guide for Building America’s RD&D activities over the coming years and a request for information just released that is soliciting industry feedback on the roadmaps. Before our speaker begins, I will provide a short overview of the Building America program. Following the presentations, we will have a Question and Answer session, closing remarks, and a brief survey.
The U.S. Department of Energy’s Building America program has been a source of innovations in residential building energy performance, durability, quality, affordability, and comfort for 20 years. This world-class research program partners with industry to bring cutting-edge innovations and resources to market. Building America is supported by 10 industry research teams and four national labs. Each of these teams and labs partner with dozens of industry professionals, including builders, remodelers, manufacturers, and utilities. The best and the brightest in the residential buildings industry can be found here.
Building America uses applied research to deliver building science solutions using a four-step framework. These innovative solutions are tested in homes to develop proven case studies of success the market can point to. Building America provides the tools the building industry needs to ensure the innovations are applied correctly, always keeping an eye on energy performance, durability, quality and affordability. The final step, infrastructure development, is the conduit to getting innovations to the marketplace.
Building America research focuses on how the components of new and existing homes work together through systems integration. As the market changes and evolves, so has the direction of our research in order to add value and drive changes in performance across the residential building industry. In addition to technical challenges we have been addressing for decades, there is now a need to understand market transformation issues, such as valuation of energy efficiency. In the 20 years of Building America research, we have spearheaded combining ultra-high efficiency with high performance in both new and existing homes. And we are consistently achieving this challenging task.
For example, in 1995, a typical home used three times more energy per square foot compared to today, and indoor air quality, comfort, and durability problems were common. Today, a home built to DOE Zero Energy Ready Home specifications uses less than half the energy and is more comfortable, healthy, and durable. By 2030, Building America will demonstrate that new and existing homes can produce more energy than they use.
Do you want to know more about these proven innovations? The Building America Solution Center is your one-stop source for expert information on hundreds of high-performance construction topics, including air sealing and insulation, HVAC components, windows, indoor air quality, and much more. You can find it by the URL on your screen or by searching on "Building America Solution Center." Also, the Building America website provides information about the program, the latest Top Innovations and case studies, and there you can also subscribe to the monthly newsletter. And now, onto today’s presentation!
Our webinar today will introduce the new Building America Technology-to-Market Roadmaps and a new request for information to gather industry feedback on the three roadmaps in the areas of moisture-managed building envelopes; heating, ventilating, and air-conditioning; and indoor air quality. If you would like detailed information about any of these efforts, or if you are interested in collaborating, please feel free to contact our panelists.
Our speaker today is Eric Werling, who directs Building America research efforts on behalf of the Energy Department. Formerly, he worked at the Environmental Protection Agency as the National Coordinator for EPA’s Indoor airPLUS home labeling program, created EPA’s Healthy Indoor Environment Protocols for Home Energy Upgrades, and managed development of the ASHRAE Indoor Air Quality Guide. He also helped to build the ENERGY STAR for New Homes program. Eric is a member of the ASHRAE Standard 62.2 committee and has served on the boards of ACI and Resnet. And, if you’ve ever attended a Building America Technical Stakeholder meeting, you may have heard Eric performing one of his original “Building America ballads,” accompanied by his guitar.
Today, Eric will introduce a new Building America research-to-market plan, and tell you about a request for information (RFI) just issued by Building America to gather industry feedback on three technology roadmaps addressing the areas of building envelope; heating, ventilating, and air-conditioning; and indoor air quality. The feedback received will be used to guide the Building America research-to-market plan and develop future funding opportunity announcements, as Building America works to meet long-term energy efficiency goals. Also here today are experts from the national laboratories supporting the three technical areas, who will field questions during our Q&A session.
Jon Winkler is a senior engineer at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, where he focuses on residential HVAC systems, dehumidification control, energy modeling tools, and BEopt development. NREL serves as the technical lead laboratory for the optimal comfort, or HVAC systems technology roadmap.
At Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Iain Walker studies energy use, ventilation, moisture, performance simulation, and diagnostic issues in homes. His current research focuses on retrofits, zero and low-energy homes, and HVAC systems through field and lab evaluations, modeling, and standards. LBNL serves as the technical lead laboratory for the indoor air quality technology roadmap.
Roderick Jackson leads the Building Envelope Systems Research group at the Building Technologies Research and Integration Center of Oak Ridge National Laboratory. His research focuses on the integration of technologies and best practices that maximize cost-effective energy efficiency in homes. He also leads an Oak Ridge initiative to integrate building technologies, advanced vehicles, manufacturing, distributed clean power generation, and novel energy storage that will enable transformational breakthroughs in energy generation, use, and management. Oak Ridge is the lead laboratory for the building envelope technology roadmap.
With that, I’d like to welcome Eric to start the presentation.
Eric Werling:
Thank-you, Gail. Let me push the buttons to get the presentation up. There we go. Hello, everyone. Thanks for the introduction, Gail. I'm looking forward to telling you about the market roadmaps that we've been working hard to develop over the last few months and, more importantly, excited about what comes after we get through this RFI. We're looking forward to refining it, based on public comment and then feeding it into our development process for future funding opportunity announcements and hopefully this new strategy clarifies specifically our objectives in a bunch of areas that I'll describe later in the presentation will help make it much more clear what types of activities we're doing with Building America and how industry stakeholders can participate actively and how we can solve the problems that prevent the adoption of higher performance, energy-efficient and healthier systems in our homes in the next decade or so. With that, I'm just going to dive into my prepared slides. My strategy for this today is to get through the slides as quickly as I can. Many of you who have heard me talk before know I can talk a lot so I'm going to try to temper that a little bit, get through the prepared slides as quickly as possible, and leave at least half of the session, if possible, available for questions.
