Towards Affordable Decarbonization: Lowering Utility Costs in Electrified Multifamily Buildings

Registration Information:

To register for this course - please reserve your seat for the "Sustainable Finance in the Built Environment Summit" located in the Greenbuild agenda.

Registering for the session holds your seat in the class until 5 minutes prior to the scheduled start time. At that time your seat in the session can no longer be guaranteed.

If a workshop or session is full, you will not be able to add it to your agenda; however, if you have the appropriate pass you will be able to enter the session on a first-come first-served basis 5 minutes prior to the scheduled start of the event so long as capacity has not been reached

Greenbuild staff at the entrance of the session have the ability to stop permitting entrance to the session when the room hits the set capacity.

Description:

Building electrification is key to a clean, resilient, and carbon neutral future, but our industry faces an inconvenient truth about electrification: electricity is more expensive than gas in many municipalities, making fully electric buildings more expensive to operate than hybrid buildings. This increase in utility cost creates a utility cost gap penalty. For multifamily residential, electrifying domestic hot water is a looming challenge to controlling utility costs. This is an issue for architects, owners, tenants, and the building industry at large: The increased cost of fully electric buildings will prevent adoption where not mandated, and punish adopters who do not employ cost controlling tactics. Passive House and its co-benefits risk omission without associated cost savings. Affordable multifamily operators will be hit the hardest as utility costs account for 2.5 times more of total operating costs when compared to market rate multifamily. This presentation presents a necessary and innovative toolkit of potential strategies for controlling utility costs in fully electrified multifamily buildings, offsetting the utility gap penalty to realize utility costs equal to, or better, than buildings that are not electrified. These tools span envelope, energy generation, utility rate structure, and building management systems. They include Passive House, geothermal, solar, time of use rates, demand response, peak load reduction, fault diagnostics, and occupant engagement. These strategies will be presented through the lens of a case study: The Beacon, a 21-story affordable new building in Harlem, NYC. Attendees will gain a toolkit of potential strategies to control utility costs in electrified multifamily buildings, learn to assess their electrified utility costs against a hybrid gas and electric baseline, analyze which strategies are suited for their project, and establish next steps for integrating them in a project. Keeping electrification AFFORDABLE must remain as priority, as decarbonization becomes mandated and more urgent than ever.