On December 5, 2023, Tim Sweeny made this presentation to the American Institute of Architects, AIA, Norther Nevada as part of a continuing education certificate. Here is the video of his talk. Below the video is a transcription of the talk.
I'm not a lawyer. I'm not an expert. I'm not an insurance person or a code person. But I do have some things to share in the past 15 years, I've been doing some things that most people haven't been exposed to. And so one of them is I've found that there's a new easy way to do sustainable buildings that saves you time and money and trouble and energy. It's more sustainable and fits any kind of building.
This is to give you a little background on me. This is the last part that's going to be about me or my company. I've been around a while. I've been an architect forever. Brad has been one longer, but I'm older than he is. That's a battle we have going back and forth. I've been a president, former general contractor, International Passive House Association, certified designer, and tradesperson designer related to architecture, trade person to construction, and materials. I've created my own building system called the Simplus Building System, which is a combination of magnesium oxide panels and passive house design. I'm a co-housing facilitator, and I create communities and use a design down a process to gain consensus and direction. I'm one of 49 people across the nation has been selected for the 2024 IMPEL Program, which is a US Department of Energy-funded Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Administrative Program to support Innovation in construction in the U.S.
I think this is all important. Climate change is the big wolf in the forest and it's coming after us. We need to do something about it. The evidence is everywhere. We all know that. We all know what's happening. I don't have to repeat everything that's up here. But, you know about the polar ice caps, glaciers, acidification of the ocean, and temperatures rising.
It's undeniable. And unfortunately, we're not on track to get where we need to go to control the greenhouse gases. And the associated temperature increases. Currently, if we are following policies that are in place right now, we're going to end up with a 4.8-degree Fahrenheit increase in our global temperatures by 2100. We need to follow the blue path and get down to just 2.7 degrees by that same 2100 and by 2030. We need to be well on our way to that. We're not there yet. We're going in the wrong direction. That's why I need your help.
We're running out of time. AIA National has its 2030 commitment that points out that we need net zero emissions in buildings by 2030. So I'm not the only one who's waving the red flags.
And to make matters worse, the population and the number of buildings is hugely increasing around the world. Imagine 2.5 trillion more square feet of buildings by 2060. That is to say, another New York City every 34 days. It's just mind-boggling. And the reason is buildings are responsible for 39% of all US emissions of greenhouse gases. That counts for 28% from operations.
And that's the low-hanging fruit that we can make a difference about. And 11% from building materials and the actual construction in the field from transportation, we can make a difference there, too. Meanwhile, its sustainability is not at the forefront of many people's minds. We're still doing code minimum business as usual with design and construction. That's the problem.
Current construction is unsustainable. It is what generates all these greenhouse gases. So we're wasting our futures as well as energy. Again, this is the problem. We have leaky buildings, they leak energy, they leak air, they leak moisture. You can not only get maintenance problems, but you're burning more fossil fuels. And again, you have more greenhouse gases produced as a result.
An example is one single exterior or receptacle outlet that is not properly sealed and passed from a normal indoor atmosphere condition. Water vapor over one heating season is equivalent to a 55-gallon drum. And, you know that there are all kinds of leaks and penetrations throughout most buildings currently, walls, roofs. And it's the fact that they are so leaky that keep some problems from happening because they have a chance to dry out. But if that water gets trapped in, you have cold temperatures and you can get condensation and freezing, you're you could be facing some hidden problems, including mold and beyond.
But we are architects. We can help fix the building part. Like the doctor says. Tell us where it hurts. Well, the buildings are leaky. That's where it hurts. We need to reduce those greenhouse gases. Now, there is no perfect building system. If there was, it would do all of these things. Not producing any carbon in its operation and not having any carbon in its manufacturing be reusable.
You could break it down, recycle it, move it to a different location, reuse the parts that don't exist as yet, but we're moving in that direction. A circular economy is the direction that we want to go in.
And we can also have healthy, safe, strong, and more comfortable buildings with a perfect building system. We also can do that with Passive House.
Now there are four main ways that we can reduce greenhouse gases.
Number two, building usage is the low-hanging fruit that I was talking about that's making buildings that don't need as much energy and leak so much energy. The other items are discussions in themselves, but they're all ways of reducing greenhouse gases, less embodied carbon in the materials, using more sustainable energy sources, and sequestering carbon, such as not cutting trees to make lumber.