With that I'd like to just start with a newsflash. We already know how to build zero energy homes. Many of you are probably not surprised by that statement but just a little tongue-in-cheek recipe here. Here is how we do zero energy homes already. First, you construct the perfect envelope. Second, you install high-efficient HVAC ventilation, appliances, and lighting. Third, you add some energy generation to make up for what you haven't saved with energy efficiency and you add conservation to taste. Here is an example of a home that is actually a net positive at this point. This is a test home at the NIST laboratory in Maryland that was designed, incidentally, by one of the Building America participants.
With that, we're shooting for zero. Building America is focused on helping to develop the technologies and demonstrate them and overcome the market barriers to them so that mainstream builders -- both production builders and affordable housing, public housing, etc., and also the existing home retrofit community can get closer and closer to zero. Then over the next decade we expect the prices of renewables to keep coming down so that the actual zero energy homes will be achieved over time with our contribution.
It looks like we're pretty squarely on the road to zero energy homes, which sounds great. "In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is." That's one of my favorite quotes by Yogi Berra. There we go. I'm struggling with my animations.
The road to zero energy, well, we're on that path but how many actual zero energy homes are there? Well, I can't find an official count. If anybody has one, please email me or submit that through the RFI process or whatever. Our best guess is it's probably less than 500 homes to date in the U.S. that are actually net zero or positive energy homes and that's a pretty small number compared to the rest of the homes. If we know how to do zero energy homes, I think it's important to know why we're not seeing a whole lot of them in the marketplace, especially in the context that we're actually seeing hundreds of thousands of PV installations on roofs over the last couple of years. There is an awful lot of generation going into houses. Why are we are still not at net zero energy homes at a large market level? The reality is that it still costs more, especially first costs, to get to these higher levels of performance in homes. The infrastructure favors low first cost. We also have some other issues that have been identified over the last 15 or 20 years, which is one of them and one of the most important ones. We'll talk a lot more about this issue, as we go on today, is that many of the different technologies for improving the performance homes are actually pretty risky from a business perspective and sometimes from a technical perspective. We also have issues like the workforce is not skilled enough to manage all the complexities of delivering a zero energy ready or a net zero energy home. Finally, the utilities are worried about what will happen when we start to add generation capacity in a decentralized way on top of roofs all over the country. What will happen to the reliability of the utility grid? These are really good questions and concerns that the good grid-connected zero energy community needs to address over the next few years. So we have some fairly significant remaining challenges that prevent us from driving fast down that road to zero energy homes. I kind of liken it more to a dirt road that we've started. The question is now how do we pave that dirt road and get us to zero energy homes, hopefully within my career over the next 10, 15, 20 years? I'm about ready to retire, I'd say, in about 10 or 15 years and I'd like to know that we accomplished most of our job. One question that sometimes comes up, especially when we're doing analysis about what are the optimum ways to get to zero energy, the question of whether we should focus more of efforts on energy efficiency or renewable. I'm not going to try and enter into that argument. It's really a falsehood that we face that road, that choice.
Here's another Yogi Berra quote that I like. "If you come to a fork in the road, take it." What I mean by that is that we're going down this road towards zero energy homes and it's under construction and we are working on both the energy-efficiency issues and the renewable energy generation issues. There's no reason why we should decide which one of those two is important. They're both important. Getting to Zero Energy Homes, the overarching strategy for DOE is that the energy-efficiency goal for the homes, buildings, in general is 50% savings. We've set that based on a benchmark of what the code level of performance was, for new construction anyway, in 2009 with the IECC. So, 50% savings compared to 2009 IECC is our technical goal. We know that it's technically feasible. It can be challenging to find the optimal and there are also a bunch of market barriers that we're focused on. That's what Building America and the Zero Energy Ready Homes program are doing collectively and we'll leave the other 50% of the getting to Zero Energy Homes up to our counterparts in the SunShot program. Since I'm mentioning it, briefly, their objective is that by 2020 to get PV installations to be cost competitive with the existing central utility supplied power. Therefore, they're focusing on the biggest cost barriers right now -- the balance of systems and soft costs like non-technical costs, such as permitting and labor costs and things like that.
That's the big picture about what we're doing to get to zero energy homes at DOE. The rest of the presentation I'm going to dive into the issues we're tackling with Building America and then also with the market facing aspects of the Zero Energy Ready Home for new construction.
This constitutes what we're kind of informally calling V2 of the Building America program. A bunch of stuff has changed in this iteration of the program and with this RFI and a host of funding opportunity announcements that we'll be doing, and awards that we'll be doing over the next few years, this is a summary of the changes that we've brought into the program. First, we're focused more tightly on the biggest energy consumption and the biggest issues that we have to tackle in order to get to that 50% savings target for homes. If we're going to get 50% of the savings relative to 2009 code levels and we're going to do it all with energy efficiency, there is a long way we can go with appliances and lighting and miscellaneous electric loads, but we're not going to get the full 50% savings if we don't improve the efficiency of the heating and cooling systems, which also include the performance of the envelope or enclosure. That's our focus over the next two to three years. That doesn't mean and as long as the impacts will be or projects we're funding in this area will be going on probably for the next three to five years. Now, we are focused mostly on these three aspects of getting heating and cooling energy to be optimized and as low as possible.
How do you deliver high-performance envelopes to the marketplace such that they achieve those performance targets and they do it in a way that doesn't cause problems for comfort, indoor air quality, or durability in the homes? We also are going to need to optimize HVAC systems and we need more expanded IAQ solutions to keep the homes healthy as we build them more tightly, more about that stuff in a few slides.
The other things that we’re doing are we're changing the way we do funding opportunity announcements. I'll show you a slide that gives you a little bit of a graphical view of how we do those funding announcements, but in short we are planning three years of funding announcements, sequentially 15, 16, and 17. We're just about to award the FY 15 funding opportunity announcements. Some of you on the phone may have been participants in that process. What we're doing with the roadmaps is going to work up to the development of the FY 16 and FY 17 FOAs, a little bit more about those two things later.
