Building America: Research for Real-World Results

December 17, 2014

Eric Werling, U.S. Department of Energy, Building America Program

Gail: 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 from the Energy Department with us today to give an overview of key Building America accomplishments, current research focus areas, and future program strategies for encouraging market adoption of energy efficient technologies and practices. He will also tell you about exciting new developments in the DOE Zero Energy Ready Home program and the 2015 Race to Zero Student Design Competition.

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We have an exciting program prepared for you today that will describe Building America innovations, impacts, and current research focus areas, and exciting new developments within the Zero Energy Ready Home program and 2015 Race to Zero Student Design Competition.

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 nearly 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 4-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 3 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 provide information about impactful Building America accomplishments, current research focus areas, and future strategies for research, development, and demonstration of high performance homes. You will also learn about exciting new developments in DOE’s Zero Energy Ready Home program and the 2015 Race to Zero Student Design Competition.

If you would like more detailed information about any of these efforts, please feel free to contact our speaker, Eric Werling. Eric Werling 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 provide an overview of Building America historical impacts, current research focus areas, and future strategies for ensuring Building America’s leadership in the movement toward high performance homes. He will also tell you about exciting new developments in the Zero Energy Ready Home program and the Race to Zero Student Design Competition coming up in April. With that, I’d like to welcome Eric to start the presentation.
Eric: Alright, thank you Gail and I did not see your presentation ahead of time Gail so I'm pleasantly surprised. It provided fairly significant coverage of the Building America Program so I'm ready to skip to the end and ask if there are any questions. Just kidding. Actually what I'd like to do is take you through a little bit less of the past innovations than what Gail's introductions suggested, mainly because we have a lot of great material about that on our website and I'll get that information. What I want to do instead is tell the story in terms of where we are now and where we are going forward and a little about how we got there.

I will start with a glimpse at the past. Homebuilding did not innovate significantly. A lot of people may think it is still true today but it is changing. Consumers won't pay for energy efficiency is something I heard so many times I can't remember. I lost count a long time ago. Then, once again, renewable energy was deemed to be not cost effective in the residential environment and we have a lot of indications that these things are all changing.
First of all, they pace of innovation is picking up. Building America has been at the forefront of innovation in the housing industry for 20 years as Gail said and a lot of those innovations, certainly not all, but a lot of the ones we call people's attention to are highlighted on our website.

One of the most promising parts of the Building America websites is the top innovations. This is just a brief sort of outline of the structure and I am not going to get into specific details because there are factsheets on numerous top innovations with some of the history, and some of the players, and some of the accomplishments definitely laid out for each of them. In general, I want to tell you that the innovations that Building America has, in partnership with industry to create, have been transformative in the housing market. They've included demonstrating advanced technologies, which have helped in a partnership kind of arrangement, which have helped get advanced technologies be adopted more quickly than they would have without Building America's help. Those include building science solutions, energy efficient components, IQ, indoor air quality solutions like ventilations and systems that work. Most of the ventilation systems work today and are being used in homes were first demonstrated through Building America. The second category, House-As-A-System Business Case has been one of the pillars of Building America's strategy and one of the most successful aspects of the program over the years in that Building America has worked with builders for most of the 10 years of the program and a little more recently with contractors in existing homes to demonstrate that not only can we save more energy technically, feasibly, but it also helps the business case for the builders and contractors who are participating by making their homes a higher quality, better differentiable in the market, but also lower risks - lower technical risks, lower business risks, etc. We'll talk a little bit about where we are going with that later. Then of course, Building America was closely tied to some of the whole house programs that have been successful, including most prominently the Energy Star homes program for most of the life of the program and the collaboration between those programs is not always intentional, but certainly as we look at past history we can see that Building America's influence on Energy Star was profound. It helped both programs to succeed. I am very proud of being business focused in the process of demonstrating advanced practices and technologies in the housing sector. The third category of innovations, you know, when we think the DOE we don't normally think about...we think more about the technologies that require research and development investment and maybe a little bit less about tools and guidance and things like that that make it easier for normal industry folks to adopt the new technologies and to do it more quickly. But, those are so important in terms of changing markets and improving the state of the art in terms of energy efficiency in the housing industry that we established a completely separate category to identify innovations and getting the word out about technologies, including high performance home solutions, like whole house packages, and information about technologies at the Building America Solutions Center, which I will talk about a little later, high performance home metrics that help to better specify high performance systems in housing designs, etc. and then research tools like the program that has sort of been behind a lot of the go to energy plus modeling advancements that have happened in the residential sector.