So as I said, we don't have to discuss everything and we're going to just talk about operational carbon.
I have found that the best way to reduce operational carbon is by the combination of two proven technologies. Number one is the most energy-efficient way to design, which is using passive house design. And LEED is good, but you sometimes get stuck scoring points.
Passive house design is based on controlling and functioning and is results-oriented. You combine passive house design with the most efficient way of building, which is panelization factory precision which reduces labor in the field. And you have what I am sure is the best possible combination, a way of doing buildings that there is today. It's easy too. Now you get all of these benefits with these two systems, each comes with its benefits.
The passive house side is more energy and people-oriented, more comfortable, safer, healthier environments.
But it's energy-focused too. So you're reducing that leakage, you're reducing greenhouse gas emissions. You are getting into a truly sustainable way of designing. And then there's 30 years of proven technology that passive house design works. It came out of Germany. Panelization brings all of the construction benefits. It is fast and easy to design panels, a lot easier to design than just a whole bunch of sticks and an engineer.
Same with fabrication assembly. There's minimal waste. There's more precision and efficient use of materials. You do save a lot of time and money with penalization and there's over 100 years worth of boosted panels work since the Frank Lloyd Wright days.
Now let's talk first about passive house design. It's not just for houses, it's not solar, It's not passive solar. Of course, that name is confusing. It came out of Germany and spelled PASSIVHAUS. Haus, as I understand it means more building or environment as opposed to HOUSE. And so you're having mechanical systems that don't have to work. They're very passive and inactive. And on the right you see what used to be the world's tallest passive house, a panelized building, 26 stories.
We will do a 90-second video here.
Video Exert (see video on YouTube: Passive House Explained in 90 Seconds)
Passive House explained in 90 seconds. Does your house have a heater in the basement or maybe a fireplace? Probably also a central air conditioner or maybe a window unit. Did you ever wonder if it was necessary? In 1991, a physicist in Austria, Dr. Feist, built the first passive house. Here's what he did. One proper insulation. It's just like wearing the right winter jacket.
It also doesn't need a heater and no air leakages. There should be no holes, small or large, to let hot air out of the house. Three. No thermal bridges. A thermal bridge is like a road for heating energy in which warmth can travel right through your walls. As a matter of fact, most of our houses have thermal highways in our walls, where heat can easily travel to the outside.
Plus, the house means proper windows. Most of the time with triple pane glass. It needs to be oriented properly so the sun can heat it in the winter and shade is provided in the summer and it uses an HRV, a device that provides the inside with fresh air without letting the heat out. Add all these things up. And it turns out your house doesn't need a heater or air conditioner.
So where does the heat come from? A passive host needs 90% less energy, and that can easily be supplied by your body heat, the sun, your appliances, light bulbs, and even your TV. This saves you a lot of money on your heating bill and helps preserve the environment. Do we make it in 90 seconds? You bet we did.
Tim Sweeney continues:
Passive house is designed for climate and in this area often double pane is adequate You get up into the mountains it may maybe a different story, but it's still it's an energy-efficient way of designing and this proves it. You see the column on the right, that's conventional construction, 20 times more losses of energy than the column on the left, which is Passive House design.
In between is the column is the latest highest efficiency energy code, Title 24. And you can see that there's no comparison between the performance you get from passive house design and other systems.
I like to say the passive house is the opposite of being wasteful because you are doing more with less as you do these simple principles that were just described in the video. You are actually reducing the energy, getting a higher level of comfort and you just add PV and you're already at net zero or even positive and you're not using the energy any more than you're not. You can produce more than you're using. Now. The second part of the equation is panels. RS Means, maybe about 20 years ago did a study for BASF comparing structural insulated panels using OSB skins to two by six construction.
This is what they found. Panels were up to 55% faster than two by six, framing and use up to 41% less labor. All that equates to money. This is where you can more than pay for passive house improvements to your designs by the savings, by using panels. And of course, with any public works kind of construction, you have prevailing wage requirements. The more you can do offsite in terms of panelization floors, walls, and roofs, the more labor costs you're going to save. You have more precision, higher quality work, and save a lot of life, time, money, labor, and grief.