We are developing these roadmaps. That's the subject of the rest of this presentation and some following activities that we'll be doing for the remainder of the year so I won't say anything more about them until we get into them and that includes stakeholder input through this request for information and also Building America expert meetings that we will be holding in each of these three target areas. That's a lot of stuff that we've been changing at Building America and I'm not going to even mentioning the Zero Energy Ready Homes program activities that we're doing in conjunction with this. There's a lot going on.
Just to back up real quick to remind folks why we're doing this. We're in the Department of Energy. Energy is our primary focus. It's our primary currency so our goals specifically relate to energy. How do we demonstrate at scale, based on the activities that we fund, market-relevant strategies for new homes that offer savings of 50% or more by 2025? That's a little bit more tightly defined goal than what I said before. Then, in the existing homes realm, we're acknowledging that we're not as far along so the goals aren't quite as high in terms of percent savings, although in many cases the absolute goals of 40%, for instance, may well be actually bigger in savings than we're going to be able to get in new homes. Plus, the existing homes stock is much bigger than what we might affect in the one or two or three year period for new construction. So, the Holy Grail is in getting existing homes to save 40% or more by 2030. We've phased that in our goal structure, acknowledging that there are a lot of challenges in reaching that goal.
Back to Building America, why are we focusing specifically on the energy efficiency? Part of the logic behind that the energy efficiency in the comfort areas -- the envelope and the HVAC. I'm lumping those together. Now this pie chart is based on U.S. EIA, so it's real data in terms of what the average end use break-out is for homes today in the U.S. by the different end uses. I've deliberately lumped together the HVAC and envelope related consumption because really they are intertwined. The envelope itself and how energy efficient it is determines what your heating and cooling loads are going to be for the house. Then the efficiency for the system determines, for a given load, how do you serve that need efficiently. Those two are just linked at the hip and a couple other aspects about this problem is that, unlike most of the rest of the areas -- appliances, lighting, miscellaneous end use loads, those are all energy consuming end uses that are produced in a factory assembled process where the performance can actually be measured before it actually gets shipped to the home. It's not the case at all for the envelope or the HVAC system because those systems are assembled, for the most part, in the field. Now there are some components, of course, that are assembled in a factory but you don't find out how the HVAC system in a house is going to perform until it's hooked up to the duct system in a house with an envelope that's complete. So, we put all those together and we see that that actually accounts for 43% of the energy use in buildings today, which is over 1/5 of the total energy consumption of the entire country. We've got a significant, roughly 10%, of the total energy consumption in this country is tied up in making our houses more comfortable. That's a big amount of energy and so that's a big target in Building America's focus on the system integration aspects of improving the energy efficiency in that really big 10 quad bucket. That's why we're doing what we're doing and it drives some of our decisions.
This is a little bit of a timeline. This is what we originally called our roadmap. It's really now sort of more of an overview of how the technology has evolved and how we've gotten to where we are in the middle of the second, third, fourth, fifth decade here. Building America is now focused on wrapping up the high-performance targets for our 50% efficiency goals in these three areas over the next five years. That's what we're focusing on today and over the next few years with our roadmaps. The reason I show this graphic is to also acknowledge that those weren't the only energy issues that we're concerned about but they are the ones that we're focusing the most attention on with Building America. We acknowledge that by 2020 or sooner we're going to have to pay more attention to how we integrate efficient water heating and water usage, actually, into the home, how we make our homes smarter by integrating the control and communication across different systems in a home and ultimately how well do we integrate the renewable energy generation into the grid connection that is in a house with development of smart meters and grid interconnectivity, etc. There're a lot of issues yet to be tackled but our focus in the next few years is these three areas. More about these three issues but first I want to sort of briefly explain how Building America works in the context of these other important areas. We can do a research or demonstration project where we're showing the house can achieve certain energy savings targets, like 30% or 50% or whatever. We can do it in a cutting edge, real world, market player type of a scenario but how do we deliver those demonstrated and proven home solutions to the market? There's a whole different set of activities associated with that. Building America involved in some of those but many of the deployment programs that we work with, like ENERGY STAR, are instrumental in helping to actually get more market growth. We see an interconnection between the Building America activities and historically, you know, we might demonstrate systems or combination of systems that achieve 20% or 30% or more or whatever we might have done at years before ENERGY STAR. Then ENERGY STAR can help to take those proven solutions into the market with some of the early adopters that started with Building America's assistance. Then finally, we see that energy codes follow as the market gets better and better at building higher-performance homes cost-effectively. We would hope that Building America doesn't drive the codes but we would hope that as the market gets better and better at delivering energy efficiency that's of value to the American public and we would hope that the standards and codes by which the industry is judged will continue to improve so that the public benefits from it over the years. Looking forward, what we see when we look at this chart is that an awful lot of the savings that we can get cumulatively, based on previous successes in this chart but also where we'd like to go with the 50% savings target. There's an awful lot of savings that have not been realized yet and so that's what we're focused on and we're calling this the 50% savings zone. The question is -- how do we help achieve that 50% savings?
More importantly what we've observed over the last 10 years, especially over the last 10 years, but it's started over a longer period than that throughout most of the history of Building America, is that the more insulation and the tighter construction that we have the more we have to manage the moisture flows, airflows, and heat flows in the building in order to get control, to keep comfort, and to keep healthy indoor environments. I kind of equate this to, we kind of think about, for instance, in aviation imagine back in World War I when you're a fighter ace and you're fighting in a bi-plane with an open cockpit. You take off at 40 miles an hour and your high speed is 100 miles an hour. Back then we had an open cockpit. Back then we did not have to worry about the indoor environmental air quality of that airplane. Fast-forward to World War II when we got to high altitude fighters and bombers where you can't actually have an open cockpit anymore. Now you have to have a more tightly controlled internal environment for that airplane and of course we got into airliners in the '50s and '60s and in '70s the space program and we had to get tighter and tighter in terms of engineering these systems. The same is also true for houses. If we want to get more and more efficiency, better and better controlled performance in houses and other buildings, we have to control the airflows and understand what pollutants are in the environment and we have to control for it. It's the same kind of problem that the aviation community had to deal with decades and decades before us. So, these are the specific problems that we are focused specifically with Building America on solving. We acknowledge that, just from a building science perspective that, more insulation and the tighter construction you have the more likely you are to have moisture problems if you make mistakes in the process of installing the extra insulation in tighter construction. That's an important issue.