Then finally, even if you get advanced technologies through the business case and help people learn how to do the advanced technologies, we still find that in the housing sector there are barriers that remain, including the following three: That educating professional is the solution, of course, but the barrier is if we don't have a trained, educated workforce that can deliver on the best practices and technologies that we are demonstrating in the program, then how can we be expected it to take off in the market. We need to help stimulate more building science education in all the education pipeline. Second of all, figuring out how to recognize the value of energy efficiency in high performance and the transaction process. That's been a bit of a bear of a barrier for a number, a couple of decades now. Only now are we starting to see the value of energy efficiency in high performance homes starting to actually be recognized in the real estate transaction processes. That's a subtle development, fairly recent, but something that we're quite proud of because it enables a more mass market adoption of energy efficiency improvements. And then finally, codes and standards can get in the way if they're old with regards to some of the technologies and practices that might lead to better outcomes with regards to performance, production, and energy efficiency but if they are adopted more slowly by the states and jurisdictions or the code officials aren't trained in new technologies, etc., there is a whole slew of reasons that codes and standards can be behind the state of the art. So, we've made an impact in all 12 of these areas over the history of Building America. If you want to see more of the details please check out the website. It's pretty easy to find. It's right on the front page of the Building America website.

So that's about all I want to do looking back into the past. Now I want to get into the trends here. Consumers, we have some fairly significant evidence here, are starting to demand green and energy efficiency. Some of these recognizable labels did not exist 10 years ago. There are more where those came for if you are interested. Another source of information for our conclusion thought consumers are starting to demand green energy efficiency is a National Association of Homebuilders report. I think this came out about 2 years ago - What Homebuyers Really Want, and its survey based instrument that they do every couple years I believe. The most recent one was pretty fascinating. The trends in that report showed some pretty significant change in the way that consumers view energy efficiency and green features. I just want to call to your attention a couple of those highlights. One, most buyers want an energy efficient home and on average would pay an additional $7,100 up front if it would save them $1,000 a year in utility costs. This was a result of an in-depth survey, statistically significant, that is a pretty impressive result and subject to the limitations of surveys as always but  still they actually were robust enough to get that kind of level of assessment about how important those issues might be when it comes right down to spending extra money.

Another thing that was interesting in that study was they asked consumers about a whole bunch of different features, most of them not specific to energy efficiency, but 11 of them, the top 11...trying to remember the exact fact here. The bottom line of this one was that three of the features were in the top were Energy Star ratings. That's a pretty significant change indicating that people know and value the Energy Star label in terms of higher perceived quality, not necessarily understanding what it means in terms of energy savings, but they certainly perceive it as an indication of being a higher quality product here. Then 85% of the buyers valued these energy efficiency features that were much higher on the list than they were in the previous study. So a lot of evidence in that study and I urge you to go check out that study if you are interested in finding out more of the specifics.
A third trend, market trend, that I wanted to point out that's been fairly recent is that photovoltaic cost - this is just an example of how the renewable energy technologies that have been perceived as being too costly, are coming down significantly. There is a program at DOE called the SunShot program that set out to achieve what we call price parity for roof top solar collectors, solar electric collectors, by 2020, which is only about 5 years away. They started the program in 2010. They have been tracking what that price is and it has come down 60% of the way from when they started the program to the goal in 2020. What they mean by price parity is a kilowatt hour of electricity is approximately equivalent, you know, generated PV is approximately equivalent to what that same amount of electricity purchased through a coal fired power plant might produce, so any of you that have followed the economics of renewable energy know that that's a fairly recent trend. There has been a steady but very slow reduction in price of energy renewable assistance but recently, with the combination of investments by the Department of Energy and also a lot of the activities overseas, including especially a big play by China to reduce...to produce a lot more PV panels. The result is that the costs are coming down significantly and we are getting pretty close to the point where it's going to seem pretty attractive for people to buy PV panels, through lease or some other way. Bottom line here is we have the pace of innovations picking up. We've got consumers starting to recognize the value of green energy efficiency and the renewable energy that might be able to offset anything that we can't take care of with energy efficiency is getting pretty close to realizing that goal of cost effectiveness and cost competitiveness with the other utility options, which will leads us to feel very confident. In fact, Sam uses a term "hard trend" that we are on the path towards zero energy homes. When we will arrive there we're not sure but we can plan for it and we can expedite it through energy efficiency with understanding of how those investments might pay off in the market place.