Now there are many different kinds of passive panels. There are a couple of panel shops that do this kind of work around town. They're called wood open wall panels, but they're not Passive House. They don't even have any insulation and sometimes don't even have any shear skin on them. They're stud walls that are factory-made efficiently, but they're still stud walls. And there's a whole lot of things you are left to do out in the field. It's not as efficient as other systems, but it's better than stick framing where people are scratching their heads over the drawings and, you know, sometimes the quality you get out in the field to still wood framing, but certainty, it has their own passive or not passive, but a prefabricated wall system they can do even siding and windows. Now there's a whole lot of shop labor that comes with it, and there's going to be some transportation from wherever their factory is, but it is a solution that might be suitable for a certain project. Of course, there's no fire resistance or anything special in terms of water resistance.
Now, RS Means evaluated a conventional structural insulated panel, OSB panels, on the left side of the screen, and what they evaluated on the right side are magnesium oxide panels. And I'll explain a little bit more of that in just a second. So OSB is, of course, a wood product and it has its susceptibility to all kinds of problems, not only code problems, but, you know, fire and moisture. But it could be a good solution in the right instance because it is a solid structure. It does itself, provide a lot of continuous insulation with few thermal bridges is better than stick framing by a long shot. On the right side, though, if you use a magnesium oxide skin on a structural insulated panel, that is another good option. This one happens to show yellow fiberglass spines being used to join the panels together.
The thing about magnesium oxide is it's simply a cement board. You have two kinds of cement. Portland cement and magnesite, magnesium oxide, cement. The Portland cement is made by grinding up limestone and burning it and then you do the same thing with magnesite to make the magnesium oxide, except it takes about half the energy to produce. It just happens to be that Portland cement is more readily available.
Here's a diagram showing how MGO panels can have optional insulation spines to connect them. I don't recommend the metal stud option because it is a thermal bridge. You can get away from having splines or any studs except for at the panel joints for foot on center, depending upon your structural design. But there are many different ways that you can join these panels together, kind of like tongue and groove. They come with their own electrical cases and you hit it with the blow torch and it just makes a smudge not affected by water. It's a natural anti-fungal material, with no mold.
I was involved with a company in Canada that produced two panels worth of buildings. Each of those buildings was done in under 120 days, from groundbreaking to students sitting in the seats. And that's, of course, rocket speed. The general contractor saved over $1,000,000 in general conditions. In one of the schools in Florida, Hurricane Irma came along and it's reportedly the only school in the area that had no damage. It just had a couple of windows that were not secured correctly blew out and had a little bit of water inside. But it's definitely a proven effective building system.
Now, you take OSB or stick framing or MgO panels and you combine them with Passive House and you have a couple of other options. On the left is a double wood wall system. This happens to be a product produced by a company called B.Public out of New Mexico. It does take a lot of sharp labor because you're still stuck framing it. You're doing it all in the field, I mean in the shop but it's very rapid in in the field setting. On the right is a magnesium oxide passive house combination that has all of the benefits that I talked about previously. Both of them will have a structural wall component and an interior service cavity could be its own stud wall. It could be just a three-by-four fairing, plus interior air barriers and exterior weather barriers. And again, depending upon your climate, the location of those barriers may have to change.
Everybody wants to know about cost as well. You should, because that's always the bottom line.
So if you compare old school to buying six single-stud wall framing these numbers are based upon a local general contractor who does a lot of multifamily projects. They're not paying the prevailing wage, but they are paying a competitive wage. The labor is really where you get hurt with wood construction, with the materials are cheap, but with standard wood construction, you're building junk because of its terrible energy performance.
And this is the problem in the first place. We don't want to be doing that. You compare that to a geo-passive house solution. It's a little more expensive, but if you're getting more and you have all of those 90% plus energy savings and you're using as you have to labor that knows how to set panels, it can be a very economical solution, especially if you start comparing it to some other systems that are commonly being built today, such as double stud. the B.Public solution. It's about 25 bucks a square foot. So again the labor on stick framing is getting you up above what you can do with MGO panels and passive house.
Now here is where we get to tilt up. It's a lot of embodied carbon. Concrete is terrible for having a lot of embodied carbon. It's heavy. It takes big foundations, it takes a lot of steel. It's a very energy-intensive solution and most often a lot of these tilt-up projects are only insulating just to the office areas or maybe up at the roof. And there's a lot of heat loss that happens in these buildings. So you're paying more and getting less. And the same is true if you use concrete blocks. Some of the buildings that you see going up today are nice big masonry buildings, but they only put a little bit of insulation on the inside. Even if they put in more, it's still not that efficient construction and it's costing you way more than it should.