The second issue, of course, is that if we're successful at doing the envelope piece and we get the loads for the house down low then what happens? Well, our airflows in most systems, most heating and cooling systems in the country, are air systems and so they deliver the cool air or warm air to condition the house depending on if you are in heating or cooling mode. As the loads of the house get lower and lower the system either runs less or runs at a lower air flow. When you have those kinds of situations, now we're worried about getting the flow to all the parts of the house where people are living and dwelling and occupying. We also have a situation where moisture doesn't flow as rapidly in and out of the house. So moisture that is trapped inside the house stays there longer and now we have a problem potentially of controlling the relative humidity inside. Of course, if that relative humidity gets too high then the surfaces in the house become potential condensation risk situations.
Finally, of course, just the cleaning or dilution of pollutants that build up inside of houses is an important issue that we have to deal with through indoor air quality strategies. If we don't get better control over these three issues in high-performance homes, we're going to be stuck with the levels of performance that we have today because builders today are concerned about getting more insulation and airtightness into their buildings until we have cost-effective, reliable solutions for managing these issues. If we focus on those, we solve those, we do have isolated demonstrations of solution to many of these but sometimes there are cost barriers to many of these. We have a lot of work to do still. At least we understand what the problem is better than ever before so now we're tackling this problem. How do we solve this problem as quickly as we can and make it accessible to the industry?
Here are the solutions. This is sort of turning the challenges into opportunities. We need high-performance home solutions for energy-efficient homes, new and existing. We need to be able to have moisture-managed high R envelopes that are less likely to get or stay wet. We need optimized low-load comfort solutions that manage both the airflow and the RH control to maintain adequate comfort or maybe even improve comfort. We need smarter indoor air quality solutions so that we can do the dilution of pollutants that are generated inside without generally cleaner outside air. We can filter out our control pollutants that come from specific sources inside the house or sometimes pollutants from outside the house, etc. We want to do it with little or no energy penalty. We've got some partial solutions but there is plenty of work to be done in indoor air quality space as well. We've got our hands full with these three challenges but Building America has also been successful at making a lot of progress in each of these areas. We're confident that we can continue to push this forward and deliver on the 50% savings goal without doing any harm. In fact, we think we're going to end up with homes that work better for occupants, they last longer, and they live better -- higher quality of living.
Now to the roadmaps. That's the setup. Here's the real deal. With the roadmaps in each of these three areas, we are looking to specific types of objectives that dictate what we have to put in them in the roadmaps. We're acknowledging that mass market adoption of high-performance homes is going to require some changes to existing codes and standards for a variety of reasons. Sometimes codes or standards are a disincentive to achieving energy efficiency. Sometimes they don't address some of the concerns and risks that we've outlined before, at least not to a satisfactory level in order to encourage higher-performance homes, etc. They also want to be able to manage these risks and do it in a way that's good for business, for the building businesses, and it's good for the outcomes. In other words, it's better for the occupant comfort satisfaction and more savings. That leaves the last bullet, which is these solutions have to be practical and profitable for builders and home improvement contractors. One last thing real quick before we get into some of the details of the roadmaps, there is a color code that we're using within these roadmaps to depict these kinds of activities. The blue bubbles in the roadmaps represent research and development activities that were our targets, I should say, that we're shooting for. We acknowledge that each of these blue bubbles is an R&D challenge that's remaining. So, what do we have to do, invest in, in the research and development area to solve that particular problem by a specific date or year? Then we have green bubbles, which represent overall, we're just using the term, market engagement. What we mean by that is what kind of information? What kind of tools? What kind of guidance? What kinds of other types of information are needed to make it easier for people in the industry to adopt the better technologies that are demonstrated through research programs? Finally, what kinds of changes, adaptations, modifications, to existing codes and industry standards are needed? I want to stress that we're talking about industry standards in this roadmap. There are no DOE appliance standards addressed in this particular roadmap. We're really only talking about the industry consensus standards such as, for example, the ASHRAE 62.2, which is the ventilation standard.
One last thing about a key to these roadmaps that you'll see is that we've outlined the bubbles with a solid line if the Building America program envisions that we can take a leadership role in pushing forward some of these things. For instance, if it's a blue bubble with a hard line around it we envision funding some of that research, or part of that research, with Building America funding if we get the appropriations that we plan on. However, we acknowledge in the roadmap that this is an industry, a public/private partnership, and program. It's collaboration between the government, the private sector, and the industry organizations. There are some bubbles in this roadmap that we don't expect to be able to lead but we would like to generate the collaboration that will lead to accomplishment of these objectives. It's pretty important for us to be able to identify whether or not the Building America program and DOE are taking the lead on something or whether or not we're hoping to contribute to or influence an outcome but we don't have direct control, nor do we expect that it's appropriate for us to have direct control of an issue. The dotted lines around the bubble mean that.