We also think that this won't just apply to new homes but existing homes. A little bit more about that, there are some huge challenges there but I think that we're on the way to zero energy in all homes.

What does success look like? We do it well. We do it quickly. We end up with a market down the road, say 15 - 20 years from now, where net zero homes are commonplace. Builders are more comfortable with making long term warranties because they know the quality of their homes is higher than in the past. All the housing trades are starting to get comfortable with energy efficiency and efficiency first services and the profitability of them. Starting to emerge, professionals that can act as house doctors to help people solve the problems in their existing houses because they don't perform as well as the new high performance houses that are emerging in the market place. Home asset management, as we start to recognize the total cost of ownership for a home is dominated by operating costs over the life of the house. So can we rely on new professionals that will emerge that will help homeowners to efficiently manage their asset, including maintenance plans, upgrade plans, etc.
Then finally, Americans are going to start paying more attention to preventative maintenance. It's been my observation throughout my over 20 years in the housing industry, including the behavior of my own family in our own houses, that preventive maintenance is not often done in houses. We usually do maintenance when needed, unlike the culture that we've come to with our cars, by and large in our society, where we take care of them - the oil and rotating tires on a regular basis. We often only maintain our houses when things break and that's something that can be fixed and can be in the best interest of consumers when we change that culture but that culture doesn't change easily. We'll need a whole workforce of professionals that know how to service those preventive maintenance needs and the optimization of the performance of houses. That's my vision over the next 20 years about how the housing industry might change with regards to both the technology of high performance and also business. 

What will all that mean? The economic impacts are quite large when you consider there's $2,200 a year in annual energy household bill for single family houses with over 70 million single family houses and when you include attached housing units we are up above 113 million housing units in the US. The total then is just a rough estimate of over $240 billion spent per year on utility bills in this country. If we could just cut those in half for that whole population of homes we would be talking about adding $120 billion of savings into the economy that consumers, homeowners, and renters could spend other ways. We think that's healthy economic impact if we can achieve that goal.

The opportunity is big as well because of the over 100 million homes that could use energy efficient improvements that could be cost effective. There are plenty of jobs in the housing industry that could be leveraged towards the improvement of homes. Of course, if we get net zero energy homes we're not depending on foreign energy and we move closer to that goal of energy independence. Then of course if we get high performance homes the air in the homes is cleaner and the indoor air quality and health risks are lower and people are healthier and more comfortable in their homes, all good stuff.

This next slide is just a quick outline of the four different areas of strategic focus that we've been developing over the past few years with Building America and our sister programs here at DOE. They boil down to four different types of activities. There is developing this innovation pipeline that certainly research and development is part of that but it's not just research and development. It's also how do we plan to get, influence, both the new construction and the home improvement markets to actually embrace the technologies that are developed through research and development. We prefer to call it developing the innovation pipeline and accelerating innovation instead of plain research and development.

The second bin of activities is that guidance and tools set of activities. I will talk about each one of these in the innovation pipeline and the guidance and tools area. The other two areas, improved infrastructure and market recognition, are a little bit more towards our deployment activities. I am going to touch on a couple of these things like the student design competition, as Gail said. I will talk just a smidgeon about COSA standards and might get some time to talk about building science education because Building America plays a key role there. I can introduce you to the Zero Energy Ready Home program. But much of the issues in the improved infrastructure and market recognition are activities on our deployment side program, like the Zero Energy Ready Home, and my colleague, partner in crime Sam Rashkin, is much better at presenting those activities so I'll reserve that for another webinar.

I am going to dive right into the Building America R&D Roadmap. Now this is a fairly new development on the program. We've been working hard the past few months to chart a course for how we're going to improve the focus and the accountability of our research and development activities with Building America. I'm going to take you through a few of the slides for the logic and the technical backdrop for why we're focusing on what we're focusing.
First of all let's start with the goals. For DOE our goals are in the new construction market to demonstrate at scale market relevant strategies for new homes offering savings of 50% or more by 2025. That actually is the easier of the two goals even though the numbers are bigger and the date is sooner. The reason why we think it's easier is because we think that we're already demonstrating pretty close to that with our Zero Energy ready partners on some of the Building America projects that have been done in the past couple of years. So we're pretty confident that most of the challenges there are mostly about how we can help inform the market and change the market infrastructures so that those kinds of approaches are encouraged in the market. And what can we do about R&D and demonstration set of activities that will encourage that and solve the barriers. So, that is the new homes goal.
The existing homes goal we've staged it a bit because it's a much more complicated market I believe and so we're currently shooting to demonstrate at scale the market relevant strategies offer existing home savings of 20% by 2020. We're on track for that one with home performance, with the Energy Star program achieving an average of more than 20% savings per home but getting to scale is the tricky part for that. By 2025 we'd like to extend the efficiency more but mostly focus on getting that scale up and then hopefully by 2025 we'll be in a good position in the existing homes market to increase the energy efficiency of the upgrades that we're helping to make happen on the marketplace by up to 40% by 2030. So we're hoping that the scaling of the market will also help to open up opportunities for increasing the energy efficiency improvements.

