Describing an important need and obvious benefits does not produce change, unfortunately. The federal bureaucracy’s resistance to change is legendary. But it is also important to note that the buildings industry resists change too, simply because it has little economic incentive to make changes that do not relate directly to increased sales. Of course, the most promising way around these barriers is to generate demand for better buildings.

It is also important to underscore here that in a whole buildings perspective the definition of R&D itself extends well beyond the laboratory to encompass the ancillary activities, such as training, education, and market transformation, that transform R&D into productive contributions to society. In this way, the whole buildings approach not only integrates the building components and materials with design and operation, it also unites the present with the future and combines the myriad R&D and market conditioning programs of the federal government.

Where could the central direction — “the nerve center” — of this grand whole buildings synthesis activity even be housed? Can one government entity coordinate the work of others? Certainly there are a number of committees and panels already charged with this responsibility. But the PSIC re-port questioned the “degree to which the efforts of groups such as the National Science and Technology Council … can be translated to concrete program direction for the nu-merous disaggregated federal buildings programs.”³²

Should coordination, then, be the work of an industrial coalition, since industry will reap the rewards of the programs? But how could such an entity coordinate federal programs? And judging from the little R&D funding by the buildings industry to date, the federal government would still need to be the primary source of support for this new activity. Whatever the answers to these questions are, it is obvious that some entity must take charge of coordinating and integrating federal buildings programs.

The five objectives and strategies in this section can represent a beginning to the adoption, successful introduction, and continuing effectiveness of a national whole buildings policy. They should serve as the foundation for a coherent national strategy that is based on the whole buildings concept, that integrates R&D with market conditioning, and that coordinates the various federal buildings programs.

Establish the Whole Buildings Framework as a Cornerstone of Policy

A whole buildings approach needs to be explicitly articulated and acknowledged as the cornerstone of any national buildings energy or sustainable design policy. This articulation needs to come from the highest possible levels of government, and should include an acknowledgment of the importance of buildings R&D to furthering all aspects of U.S. economy, education, environment, and quality of life. And since build-ings constructed today have lives of 50–100 years, a national whole buildings strategy must also recognize that new buildings should provide the conditions for future sustainability in their design, operation, energy requirements, maintenance, and potential reuse of their construction materials. This would represent a new mode of thinking about buildings.

This is perhaps the most difficult objective because it requires a fundamental change in the current mind-set on federal buildings policy and R&D management. Furthermore, the change must be made from the top down. Currently, the scant programmatic focus given to addressing buildings as whole integrated systems is an after-thought or add-on. From the Cabinet level on down, this orientation must be changed so that the whole buildings perspective is the locus from which all federal buildings policy and program direction emanates. Several precedents at the federal level indicate that such a fundamental shift is possible.

Federal policymakers should be commended for recently establishing a programmatic model of the type of program and orientation that is needed. The newly created Partnership for Advancing Technology in Housing (PATH) program, administered by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), is an interagency collaborative with the private sector. PATH aims to improve the cost, quality, comfort, and environmental impacts of all new housing by the year 2010 by getting improved technologies into the marketplace.³³ The program is now in the process of formalizing its plan of action for achieving that goal. What is already apparent, however, is that PATH will be the most holistic buildings program available — both in terms of addressing buildings as whole, integrated systems and for its interagency/ private-sector strategy for achieving its goals. The program’s one limitation is that it addresses only housing. It does not address commercial or institutional buildings.

Hints of the necessary change in focus are also found at DOE. As already noted, DOE’s Office of Building Technology, State and Community Programs recently adopted the Buildings for the 21^st Century umbrella philosophy to guide its building programs. While it is still too early to evaluate the impact this presently unfunded program will have in stimulating fundamental changes in actual R&D program perspectives and public policy, it potentially provides a foundation for taking the whole buildings case to higher levels of the federal government.

Beyond these initial steps, an informal or ad hoc coalition of buildings industry interests (such as builders, architects, designers, engineers, financiers, and realtors) and renewable energy and efficiency industry representatives should be established on the model of the Sustainable Energy Coalition. The coalition could be spearheaded by the Passive Solar Industries Council, which is already a coalition of diverse building interests with a whole buildings mission. The first priority of the coalition should be to implement a communications and advocacy campaign aimed at the administration and Congress. The campaign should target these audiences from the top down. That is to say, the focus should begin at the Office of the President (and relevant bodies such as PCAST, the National Science and Technology Council’s Committee on Construction and Buildings, and so on).