Let me dive into the three roadmaps in a minute but first I want to get back to schedule. This is where we are. I put both the FY '15 funded activities for Building America and the FY '16 funded activities onto the same timeline here, just in broad general terms. We've got five quarters here just so you can see this is the near term set of activities that we've been working on and will continue to work on the reminder of this calendar year. We are at the middle there at the RFI. We just posted it on Friday and today the webinar about it. I'll get to it later but just a teaser that we're closing the comment period on April 30. So, at the end of this month we'll close that out. Then what we'll do is we'll process the comments that we get from you all and hopefully a lot of other industry stakeholders through this RFI process and we we'll analyze what kinds of feedback we're getting from industry stakeholders. Then we'll convene some specific Building America expert meetings to discuss each of those three roadmaps. Those are going to happen mid-year this year. The results of all that, both the public comment period and the expert meetings focused on what kinds of changes we need to make to these draft roadmaps, will lead to the Building America research-to-market plan. We have a draft but we're not going to publish it until we have been through this, you know, fairly robust stakeholder engagement process to make sure we've taken into account all the market issues and concerns and stakeholder needs that we can within the objectives of the program. That we expect to publish sometime in the summer. I'm hoping by the end of August so that when we start the development of the next round of the funding opportunity announcements and the FY '16 FOA development process. The target issue date for that is October 1 and so I hope that the plan that results from this roadmap process will be publicly accessible and available to anybody who wants to bid on our funding opportunity announcement and will be able to strategically identify what types of areas in the roadmap are specific objectives that are highest priority for our funding opportunity announcement. We're hoping that this process will provide much more clarity about what program goals are, not just specifically what energy targets are shooting for, but also what types of market engagement activities are most strategic in order to overcome the technical barriers that we have and drive us towards accelerating the adoption and the standardization of the use of the high-performance solutions that we develop and demonstrate through Building America and other related activities. That's in a nutshell what the planning horizon is for the near term. For the longer term that can extend into the following years.
Each of these funding opportunity announcements, the current FY '15, the FY '16 funding opportunity announcement, and FY '17, each one of them is fully funded upfront for, anticipated to be, awards for two to three years. We're doing it that way for a variety of reasons but probably the number one reason is that we have to. We've been told that it's required to fully fund these awards and so that's partly what drove us to having this incremental funded project approach, which is different from the way Building America projects have been funded over the last five years. That's, in a nutshell, the funding arrangement and the schedule.
Now let's talk about the individual roadmaps, the three of them. I'm not going to get too far into the weeds. You can read. I hope that you and many more folks will actually read the roadmaps and give us your comments, suggestions for improvements, etc., but I do want to introduce the basis for them. The first one, high-performance moisture-managed envelope solutions, we have plenty of evidence that high-R assemblies are going to be needed to get to the 50% savings goals. We also know that well-constructed high-performance envelopes lead to more comfortable, healthier indoor environments in conjunction with indoor air quality and HVAC systems but we also know that as the temperature differences and air flow control in the envelope gets tighter we actually have, in some cases, greater risk of what happens if you don't do the jobs well. We need to help industry to do the job of building high-performance envelopes better and plenty of evidence of those opportunities and those risks so we will move into the roadmap itself here.
We've divided the envelope. This is a draft again. We've divided it into two different sections. One is specifically targeted at moisture risk management and the second is about developing demonstrating and documenting guidance for the whole envelope solutions that lead to high performance. Again, just a rehash of the roadmap objectives, all this stuff is in the RFI so I'm not going to dwell on the slide. Here is the draft moisture-managed envelope solutions roadmap for Building America. You'll notice that the key that I mentioned, the blue bubbles, are focused on research activities. In this case, they are generally research activities that aren't. Most of them aren't directly developing new products or materials, with the exception of the property materials measurement. That may end up leading to new materials but most of these are about getting a better handle on how the new materials or even existing materials at larger insulating levels, for instance, or better air control levels. When we're at those higher performance levels how do they behave and what kinds of research projects do we need to do in order to better understand that so we can provide guidance to the industry so that we can help to improve the standards, and in some cases even develop new standards that make it easier for folks to rely on the results that are published by manufacturers and programs? That's the moisture risk management part and the high-performance envelopes have to do with developing the guidance, validating in the field, performance measurements in real-world houses, the solutions that we recommend, and then helping to integrate those solutions into voluntary programs where they get demonstrated. They get some uptick in the marketplace. Ultimately, how can we encourage them in consideration or future codes, either by revising the codes, such as IRC, such that they don't discourage the use? For instance, one example of discouragement area is when you want to put more than an inch of insulated sheathing on the exterior of a building. Now you have some issues that you have to deal with with regards to cladding attachment strength and things like that that people haven't had to use before and may not be adequately addressed in the codes. That's just one example. There are others, including fire code issues, etc.
Then other provisions of the energy code, as well, that may or may not encourage the best performing systems. We'd like to help build support for encouraging the best performing, highest cost-effective solutions in the marketplace over the next few years. In a nutshell, that's a quickie summary of the moisture-managed envelopes.
Roadmap -- we've got similar types of justification for the optimal comfort systems. I call it that to remind everybody that it's not just an HVAC system. It's a comfort system. We have HVAC systems so that we can achieve a desirable, comfortable environment inside houses and we can't do that just with a box. We need to do that by optimizing the performance of the entire comfort system, which includes the distribution system, not just the efficiency and control of the HVAC central control equipment. All these are part of what we're calling optimal comfort systems and in some cases it even expands beyond what is typically available, like for instance, integrated dehumidification control.
Here is the optimal comfort systems roadmap. We've divided it into two separate categories. One is system design issues because design, meaning how do you design to meet the loads, not just the sensible base loads but also the latent loads for managing the energy and relative humidity. Those design standards affect the performance of equipment once installed. As systems get more sophisticated with variable capacity equipment and variable flow air handlers, and things like that, we think that the standards need to adapt.
We also think that in some cases there are missing standards or missing aspects of standards that could do a better job of helping us to actually define the design criteria and manage to them for issues like comfort, which is defined in an industry standard in ASHRAE Standard 55 but there is very little actionable information in Standard 55 relative to the performance of residential HVAC systems. We need to translate some of what we know and investigate some of what we don't know about to achieve optimal comfort for occupants in homes, so a bunch of work to do. Some of it, again, just like the envelopes roadmap. We've got a bunch of research activities and objectives identified. We've got some market information based activities in green and then we've got standards and codes that we can work towards improving.
