Author: Energy Cost

Clean economy jobs are on the rise. Today’s students have the opportunity to pursue jobs that will advance sustainability, equity, technology and resilience. Today’s teachers are eager to engage students in experiences that will equip them for the first steps of their career journeys. If you’re a high school instructor of architecture, engineering, energy, construction, building trades, environmental science or other STEM fields, you’re likely already including information about green jobs in your coursework.

Earlier this year, USGBC and its partners hosted two successful offerings of a LEED Green Associate exam prep course for teachers, a professional development experience that equips these teachers to designate themselves as leaders in green building knowledge and helps them to prepare their students for a green building career. USGBC and our partners are excited to be able to offer this exam prep training two more times in 2023!

https://www.usgbc.org/articles/gain-leed-credential-better-prepare-your-students-green-careers

Doing business in a sustainable way has been a priority of forward-thinking companies for decades—but in the 2020s, especially for large, highly visible companies, being proactive about having a positive impact and sharing that impact with the public is now essential. Green business is good business, and in the future, financial decisions linked to sustainability goals are likely to be the new normal.

Financing that benefits the environment

The term “green finance” encompasses several forms of funding: incentives to build green; green bonds, or fixed-income financial instruments that raise money for projects to benefit the environment; and green leases, in which tenants commit to, or receive incentives to, participate in energy and water conservation, waste reduction and other sustainable actions.

According to the United Nations, green finance is a subset of sustainable finance. The latter includes social and governance aspects (of “ESG” priorities, closely related to corporate social responsibility), but green finance focuses specifically on environmental goals.

For example, through its Environmental Business Initiative, Bank of America has committed $1 trillion through 2030 to advancing goals like renewable energy; sustainable transportation, water and agriculture; and improved forestry management. Citi has also made a $1 trillion commitment to sustainable finance. Charles Schwab and Co. provides layers of guidance to its clients on getting started with ESG investing. These are just a few of the many banks, investment houses and other private and public financial institutions making green choices a priority.

However, much of the momentum powering the ESG train is the will of individual investors—our values are changing. As reported by J.P. Morgan Chase, “$500 billion flowed into ESG-integrated funds in 2021, contributing to a 55% growth in assets under management in ESG-integrated products.” Individuals increasingly want to support companies and products that have a positive impact on the world around them.

https://www.usgbc.org/articles/major-companies-use-green-financing-build-their-leed-portfolios

Building operations can always be fine-tuned for optimal performance, but there’s no way to reduce the embodied carbon of the materials used to construct that building once they are installed. This means that there is a finite window of opportunity to lessen the embodied carbon of a new development using typical operations practices. However, the process is getting easier, as suppliers are now offering more sustainable options, including for the two most carbon-intensive materials in building construction: concrete and steel.

Portland cement fabrication accounts for approximately 8% of anthropogenic greenhouse emissions, due to the fossil fuels burned to heat raw limestone to incredible temperatures, as well as the carbon dioxide that off-gasses during this process. After years of research and development, the concrete industry has begun to offer lower-carbon mixes that replace some of that cement with lower-carbon materials. These products perform as well as traditional mixes, if not better, and often there is no increase to a project’s budget.

My firm, Lendlease, is developing The Reed at Southbank, a 440-residence tower that recently topped out in the South Loop neighborhood of Chicago, Illinois. This was our first project to create to meet an embodied carbon reduction target—in this case, 10%. After performing a life cycle cost analysis, we elected to work with our suppliers to reduce the embodied carbon associated with the concrete throughout the project.

Every slab and column in the building uses a proprietary concrete mix procured from McHugh Concrete, which developed the product in partnership with Oremus Material. This lower-carbon alternative substitutes approximately 60% of the Portland cement with ash and slag—manufacturing waste products that would otherwise end up in a landfill.

https://www.usgbc.org/articles/carbon-cutters-reducing-emissions-through-material-selection

https://www.usgbc.org/articles/women-green-rising-collective-northern-california

Q: How do I finance a sustainable building in a time of inflation?

We are currently going through a time of economic concern in construction projects because of inflation. In Colombia, we are finding that materials like steel, PVC, aluminum and copper have been subject to increases of around 80% since December 2020. This situation means that your building budget may be different from what you projected.

For some builders, that leads to cutting costs on things that are perceived as added value to their projects, like sustainability features and green certification, but the good news is that there are better ways to work on a budget. Here are some tips for speaking to your client about their options, learning ways to cut costs during the design and construction process, strategic planning, and marketing, so you can show the benefits to your budget-conscious counterpart.