All this is based upon what we call the Building America R&D Roadmap, research and development roadmap. This is the latest iteration of that. It has evolved over time but the basic point of it is that we're charting the history of energy efficiency and performance in homes and it shows, without belaboring the point, it shows...I'm sure that many of you have seen this online or in Sam's presentations. It makes the point that in the beginning of the search for energy efficient housing, starting right after the crisis, late 70s - early 80s. A lot of work was done mostly on what we call the thermal enclosure, or the thermal envelope, and that's adding insulation and realizing pretty quickly that that air filtration and air flow in and out of the building was a huge contributor to energy loss or unwanted energy gain in hot climates. We worked on those technologies through Building American and other research initiatives and by the time we entered the 90s we had a pretty good understanding that the tighter you make the home the more likely indoor air quality problems can happen if you don't provide ventilation, mechanical ventilation, or a better term is probably controlled ventilation. We also started seeing some of the efficiency standards improve for AC equipment. So the 90s saw quite a few advancements in that area. In the 2000s most of those issues kept developing in terms of sophistication. A little bit better ventilation systems. A little bit better understanding of what leads to indoor air quality and the complexities there. A lot more learning about moisture flows in building envelopes, etc., and then the starting to appreciate the need for lower load HVAC systems as we get the thermal enclosures continually more efficient.

Here we are in the 2010 to 2020 decade and efficient water heating is also on the plate but we've gotten a little more sophisticated with what it means to be energy efficient high performance thermal enclosure. There are still questions to be answered but we have a much more clear research strategy than we ever did. Smart ventilation and indoor air quality is actually to be within reach, including development of standards that will make it easier for industry to adopt indoor air quality and ventilation systems that work and are viable. Of course, we're hoping to see a lot more lower load HVAC systems that are efficient and affordable. That is where we are today. If we are going to get to Zero Energy Ready or Zero Energy future for homes we are also going to have to deal with the miscellaneous electric loads. That is the gray box in the right hand corner. That is, miscellaneous electric loads is an increasing portion of the energy end use in houses and the only way we can get at that, aside from improving the standards for the individual products that we put in homes that use electricity but also learning how to manage the use of the products in smart ways. So that is where the term "smart home" comes from and there is a lot of technology development still to be done in that area. So we're invested in that in our emerging technologies program. We are not expecting to make much progress in the next few years in the Building America real world home space.

Then finally we have an emerging set of issues related to integrating renewable energy generation into the home, in particular and most prominent is the solar photovoltaics that I mentioned earlier. Some of the issues that we're going to face but are fascinating but quite challenging have to do with once you start getting a sort of critical mass of rooftop solar installations in a utility grid connected situation, you actually start having some serious power management issues that the utilities are concerned about and for good reason. Figuring out how to manage the non-constant generation nature of solar power generation is going to be a big challenge but there is a lot of investments being made in that space and we're confident that we'll, within the next 5 years or so we'll, be in a good position to demonstrate some really good solutions in the Zero Energy Ready Home programs. That's the sort of 30,000 foot look at the research and development roadmap. It's fairly clearly defined the general technology areas that we need to work with. The devils in the details, of course. So let's dive into some of the details.

The first thing to say is that for now we are focused on these three issues. Anyone on the webinar who were aware that Building America announced a funding opportunity recently for the next round of Building America teams? If you've read that funding opportunity announcement you may have even bid on it. You know that these are the three areas that are focused on in that funding opportunity announcement. I'll talk a little bit about these things from a strategic level but not enough of a detail to sway any of the following activities on today's call. I apologize about not being able to go into more detail in those areas.