In terms of Congress, the coalition should work with the House Renewable Energy Caucus and others in order to use existing relationships between advocates and law makers. And it should target the leaders and members of the Interior and the Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittees in the House and Senate to make sure that these policy recommendations are implemented. In addition, the coalition should work with the Military Construction and Treasury, General Government, and Civil Service Appropriations Subcommittees in order to affect policy over spending on military and government construction projects and building operations. Likewise, the coalition and other advocates should focus on federal policy through the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee and the House Commerce and Science Committees.

The aim of the coalition campaign should be the incorporation of the whole buildings focus in the mission statements, policies, and programmatic strategies of all federal buildings–related bodies, committees, and programs. This should be the first step of on-going relationship-building activities. The coalition should then work with the administration and Congress to ensure that this philosophy is followed up with concrete program direction. Finally, the coalition should ensure that while federal programs recognize buildings as integrated systems, federal policy should also view R&D programs as integrated systems.

Fund Collaborative, Fundamental, and Applied Research

The United States should support a coordinated, coherent program of fundamental and applied research in materials, components, design tools, and monitoring techniques in the context of whole buildings performance. Research today is product-specific and does not adequately address whole buildings performance and demonstration. New programs need to be defined and implemented that in particular consider the interactive effects of all technologies within the building and with the physical and economic environments that support them. New and emerging buildings technologies that facilitate better interactive performance are to be especially encouraged. And, as argued earlier, a coordinating agency or entity needs to be defined and empowered that will facilitate both the conception and synthesis of whole buildings R&D across all public and private sectors, supported by new analytical tools that embrace the interactive roles of buildings as elements in the U.S. economy, environment, and sustainable future. Although this could be a new agency, it might be better to empower an existing agency, given greater authority through the President’s leadership, to provide more concrete program direction and review and to handle the coordination between agencies.

Meeting this objective requires a two-pronged strategy that addresses two major flaws in current federal buildings policy. The first is the minute level of funding for buildings systems integration R&D programs. The federal government at the moment underfunds both basic R&D (such as basic building physics studies) and applied research (such as development of analytical tools to facilitate better interactive performance) in the area of whole buildings.³⁴ The second flaw in federal policy to be addressed is the lack of coordination of R&D activities and program direction among the myriad buildings-related programs.

As indicated earlier, the whole buildings approach is a powerful tool in the policy arsenal for achieving economic, environmental, and national security goals. To achieve this return on investment, the federal government has to take the leadership role and make the investment. The few federal programs that develop systems integration technologies (such as DOE’s Best Practices program) or that aim to create high-performance buildings using a whole buildings perspective (such as DOE’s Exemplary Buildings program or EPA/DOE’s Energy Star Buildings program) receive scant funding. The term scant is used here in comparison to four benchmarks: the potential of these programs to reduce building energy costs and environmental degradation, the appropriateness of the federal role in this area, the comparison with other federal building component programs that take more of a “shotgun” approach, and the contribution of buildings and construction to annual GDP.

As a start, the federal government should increase funding to research basic building physics, particularly the areas of thermal storage, perimeter daylighting, performance values of “green” materials, and convective airflow. Furthermore, it should fund research that supports existing voluntary, market-driven, industry-based programs (such as the Home Energy Rating Systems Council’s “Guidelines for Uniformity,” the U.S. Green Buildings Council’s LEED Rating System, and Edison Electric Institute’s E-Seal program) that incorporate whole buildings interaction, indoor air quality, water quality, consumer waste, passive solar design, and so on. However, this support should be cooperative and supportive rather than being set up as competing programs.

The federal government must also provide adequate funding to programs that implement the whole buildings concept (such as EPA/DOE’s Energy StarBuildings) while ensuring that other new buildings-related initiatives (such as the Million Solar Roofs program) that receive funding adequately address the whole buildings perspective. Probably most important is the need for funding to be stable (multi-year) and less subject to the changing winds of partisan politics. Large fluctuations in the past have not only sent mixed messages to industry and markets, they have also disrupted on-going R&D activities. The “buildings coalition” should conduct the advocacy activities to support funding for these programs.

Some entity must be given responsibility for ensuring that a coordinated federal buildings R&D policy is implemented at the programmatic level. The federal government administers buildings R&D and related programs at numerous federal agencies — ranging from DOE, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), HUD, the General Services Administration, and EPA to the Department of Defense and even Health and Human Services. Research is conducted by private companies on their products and materials, at national laboratories, at universities, and by state energy offices across the country. These activities must be coordinated to avoid duplication and to ensure the cross-pollination of research efforts. More important, the research must be coordinated to ensure that individual programs are organized by a whole buildings philosophy.