On the equipment side, there's a set of objectives there as well. Again, they're similar and related but sometimes there are different parties involved and different strategies for the design community versus the equipment performance from the manufacturers. So, we've separated those activities but they're all a part of the same roadmap.
Finally, I'm going to introduce real briefly the indoor air quality solutions roadmap and then I'm going to open it up for questions and I'm just past halfway so I'm going to do this last one really quick. There are a lot of details here that spread out into two different slides. The first is in the IAQ field. Unlike in the other two areas, we have a bunch of specific risks that don't behave the same. We've got more bubbles here. There are more different types of indoor air pollutant issues that we have to manage and so this got bigger than the other one. We may be able, with feedback, prioritize some of these things. I hope so because we probably can't do all of this. It's a set of objectives to shoot for in order to improve our standards for managing indoor systems, for managing indoor air quality in homes, and doing it reliably, and also to minimize the amount of energy that's used to do that indoor air quality management.
Another part of the IAQ roadmap is the smart ventilation systems. Those are specific because they're about controlling the existing ventilation systems or improving the ventilation systems that exist, which are, admittedly, only part of the solution to all that targeted list of pollutants in the previous page. Then, finally, the IAQ evaluation to whatever extent we can help to build the science and the standards basis for making better practical decisions in the design and operation of buildings based on better science. I think anybody that has been in the ASHRAE Standards 62.2 committee will probably tell you that we don't know as much science about indoor air quality as we'd like and so we have to make some judgments and some compromises in the process of trying to determine what the industry standard minimal level performance for air quality ought to be in homes. In that context, we think that some better science would help us quite a bit at doing at better job of standardizing minimal acceptable levels of indoor air quality and developing the systems that can lead to controlling the indoor environment to better, more health protective, more comfortable levels. That, in a nutshell, is the roadmap and just a couple of slides to tell you a little bit about the RFI itself, the request for information.
We've specifically asked these two types of questions in the RFI. If you decide that you can spare a little time to look over the request for information, read over the roadmaps and get to some comments. We're most specifically interested in general comments about this overall strategy. Are we missing critical technical challenges beyond the three that I have identified? If you think so, make a compelling case for how we could address it in this context without slowing down our process towards improving high-performance homes. Second of all, do you have any suggestions for how we can implement different activities within the roadmaps? Then, more specifically for each of the three roadmaps if you happen to be somebody who is more interested specifically in one or the other of the roadmaps, we would ask you to consider one of these types of questions. Are we missing critical research, market, or code and standards needs for stakeholders that are going to make a difference in scale adoption of energy efficiency and high performance? Are there sequence and timing issues related to what we've laid out? Is it realistic and logical? What types of industry organizations are critical to our success? We need to collaborate with folks. Who are the folks that need to be in the room with us and how do you recommend engaging with them? Then finally, do you have any suggestions for improvements that we have not identified in any of this process? Those are the things we're looking for and here are the specific logistics. One thing that I want to clarify is that the EERE, the Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Office of DOE has a system for managing funding opportunity announcements because that's the vast majority of the types of industry interactions, stakeholder interactions that we do. So when we do and opportunity announcement we have a system for managing the submissions and rather than developing a completely separate system, we just use the FOA system for request for information. But, it's really important that you know that this request for information, designated DE-FOA-0001326, is not a funding opportunity announcement. By responding to this you won't get any money from us. It will lead though to our ability to better address stakeholder objectives' needs in our roadmaps and our plans, which will lead to funding opportunity announcements in the future.
There's a link there but don't be fooled by the name of this, the number of this, request for information. To repeat, something I said earlier in the webinar, the comment period closes at 5 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, or is it Daylight Time? Spring forward yet? It's Daylight Time; 5 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time on April 30 this year. That's three weeks away or so and you'll submit your comments to this email address -- BuildingAmericaRFI@ee.doe.gov. All that information is available in the RFI announcement itself. You may have gotten an email blurb from the Building America program if you're a subscriber. If not, you can quickly find the links to the RFI on the Building America website or you can go to Google and Google Building America RFI roadmap and you'll find the link directly. Look under the top. That's all I have to say here. Here's my email contact information here, if you have specific questions for me about anything I've said today. We've got a half an hour open for questions so I'm going to turn it over to Heather and Gail to manage the questions period.
Gail Werren:
OK, thanks, Eric, and we have time now for a few questions. Panelists, if you could please unmute your lines for the Q&A session? We have some great questions from the audience and you can submit additional questions through the questions pane on your screen. Eric, I have some general questions for you. You mentioned there would be three expert meetings for each of the three technology roadmaps. Are these open to the public and how can we participate?
Eric Werling:
The expert meetings, in the interest of fitting into a four- to six-hour period a very hefty agenda designed to take public comments and the strategy and our roadmaps to a point that's actionable for us at DOE, we've decided that the only way we can manage that is if it's not a public meeting and that's a primary justification for doing the RFI itself. The public's issues are being considered through the RFI and we're taking them all quite seriously and we'll analyze everybody's. We'll read every comment and take them all seriously but we can't handle hundreds of people in the expert meetings and still get the roadmaps constructively improved. We've decided to limit those meetings to expert meetings and so they won't be open to the public. We will, however, publish the proceedings of those meetings. So, we'll be open in that regard. We just need to be focused on getting the job done in those meetings.
Gail Werren:
And then there was another question from one of the audience members regarding your breakdown of the field assembled systems. Why isn't hot water a field assembled system? The tank or tankless heater is much like a furnace.
Eric Werling:
Yes, sorry to interrupt, Gail. That's a good question and it is a field assembled system but in most cases it's a separate system from the envelope and HVAC. We're in a position where in a shrinking budget we had to make some decisions about what's the biggest challenge that we're going to tackle and how do we focus on it? We made the tough decision that for the next couple of years, Building America is not going to be primarily focused on the hot water heater system, even though we acknowledge that it is a field assembled system. That's a really good question. You may not like the answer but that's our rationale for doing it this way. That's another reason why, moving forward, we keep it on that generalized roadmap that I showed earlier in the presentation. Hot water systems are still an important energy use that we need to improve in houses.