I would like to at least be able to tell you why we're doing it and how we expect to make our investments in the future. I want to start with further explanation of why we're focusing on those three areas. I want to start with this pie chart, which is just a detailed energy end use pie charts for residential energy consumption. A quad, for those of you who don't know, is a quadrillion BTUs. It's a lot of energy and 22 quads is what's used per year on average in the residential building sector, which is approximately 21% or so of the total energy consumption in the US economy. We're, in homes, using a fifth of the total energy in the US, a little bit more than commercial buildings. If you put all the buildings together it's 40%, which is more than the transportation sector and also more than the industry sector. So we use a lot of energy. When you break it out to these five categories you can see that a good chunk of that for appliances, lighting, and miscellaneous end use loads, all of those small things that you can buy in a store and plug in. Those are all factory assembled products, which may not have much effect on the overall operation of the home other than whether or not the lighting or entertainment needs are met. Building America does not focus on those kinds of products. We have other policy instruments for improving those including research and development but also standards making processes for minimum efficiency.

Instead what we chose to focus on with Building America, which is focused on the building science aspects of houses, is this part of the pie. This, I'm calling it - although it isn't officially referred to this in the US Energy Information Agency materials and databases, but I refer to this as comfort because it's really how efficient is our envelope - the building envelope, the building enclosure, and how efficient is the equipment that meets the comfort requirements for the home occupants. You put those two together and you get the biggest of the pieces of the pie for energy end use for the residential building sector. So 43% or almost 10 quads of energy, almost 1/10 of all the energy consumed in the US is consumed in houses to make them either warmer or cooler, depending on what climate you're in or what season you're in. In order to get a good handle on that and make it as efficient as possible, you need to improve both the envelope and we need to improve the HVAC systems. Even more than that, we need to improve how those things are installed such that other problems don't go up.

That leads to our new Building America R&D strategy, which is now more focused than ever before I believe on specific technology issues. In this case it's focused on primarily, in the Building America program, on heating and cooling energy use in existing, new and existing, homes because it's the highest impact on use loads. Now the way we're doing it is to focus on the issues that have arisen through that roadmap to be the most important impediment to future progress in home performance optimization. It comes down to how we can get higher performance envelopes without increasing the risk of future problems in buildings and air flow problems, relative humidity problems that the HVAC systems can't fix and indoor air quality problems from tight construction.

Those are the three key areas that we are focused on. One of the primary instruments that we have at DOE to be able to pursue our policy objectives is a funding opportunity announcement. That is what FOA stands for. Over the next three years, this year included, we are intending to invest in a new set of Building America Industry Teams to demonstrate solutions to these problems in real world houses and the first of those FOAs is currently active so I can't talk about it other to remind folks that it's addressing those three areas.

The next critical aspect of our new strategy is that we're working more than ever before within the context of Building Technology Office Ecosystem. I'll show you a graphic of that so you'll understand that.

Finally one detail, but an important detail, for folks in the near future is we're planning stakeholder meetings for the late spring, early summer, of 2015 to refine some strategic roadmaps that we are currently working on and help to leverage industry by involvement and commitment to the goals of reducing the risks of higher producing homes in the marketplace. Those are sort of the highlights. I will talk a little bit about each of those things some more.
Here's this Building Technology Office Ecosystem that I referred to below. So Building America is one of the programs within the Building Technology Office at DOE, which is responsible for all of the areas that I'm about to show you. The first part is research and development and we have an emerging technology program that is focused specifically on technologies that result in energy use in buildings including HVAC system developments, window and building envelope improvements, water heating investments and then building energy modeling to help optimize our research and investment. All of those very specific investments tend to be longer term focused, whereas Building America is at the tail end of the research and development where we're taking existing products that are underutilized in the market and figure out how to optimize those different best practices and systems to get fully optimized whole house performance. Recently we've started to apply those to existing home improvements in addition to the home construction optimization.

The second part of the BTO Ecosystem is market stimulation, not to be confused with incentives. It's really a much broader thing. Back when I was at EPA we referred to it as market transformation. It includes programs like Energy Star and the new BOE Zero Energy Ready Homes program and a host of other programs including the Home Performance with Energy Star program in the existing homes sector. These programs are about trying to stimulate sustainable market development for improved energy efficient adoption in the industry through a variety of activities.