So even if you have a very sustainable energy source, like a ground loop thermal system, you're still running that electricity to pump all that water around and try to make up for all the heat loss.
Now there is a path to reversing climate change. This was first promoted as part of the Paris Accord, the International Energy Agency's 2050 Net zero roadmap. And as you can see by these, the 2030 timeline, the first goal is only six years away. And whether we can make that is doubtful, whether we can make a difference. Trying to achieve it is real. We can make a difference. But by 2030, all new buildings should be net zero ready. 20% of all existing buildings should be net zero ready. And by 2050, 85% of all buildings should be net zero ready. You recognize that 2030 is the same milestone that the AIAA National put on to their 2030 commitment program.
So by combining passive house design and personalized construction, the combination of the two you can save a lot of energy, a lot of time, a lot of expense, and labor. And you can reduce those greenhouse emissions quite significantly at this time. And of course, technology is getting better I can see even greater reductions from 39% to less than 7% soon.
So here's what the rest of the world, including the U.S., is up to. As you see the dormitory, as I was pointing out in a prior slide is penalized. This is now going to be the tallest multifamily project in the world. That's Passive House. Not all of these are panels, but some of them are at a lower scale in Massachusetts. Here, say another multifamily project, offices in Boston, Massachusetts. This is going to be the world's tallest office, this passive house.
They're already doing affordable housing and making it an elementary school all the way through and on up to college campuses, resorts, and hotels, of course, historic renovations and brownstones or any other existing building can be what they call en-or-fit energy retrofit, and it won't perform as well as a new building, but you'll be able to get energy savings that cancel and justify the expense of those retrofits.
Use something that you call a PHPP, the passive house project planner is an Excel spreadsheet on steroids that lets you balance all of the energy and performance envelope performance considerations. There is a new code coming out. It's available here at the ZERO CODE website, but it's not being adopted in many places. It may be back in New York or Massachusetts, but it is available and there is a building standard, and I'd encourage you all to tune in to the presentation available at the Passive House Network website and learn more about how Enrico Bonilauri from EMU building systems Passive House trainers in Colorado.
I have studied Title 24 California energy codes and U.S. energy codes. Compare them to International Passive House standards and have, by analysis, proven the same thing. And this is the most energy-efficient way of designing and there are tax incentives available. I wish there was more.
Now I want to get into some aspirational things, some things I'd like to see happening. I'd love to see all of the building agencies and governmental agencies, or anybody who has any say over building standards or codes really adopt sustainability as its standard, much as the city is moving towards reducing those greenhouse gases, giving us a chance of having better living working environments, better health, a better quality of life. And I love to see if there are actually tax incentives, and that's a political football for sure. But if you were penalized for generating greenhouse gases and given incentives not to generate them, then I think that would be a very positive step.
And all of us here and beyond need to do our parts. We need to be responsible, no matter what our role is, any one of these categories. And thanks again for what the city, Susanne, Jesse, and Joel are doing to help us become more sustainable, both at the agency level and private levels, I want to see us building professionals work together more. I want to see us not be such silos competing with each other, especially when we need to be fighting on the same team in the same army against the same battle.
We need to start having focus groups talking about how to use penalized and passive health systems get trained and certified and know the science yourself. If you don't know it, hire a consultant. I'd be available for that. I have on the AIA focus on sustainability and become a resource and a leading example for the community.
So we already have the tools available to us. We just have to use all the benefits that we've already gone over or what your clients should be getting and what any project deserves to get. If you just know how to deliver it.
So as I said, this is a call to action by me to you. Please help make buildings more sustainable. And now that you know better, how can you design unsustainably? Are you opening yourself up to legal exposure or criticism from your clients? If your client says, "But I just want to meet the code minimum," you say, okay, let's do that. Maybe you should get a hold harmless when he sells that building to somebody else and they start complaining about how crappy the building was designed because sustainable building is becoming the norm and we need to be the leaders.
So before it's too late, let's get our act together and start doing something. We all have our parts. We owe it to the future and I'm going to ask you each, you don't have to answer now, but what are you going to do?