The federal entity chosen to coordinate federal buildings activities should have as its first task the responsibility for designing an overall, multi-year specific action plan that outlines federal buildings R&D strategy. This would be a comprehen-sive blueprint for a coordinated, whole-buildings-based R&D agenda. The second task would then be to assign the various parts of the overall agenda to the federal agencies (or in some cases to private researchers) that will be responsible for conducting them. While at first glance it appears that these assignments have already been made, they have not been done through a coordinated federal strategy, nor framed within this integrated concept.

The federal agency given responsibility for coordination will have to have authority commensurate with its responsibility. In other words, federal programs must be accountable to the entity for carrying out the coordinated policy. This will ne-cessitate a level of administration and oversight that cannot be achieved by a committee that meets only once a year and has no institutional resources of its own.

At the same time, this responsible agency must incorporate input and representation of the various federal programs as well as the private sector. Existing bodies already incorporate such input while operating at a high level in the administration. Therefore, it should not be necessary to create a new institutional entity; rather, it will require empowering a standing entity so that federal programs are accountable to it.

For example, the Energy Research and Development Panel of PCAST recently released a report with recommendations of general policy and funding for a host of energy R&D programs. This type of activity could serve as the foundation for coordination of federal buildings policy and program direction. In this example, the President’s Office of Science and Technology Policy could be charged with assessing the degree to which agencies meet the policy recommendations and program direction of PCAST. The new coalition described earlier and its individual members should be charged with working with the administration to implement the integrating activities of the entity and secure congressional accep-tance of the concept.

Achieving these goals might at first glance appear to be impossible. Just coordinating the large number of federal buildings programs would be no small task. Yet the human genome project provides a model for such a daunting undertaking. Research on how to map the genetic make-up of the human body is being conducted by organizations worldwide for a period of 10 years or so. The World Health Organization is co-ordinating that research and collecting the fruits of individual research efforts. This monumental task shows that coordination of massive research undertakings is possible.

Support Accurate Estimation and Verification Efforts

For optimally efficient buildings to become the norm, consumers, designers, builders, and manufacturers must be able to estimate whole buildings performance confidently and within acceptable real-world deviation limits. In the energy context, designers must have continued verification and demonstration that buildings designed and constructed according to whole buildings system conceptions are cost-effective across a variety of climates and building types in both new construction and retrofits. Consumers require this information before making their choices.

Software for this purpose must be developed that is fast, inexpensive to use, and accurate and that permits easy analysis of building envelope and component alternatives, including the effects of their interactions. Such software must also serve as design guidance tools, setting priorities on strategies that, in interaction with other approaches, deliver the highest or most cost-effective return for the package. And these must be supplemented by objective, well-documented case studies and demonstrations to validate computer models, to provide monitored data on actual building cost and performance, and to give confidence to both consumers and lending institutions. The software might also be licensed by the federal government to private software companies to market and sell, in order to help build the public/private bridge and to bring to bear the great skills of private software developers.

The type of information needs described here are crucial to winning acceptance for whole buildings technologies and practices by consumers and lending institutions that are being asked to invest in efficiency and renewable energy. Therefore it is critical that the federal government continue to support existing programs that are developing and demonstrating prediction and verification tools and supplement them in areas that are currently not addressed. Many agencies, national labs, and private-sector groups are developing their own tools to solve individual problems.

DOE could continue to be the lead agency and help coordinate all these entities and provide supplemental support for the programs, which would require separate funding. In September 1995, the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) noted in a report that building on the field performance data collected over a decade ago would have considerable value. OTA also recommended commercial demonstrations for builders and users and increased support to enable the rapid development of design tools.³⁵

This could be achieved by accelerated DOE support for continued development of “Designing Low Energy Buildings/ Energy-10” software to make it more robust and to include additional technologies. This software allows building designers to measure the interactive and complex effects of energy-consuming and -saving measures and to design options. A number of well-known technologies (including PVs, natural ventilation, exhaust air heat recovery, evaporative cooling, and solar hot water heating) have yet to be incorporated into the software because of a lack of funding. DOE should also continue the Exemplary Buildings program, which is one of the few design-oriented demonstration programs currently in existence. Another area for continued federal programming is the development of short-term energy measurement tools. Additionally, the Home Energy Ratings Systems Council Guidelines, developed in a strong industry-government partnership, should be considered a key measurement and verification tool.

Apart from the individual contributions to improving the nation’s building stock, prediction and verification programs provide a foundation for other policy tools. For example, the guidelines developed by the HERS Council are now languishing “on the shelf.” They should be the measurement and verification basis for any proposed federal tax cuts for building energy efficiency. The new coalition should work with DOE and the HERS Council, the Treasury Department and Internal Revenue Service, the Senate Finance Committee, and the House Ways and Means Committee to make this a reality.