Finally, part of the statutory authority and requirement actually for the DOE Building Technology office is to advance building codes and appliance standards for appliances and equipment that are in homes and use energy. So we have a multifaceted set of goals for the Building Technology Office but for the time we are working much harder than ever before to try to figure out how these pieces fit together so that we can remove some of the inefficiencies that often happen in a silent kind of environment. Building America is in a great position to straddle that because of the nature of the kinds of projects that we've been funding in the past and the infrastructure. Whereas in the past few years we've been trying hard to make a stronger connection between Energy Star and now the Zero Energy Ready Homes in the new construction sector and the research that is coming out of the Building America demonstration projects. That's just one example. Another example is codes and standards process can be informed by the practices and building science that's developed through Building America projects and teams. The point of course is that if we can help answer some of the building science questions that lead to lower risk code improvements or standard improvements then the codes and standards communities are going to be much safer when they attempt to increase the standard level of performance so that the industry strives for or is required to achieve.

A little bit more history about how the different components of the ecosystem have been complimentary even when we haven't tried to do it. This is just a graph that shows the first piece here is IECC code. That is the International Energy Conservation Code, formerly the Model Energy Codes, and up until...trying to remember what date...I think it was 2006 was the first IECC. No 200...it doesn't matter. The advancement of the codes has been kind of incremental, mostly small improvements in energy efficiency. To explain this chart a little bit better, the baseline here we've adjusted to the most predominant model energy code in the country right now, which is 2009 IECC. That's the current baseline for this chart. In other words, in 1986 the energy codes were 40% less efficient. In other words, 40% more energy was anticipated to be used in a house of the same size and footprint than a house built today under the 2009 energy code. You can see from this that the advancement of energy codes up until 2009 have been in itty bitty little increments. Every few years a change happens but not a significant one until 2009 and then again in 2012, not so much in 2015, but the increase in efficiency has been pretty remarkable in those last few years of the code cycles. When you look at what we've been demonstrating through the market programs like Energy Star and then this next line is the estimated level of improved efficiency demonstrated through Building America projects. It gives you a pretty good picture that we've been leading through the demonstrations in Building America the voluntary programs, which then have contributed towards the ability for the industry at large to take steps forward in terms of improved efficiency by demonstrating lower risk and higher quality can be achieved through higher performance, etc.

One of the issues though, and of course Zero Energy Ready Home is in here as well. One of the issues though that has become probably the most important issue that we have to face right now is...oh, I'm getting there. So the savings from if we hadn't been involved in any way with codes or Energy Star or with Build America, we predict that there would have been a slow increase in efficiency as the industry gets more efficient or products are improved and installed in homes but the improvement would not have been significant and would have taken many, many years. The savings achieved from this kind of increase in efficiency is measurable and looks like it will be significant eventually. Our goal for, that I stated earlier in the presentation, for Zero Ready Homes in the 2025-30 range is actually quite a leap even from where we are today. But, as you can already see, we've already started to demonstrate with early adoption that it's possible to do Zero Ready Energy homes today. It's just not prominent but the savings potential is huge if we are able to successfully lead the whole market to get to those levels of performance in a way where risks are reduce and minimized and profits are optimized for the industry that delivers those levels of performance to the homeowners. The one problem that is staring us in the face right now though is now that our homes are getting rapidly more efficient, we're starting to get into what we're calling the risk zone. This risk zone is for a variety of reasons but it is because, partly because of energy efficiency and partly just because of improvements in technology, like for instance technologies like drywall and OSB that have made houses more airtight even when we're not trying, have left us with some challenges that in some cases if we don't do it smart make houses more risky rather than less as the performance increases.

Here's a snapshot of the three biggest sets of risks that we're worried about. Energy efficient new and existent homes are more likely to stay wet. What we mean by that is if you put more insulation in the building enclosure in such a way that it traps moisture inside or doesn't allow the drying of moisture when it does get wet, either from the inside or the outside, then it stays wet and of course makes the building materials more vulnerable to decay. It makes the house more vulnerable to indoor air quality and humidity problems, etc.

The second thing is that even if we have that moisture issue under control, if we get loads down because we've improved the efficiency of the roofs and walls and foundations, we actually tend to get lower heating and cooling loads and now the traditional systems that we see predominantly in residential, in houses, are not able to handle loads very efficiently. They don't run as long. It's an increase latent load ratio...I'm sorry. That's a slight error. It's not an increase necessarily in latent load. It could be but mostly it's the ratio of latent to sensible load that's increased. Then the result is that the swing seasons might be increased because the insulation and air tightness of the houses are leading to the systems not coming on as early in the year. Then we end up with increased risk of lower air flow problems like insufficient mixing, stagnation of air, higher relative humidity in the HVAC systems on the market today are not particularly good at handling those issues. Then finally the need for assured adequate fresh air through ventilation, of course, but also source control whenever possible.