Gail Werren:
Here's another question for you, Eric. Please explain about your research, development, and demonstration approach. This person understands that the national laboratories will conduct laboratory evaluations in tandem with the VA research team field demonstrations. Is that correct? And who will the teams partner with for these field evaluations? How did they find partners for the field demonstrations in existing homes?
Eric Werling:
Right, OK, so two questions. The first one, the quick way to answer that is that the Building America program funding is divided into direct funding to the laboratories, which we tend to focus on what are their expertise and strength that is not generally efficient to do through Building America partnership teams, which are things like lab facility testing and analysis and the development of the modeling tools and algorithms and things like that. That's an example of the labs role in this stuff. Then, the Building America teams that we will be issuing awards through the funding opportunity process, those are industry partnership teams and they tend to be more focused on the real-world demonstrations in real homes and, where possible, collection of data that helps us to build on the body of knowledge. Now, if you think about it it's pretty obvious that the lab-directed activity and the industry partnership activity really are both going to be better off if they're well-coordinated. So, we have been taking steps to make the laboratory-funded activities to coordinate well with and support the team. For instance, if the team wants to do a project that's demonstrating a new smart ventilation system, they might want to work with LBL or one of the other labs, using the expertise of the labs to help inform how they do their study design or whatever. There's a variety of those kinds of examples that Building America teams will be encouraged to do and the labs will be encouraged to support the teams as well. We structure our funding arrangements with the labs to do that specifically. Then, as for how industry teams are formed, in the past it's generally happened where just like in a traditional RFP process, organizations that can benefit from working together have informal discussions about what kinds of activities they might want to propose, follow what Building America is doing -- like your participation on this webinar, reading the RFI, reading the strategy document when it comes out in the summer, and then finally, hopefully you'll have some better ideas about what you wanted to do for Building America and propose in the FY 16 funding opportunity announcement. You'll have a team assembled. Then, when the FOA itself comes out, you read it carefully and respond, you know, bid based on your team's capabilities. As for who to go talk to to form a team, I guess it all depends on what your objective is and who are the best people in the industry to talk to about teaming with. That I can't go into too much detail about recommendations for that. If you have specific questions about who to team with on a specific topic, email me and I'll see if I can help you out. Hopefully that answered that question, or those two questions.
Gail Werren:
OK, thanks, and we've got some questions for each of our laboratory experts. For Jon Winkler, on the HVAC systems -- can you elaborate on the part load sizing procedures bubble? Cooling and heating equipment is sized at design conditions to meet peak heating and cooling loads.
Jon Winkler:
Sure, thanks, that's correct. You know, typically for residential buildings you size your air conditioner and your furnace based on peak design conditions, which are typically the outside 1% and 99% conditions. In high-performance homes as our cooling seasons shorten in length and our shorter seasons, namely spring and fall, become longer it's harder for that equipment to maintain humidity control in the house. What we're suggesting here is to do research on how do you properly size whole house humidity control equipment to ensure that the humidity is control in the house throughout the entire year.
Gail Werren:
OK, thanks, and here's another one. Residential HVAC equipment is typically not commissioned after installation and installed performance can suffer. Is Building America doing anything to address installed performance issues and ensure 62.2 performance?
Jon Winkler:
Yeah, well, initially we had a third section of our roadmap that was entirely devoted to this issue. We then did timing and funding constraints had to pare that down. We still have one task in there that's related to working with manufacturers to help develop and incorporate onboard automated fault detection tools and potentially doing demonstrations around this in Building America homes and that's likely where all of our research will focus on this iteration of the roadmap.
Gail Werren:
OK.
Eric Werling:
I would encourage those kinds of commenters, this is Eric, to help us build a case for expanding that activity. Part of what went into this is what are the most important priorities for each of these three roadmaps going forward and we couldn't do everything. There are a lot of priorities that we identified but we couldn't do everything. So, if there is something that we considered but had to sort of put off or hope that somebody else could fund it or whatever, and you think we ought to be making it more central and why it's more important, give us that input. That's what this RFI is about.
Gail Werren:
Then I've got some questions here for Roderick on building envelope. In the roadmap I read that one of your goals is to change existing moisture related standards, such as ASHRAE 160, that are too conservative. Can you discuss your approach for changing these standards?
Roderick Jackson:
Yes, there is. Thanks for that comment. There is some concern by some of the industry stakeholders that standards like ASHRAE 160 or SST160 are considered too conservative where walls that we have a pretty good assurance that they are moisture durable are considered, would fail some of the criteria that are existing. What we want to do is utilize our research to supplement that process because that committee, they are refining that standard but we want to be able to, in a complementary manner be able to, provide the level of research that's needed to be able to make that moisture criteria standard, something that industry would be able to rely on as a standard they can trust and use to set durability standards going forward.
Eric Werling:
So, Roderick, this is Eric, maybe we could add to that, that that might include ... well, we expect that it will include, testing certain types of assembly configurations in a lab setting where you can control all of the variables and then validating it and using it to help improve the models. For instance, like the WUFI modeling or just the guidance about how to use the WUFI tool and then also inform and coordinate with what types of data about real world performance do we need in situations where you can't control as many of the variables and that's where Building America team projects with moisture measurement would come in play. What kinds of data do we need from those kinds of activities that will help to inform improvements to that standard that are likely to be accepted by the standard committee? That's how I would sort of, you know, a little bit of clarity that I would add to Roderick's answer.
Gail Werren:
Yes, and the next question is actually related to that. The question is, how is the high-performance moisture-managed solutions R&D leveraging existing field studies and WUFI analysis of attic moisture performance?