1. Identify the most sustainable way to invest available resources.

You have a certain amount of resources at the moment, and now they tell you that they may not be enough. How can you create more with less? Sometimes we forget the importance of sitting down and going over the basics of our building and how it consumes energy or water:

Energy

Create an energy consumption pie chart for your base building that gives you an idea of where most of the energy is going to be consumed. Attacking that area will bring the best outcome. You should also take into account the proportion of the overall cost invested in sustainability, so you can decide using both variables. A useful formula for that would be:

% of energy consumption x % sustainability cost = cost-benefit index

This number should have a tendency toward zero, and the closer it is to it, the better the investment you are making. You can rank each measure and compare that to your available budget to find the investments you can and should make.

If you want to use a renewable energy analysis, the formula would be really similar, but this time with the projected savings on energy coming from the system and the percentage of sustainability cost, multiplied in the same way, so the rest of the analyses should be the same.

Where are we now?

The recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) emphasizes that to avoid the worst impacts of climate change and limit global warming to the Paris agreement goal of 1.5°C, quick and comprehensive changes to the way we use power are required.

Decarbonization is a big word for a big goal: reducing or stopping carbon gases, especially carbon dioxide (CO2), from being released into the atmosphere and raising global temperatures. Working to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) is nothing new for the green building sector, but bringing them down to zero presents new challenges.

Buildings and construction are responsible for about 30% of energy-related CO2 emissions globally. As USGBC’s building decarbonization issue brief shares, having clean energy technology and solid operations strategies in place isn’t enough; to make it all work, we also need broad buy-in, and that means sharing convincing data, empathizing with local priorities and getting supportive incentives and policies passed.

For buildings ranging from airports to schools, zero carbon plans are being put into place. There’s no time to lose in the fight to mitigate climate change. So, how do we get there?

What do we need to do to reach zero carbon?

1. Focus on the full life cycle of a building.

New buildings: Embodied carbon is what is released into the atmosphere as the result of constructing a new building. This can include extracting raw materials at the point of origin, manufacturing those materials into usable form, transporting them long distances, building a structure, and eventually, demolishing or recycling the materials at the end of the building’s life.

Existing buildings: Operational carbon is what is emitted when a building is in use and all systems are running​ and being maintained. It includes CO2 generated by powering the structure, operating heating and cooling, and running lights.

Buildings and construction account for at least 31% of energy-related CO2 emissions globally.

Of that total emissions, some are what is called embodied carbon, and the rest are caused by energy used to operate buildings. Embodied carbon emissions are generated by the manufacturing, transportation, installation, maintenance and disposal of construction materials used in buildings, roads and other infrastructure, as defined by the Carbon Leadership Forum. Embodied carbon is an urgent concern for several reasons: First, a large part of embodied carbon emissions occurs during construction, which means that they hit the atmosphere by day 1 of a building’s life. Second, new construction is predicted to be significant, with global building stock expected to double within the next 40 years.

To understand which materials are high in embodied carbon, a reporting system known as Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) assess a material’s environmental impact over the course of its lifetime through life cycle assessments. EPDs provide transparent reports that quantify a material’s impact throughout every stage of its use. Qualities assessed include global warming potential, acidification capabilities, ozone depletion and more. Through EPDs, the materials’ environmental degradation can be compared, and sustainable materials can be prioritized. Although EPDs are voluntary for most manufacturers, they are on the rise as individuals respond to the environmental harms of embodied carbon.

Other actions to lower and offset embodied carbon within the building sector include implementing carbon-sequestering materials and using fewer finishing materials, among others. For example, cement production is responsible for 7% of CO2 emissions annually; thus, switching to green alternatives like ashcrete and grasscrete can reduce emissions. Without reduction efforts, embodied carbon will account for 74% of the emissions from new construction over the next 10 years.

One recent step toward decreasing embodied carbon is the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), signed into law on Aug. 16 by President Biden. The IRA aims to reduce total carbon emissions by 40% by 2030. The package proposes $433 billion in spending, of which $5 billion is allocated to low-carbon procurement for infrastructure. This funding will be distributed to various provisions in the bill, such as developing and standardizing EPDs; labeling and using low–embodied carbon materials; implementing low-carbon materials, technologies, and products to improve climate resilience within affordable housing; and providing financial assistance through the FEMA Building Materials Program to incentivize low-carbon and net zero energy projects.