If we don't solve these performance issues that are partly contributed to by increased energy efficiency in homes, we will end up having comfort and durability problems for builders and homeowners and contractors that will cause them to shy away from energy efficiency. It will prevent our ability to increase future energy codes and increase the standard of care and standard of quality for the industry at large. We think that would be a very significant deterrent to improving efficiency in the housing industries. For these reasons, these three issues, are the most important to solve before we can get the significant energy savings in homes in the future.

Of course the solutions for those are just changing from red to blue. We're going to moisture managed high-r envelopes, which will make them less likely to stay wet but we're going to optimize low load comfort solutions and instead of calling it HVAC I'm not calling it comfort because, you know, that's the purpose of the HVAC system - to help establish comfort. Well, if we don't have a very good definition of comfort then that's going to be a difficult thing to do. We need to learn how to better measure what comfort is and how to achieve it and how to better control it in homes. Finally, we need to have smarter indoor air quality solutions. We have some decent indoor air quality solutions right now on the market. We are increasingly seeing that option but they are not very smart and almost none of them tell us when they fail. We've got some issues to improve there. Then one other thing is that when we look at indoor air quality in a building it's not always dictated by, although ventilation is a very part of achieving indoor air quality, it's not the only factor that determines indoor air quality inside a building. Those are the solutions that we're looking for with Building America over the next 3-5 years.  

We are getting a little bit more strategic than just saying those are the issues. We're actually starting to ask the questions. What are the technical problems that we need to solve to get to that point where these risks are well managed and the high performance solutions are the best ones for both the technical goals and the business goals of the housing industry? That includes, in the high performance envelope space, it includes envelope system moisture risk management and high performance envelope solutions that can be converted to guidance and tools.

For the comfort systems for low load homes we are talking about optimizing HVAC system designs and helping to improve the standards, where applicable, such that the HVAC industry can deliver better performing systems more reliably. Then second of all there are some equipment needs in the HVAC space for residential homes that we'll need if we're going to get our envelope loads down as low as we'd like to.

Finally, we're parsing the road mapping activities for IAQ into these three areas. Targeted pollutants and non-dilution solutions - so basically acknowledging that ventilation is not the only thing we have to tackle if we are going to ensure air quality for homeowners. We do have some work to do on the smart ventilation side in terms of getting cheaper, smarter, more reliable ventilation solutions. Finally, in order to be able to help consumers and professional to sort out all of the issues that can affect indoor air quality, we believe that we need to have better evaluation and equivalency standards for all the different issues, or at least the most prominent issues, that affect indoor air quality so that we can control those different factors and ideally get to a point where the standards allow much more flexibility but achieve better results than current standards in place for indoor air quality. Those are the high level strategic issues. I am not going to show you any of the draft strategic roadmaps that we are looking at.
There is a stakeholder engagement process that we plan to open up to the public in the spring of 2015 and we're currently planning those activities. This is what our strategy development looks like. I've superimposed on the top of it the FY15 Funding Opportunity Announcement process so that you can see that you have to be sensitive about as we're selecting awards through the FY15 Funding Opportunity Announcement process you have to be careful not to have conflict of interest or any unfair competition in that process. We have to carefully time our strategic planning and stakeholder engagement in ways that don't jeopardize the FY15 Funding activity. So we are doing all those things in a way that's fairly calculated to avoid conflict of interest, etc. but also lead us quickly to a good vetted strategy for the program for research and development that helps solve these three problems as quickly as possible and primarily getting started on the next set of activities with the planned FY16 FOA, which would go out in the fall of next year.

This is just our plan. All of this is subject to appropriations but the funding opportunity announcements for the different Building America teams are going to be phased for the next three years so the current funding opportunity announcement, at the top right now, will be awarded mid next year, around June 23 next year is our target date. We expect from 1-4 awards for that but then we'll turn around and get the next funding opportunity announcement out to get the next batch of Building America teams working towards solving these problems and get those awards done in 2016 and so on after that. I'm trying to give you a picture about how we're going to be building up the Building America teams to execute our strategy over the next three years and the results will be extended into 2020. That's about the extent of what I can share with you right now about the research and development roadmap and our strategy for moving forward. Hopefully it gave you a good flavor for the specific technical issues and challenges that we're facing and our strategy for how to get the next generation of Building America teams up and running to be focused on and solving these problems. That's about what I can share with you there. The next aspect that I wanted to share with you is that the innovation pipeline is not just limited to research and development but also what's the strategy for working with the industries that we need to adopt the advancements and technologies and best practices that we develop straight through Building America projects and so I will take one at a time but I will be real quick.