Roderick Jackson:
What we do is we have a ... we want to use a combined approach where we leverage some of the laboratory assets, some of the laboratory equipment, that can look at the heat, air, and moisture flow through assemblies. Attics, roof and attic systems being one, in addition to walls. We wanted to be able to use that to complement and add to the level of research that's been done. There's already been research. There's already been a significant amount of research done, particularly in roof and attic systems that demonstrate there are some challenges. What we can do is look for solutions and in the meantime the solutions are conditioned, environmental condition specific. What we would do is to be able to work with both the Building America teams to be able to identify the key parameters that we want to investigate and, in combination with those studies, also use laboratory facilities or laboratory chambers to broaden the range of experimental conditions that we can test and then use those experimental conditions to validate the models so that we can get a broader assessment of where these different solutions are viable and where they may be susceptible to moisture durability challenges.
Gail Werren:
And then here's another question for you Roderick about windows. This person said -- I read through the roadmap and noticed R10 windows in the plan. Is there a new technology available, otherwise these would be extremely expensive? Right now they are available but mostly triple pane. Where do we go from here?
Roderick Jackson:
That's a good question. One of the things that Eric mentioned during his discussion, some of the roadmap discusses newer or existing material but then there is a place for emerging technologies that developed. One of the challenges is how do we, as a program, enable the marketed option of these technologies because how do we demonstrate through validation and demonstration of these technologies that they are, one, high performing. You get the savings that you are looking for and then, two, they are moisture durable. You're right. There are R10 windows. We listed that as an example. I think you're referring to, on page 17, where we say, "as emerging technologies, such as R10 windows ..." What we're doing is saying when these new technologies are made available we want to, in this roadmap, provide a pathway. To use the illustration that Eric used before, "to pave the road" for these types of emerging technologies through different demonstration programs, through different R&D as I alluded to earlier using laboratory facilities in combination with field experiments that Building America team can do coupled with WUFI and moisture-modeling simulation.
Gail Werren:
Thank-you and now I have some questions for Iain on indoor air quality. The roadmap mentions that you plan to develop a system of IAQ scores for homes similar to HERS ratings scores. Please tell us more about this.
Iain Walker:
Yeah, basically the barrier we sort of have to doing anything with IAQ is when you go to a house you don't know if it has good IAQ or not, like we did not know much about the energy use of homes many many years ago. We're sort of a long way behind with IAQ but we think we do know enough to produce some sort of score that we give reasonable guidance on whether or not you have a home that's performing well from an IAQ perspective. This includes looking at ventilation systems, other air cleaning systems, there are source control options. For example, you can select construction products that emit less pollutant. Do you have an automatic exhaust system in your kitchen, for example? This also includes issues about combustion safety and also the ability to deal with outdoor pollutants. Sometimes if you live in a place where the ozone is high periodically you might want to ventilate less when the ozone is high or if you live near a freeway where particle levels are high outdoors. The idea is it can combine all of these different aspects that would affect the indoor air quality in your home and generate a score. Similar to the way you get a store for energy, we would have some diagnostics for these. Things like, if you have a ventilation system, making sure it does have the right air flow. We would combine these diagnostics with calculations of the different health impacts, of the different pollutants and their relative prevalence, and the systems that are home to do with them. Hopefully we can come up with some sort of score that lets us evaluate a home and rate homes relative to each other.
Gail Werren:
OK, thank-you. Another question for you, Iain -- recently I read about LBL's range hood roundup survey in the monthly Building America newsletter. Will you use the results from this survey in your research?
Iain Walker:
Absolutely, again, this is an issue where if only we knew how everybody cooked all the time, we'd be able to put standards together that used that information, but we don't. We do have limited data from our collaborative activities from various manufacturers of kitchen venting equipment. The range hood roundup is a way for us to basically get a bigger sample of what people do when they're cooking. Do they use the front or the back burners? Do they ever turn their range hood on? Do they have a range hood at all? If they have one, why do they use it? Why don't they use it? Are there issues about how noisy the fans are, for example? Some range hoods work better than others. Some of them have really really good capture of the kitchen pollutants and some don't. One of the things we're going to use the information in the survey in is in the development of a standard to rate range hoods for capture efficiency. If we know how often people use front or back burners and how often they cook, we can use that information when we're developing the test conditions for the capture efficiency standard. We'll be using the information from that survey directly in our research work and in standards development.
Gail Werren:
OK, and I have another general question here for Eric. Does the roadmap strategy include innovative energy storage systems?
Eric Werling:
Sorry, I was on mute. No, it doesn't at this point. I think the answer, the expanded answer, is similar to what Roderick was saying about R10 windows, for instance. We would like to be able to consider innovative ways to getting to high-performance home levels in the marketplace consistently, realistically, in a way that manages all the risks that we talked about and as innovatively as we can. As affordable new products come online that helps us deliver on those goals, we're going to want to be open to all of those kinds of things. Energy storage is one of those issues that currently needs a little bit of earlier stage research support to get to a point where we're going to be willing to adopt it as an off the shelf technology at Building America. Building America, unlike some of the other research investments that we do at DOE, it is primarily focused on the system level optimization, which means taking existing equipment and materials and putting them together in as optimal a way as possible considering not only the technical issues but also the business issues and market infrastructure issues. Specifying a new transformative technology that we think might have some significant future impacts, it is not our sweet spot, but as soon as it starts to get close to market introduction phase we're going to look closer at it. I guess the way I would answer that is, in a context you know, a couple of years from now I imagine things will have changed and that we will be ready to revise the roadmaps and maybe that will mean including consideration for storage technologies and maybe we'll have R10 windows that are ready to be part of the objectives of the roadmap. This is going to have to be a dynamic process as we go forward. If we don't revise it as the field changes then we'll be outdated before too long.
Gail Werren:
Well, thank-you and that's all the time we have for questions today but we will have all of the questions that were submitted on record for our group to review.
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