Embrace Training and Education

Individual, community, state, and federal building decisionmakers must be introduced to the concepts and benefits of whole buildings policy, while architects, engineers, and building operators must be explicitly trained to understand how to pursue their trades in the context of whole buildings performance. At the very least this will require the introduction and widespread dissemination of user-friendly whole build-ings design tools that can lead decisionmakers and designers through optimal design selection on the basis of immediately available estimates of buildings performance that embrace all natural and mechanical system interactions. But the aim of this should be higher, with the goal of accomplishing a real market transformation by changing the very basis on which buildings are evaluated and decisions made.

Hand-in-hand with efforts to integrate programs, fund activities, and develop the appropriate design, measurement, and verification tools goes the need to train the building trades on the concept of whole buildings and the accurate, fast tools available to put the concept into practice. These training needs directly address the market transformation issue described earlier. At present, typical U.S. architectural and engineering education programs do not stress building technologies, materials, or components, let alone whole buildings energy performance, and therefore cannot be considered to have a holistic perspective.

To address this need, DOE and other federal agencies must implement education, training, and technology transfer programs that will help stimulate a transformation of the marketplace. In effect, these activities will move the technologies and practices developed through federally supported programs into the marketplace where people can reap the environmental, economic, and national security benefits.

DOE, EPA, and other agencies must look to industry and private models in continued support of combined national technical conferences. Organizations such as the Energy Efficient Buildings Association now open their conferences to similar organizations, such as the HERS Council and PSIC, in order to provide a broader picture for attendees. Similarly, the American Solar Energy Society’s annual national conference, the annual Passive Solar Conference, the American Institute of Architect’s Committee on the Environment, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, and the Solar Energy Industries Association’s Soltech conference now have a combined, coordinated national conference every four years that provides a forum for engineers, architects, industry members, and federal R&D professionals to share information and move the fruits of federal R&D into the consciousness of private practitioners.

In addition, the federal government must practice what it preaches by providing a more robust program of design assistance, peer reviews, and training for the design and operation of federal buildings. Furthermore, DOE’s national laboratories, along with the laboratories at NIST and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, must be required to identify “users” or audiences for their research before beginning any project, and then be encouraged to continue and enhance technology trans fer programs and partnerships with private industry. The high-level federal entity charged with coordinating federal buildings R&D should also be charged with evaluating the progress of agencies in fostering this cooperation. For example, federal agencies and laboratories could be evaluated based on the number of CRADAs (Cooperative Research And Development Agreements) and licensing agreements they transact.

Stimulate Demand Through Awareness

Since the supply of nonrenewable fuels is subsidized by the federal government, for whole buildings designs that integrate efficiency and renewable energy sources to compete fairly in the marketplace, consumer demand for these applications must be stimulated. Consumers (broadly defined as builders, building owners, homebuyers, lending institutions, and state and federal building managers) must be made aware of the documented and measurable benefits of energy and cost savings, quality of living and workplace, and resultant quality of life and productivity of employees when buildings are designed according to whole buildings principles. Such a campaign must include sophisticated and pervasive marketing programs, imbedded into the very methods by which the building industry reaches its customers and delivers its services. These programs, too, must be assembled as a “system” of related market-development activities, rather than random “shotgun” programs that stand alone, and that may not be able to produce results by themselves.

As does the last recommendation, this addresses the need for federal policy to incorporate market transformation as an inherent accompaniment to R&D activities. It is safe to say that consumers, lenders, realtors, and in many cases builders are unaware of the cost-effective buildings technologies that are currently available. The federal government has historically emphasized strategies that attempt to “push” technologies out of the laboratories into the hands of industry who will commercialize and “sell” the new technologies. In the case of buildings technologies, the federal government must also adopt a “pull strategy,” whereby consumers are educated on the avail-ability and desirability of these technologies so that they begin to demand them in the marketplace.

EPA/DOE appears to have the mandate and the funding to implement large-scale public awareness campaigns for Energy Star Buildings, but these may still need to be addressed as just one part of the overall program. Consumers should be reached through targeted public service announcements and local events and demonstration programs (like the American Solar Energy Society’s National Tour of Solar Homes). In addition, EPA should continue its efforts to gain the support of builders, realtors, appraisers, and financiers for its program.

While the federal government is somewhat limited in its ability to advertise and promote its own programs, nonprofit organizations and trade groups are not so constrained (except by lack of resources). The new coalition described earlier should implement a public information campaign (in tandem with its campaign targeting the administration and Congress) to make the case to consumers and to those with a role in building construction, finance, and operations. Funding for these activities could be obtained from government agencies, from contributions from the coalition members, and from the foundation community. As is often the case, these activities are not without precedent. Groups such as the Sustainable Energy Coalition, the Safe Energy Communication Council, and the Communications Consortium have implemented similar campaigns covering other technologies.

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