We've already used about 45 minutes or something so new homes is a pretty clear path to zero. This is again the BTO ecosystem, the Building Technology Office, which includes investments from emerging technologies, research and development in advanced technologies that we probably won't see for 5-7 years down the road but there are some pretty exciting technologies that we're investing in. Appliance standards are going to continue to increase the efficiency of major home appliances. Building America is right there in the middle where we're demonstrating early adoption of optimized performance in solving these major risks for the housing profession that prevent adoption of new technologies.  Then, Energy Star and the Zero Energy Ready Home programs accelerate adoption by recognition, by providing solid specifications for improved performance and recognition in the marketplace for achieving it. Then finally, as code advancement processes can work through the consensus process to increase both standard level of performance that's expected in the industry then those advancements lock in the savings at the scale of the entire marketplace. So all of those programs are starting to work together pretty well and we are seeing the signs of the advancement already. I showed you that chart earlier. We're feeling pretty comfortable about that clear path to zero. We're not necessarily comfortable in the sense that it's a slam dunk. We've got a lot of work to do in all of these areas but we know that the strategies that we've established here are based on lessons learned and successes accomplished in the past through Energy Star and IECC code adoption, appliance standards, etc. and research investment. So, we're pretty confident with all that.
Here's a little pictorial that some of you may have seen that sort of highlights how some of these different activities have influenced each other and how it's all part of a sort of market transformation system. We're in that kind of third row...I'm sorry, third column, and looking to help define what that fifth column might look like as 2012 IECC gets adopted around the country. Will there be an Energy Star version 4? We don't know. When will Zero Energy Ready version 2 happen? We'll see.

Then to the Zero Energy Ready Home spec real quickly. I will leave most of the gory details to Sam who presents this stuff much better than I do, but here is a real quick sort of summary of what the Zero Energy Ready Home program is. It starts with a specification for achieving the best state of the art, but by and large, cost effective performance target in the marketplace right now, which includes an optimized enclosure, risk management for the moisture risks, indoor air quality risks, and optimized comfort systems, and then we've also added the water protection issues as well. Then finally the Zero Ready Energy Homes spec acknowledges that renewable energy future and the target of getting to zero has quite a bit of market potential for differentiation, for getting consumers excited about the performance of their home, etc. We did not want to go all the way to renewable energy requirements or zero net energy requirements until the market was ready at the early adoption phase. We settled on an exemplary home performance. I should not say settled. We strategically set an exemplary home performance specification that sets up any home, any new home, for being zero energy. That's why we're calling it zero energy ready. We're not messing with the word met here. That was very deliberate. We're talking about making homes that are ready to be zero energy once the issues and costs are resolved for adding the renewable energy generation and leaving that part up to the market and our colleagues to solve the program - to solve those solar issues. What we have then is the Zero Energy Ready labeled home specification. It represents a high performance home that is so efficient, all or most annual energy consumption can be offset by renewable energy, which is a pretty amazing goal especially since we've already gotten several hundred and several thousand commitments in future homes labeled in this program. So we're very excited about it. There's quite a bit that Sam has done to develop the value proposition and we're confirming that it's working for some of the early adopters of the program. In a nutshell, the program delivers homes that live better, that work better. And that last better and that leads to the exclusivity benefit for builders, the visionary benefit for being able to actually have homes that don't have compromise for homeowners, and then they are smart and they last longer.

All this comes with, of course, some language and tools for contrasting zero ready energy homes with all the rest of the field to help our builders succeed and be on the cutting edge.

We're seeing some early examples. This one is a pretty cool one. My power bill is $5. What's yours? That's a real Zero Energy Ready Home partner, Garbett Homes, and a real advertisement that they used. The slide before that showed New Town Builders, which is using some of the specific cut sheet examples of the benefits and the systems that are assured in a Zero Energy Ready home that you won't necessarily find in your typical home.
All these are things that we're confident about, that will deliver differentiation for high performance in the new construction market, and lead towards a path to zero. Now the existing home improvement market is currently a lot more challenging. That's not to say new construction wasn't challenged...wasn't a challenging market to get energy efficiency to happen in. You know, 10-20 years ago we were struggling with some pretty significant challenges. Many of them we have overcome, not all of them but many of them. Existing homes we're quite a ways behind in terms of technology and the ability of the market to deliver solutions.

So, I'm not going to show you a silver bullet solution. What I will talk about really quickly for home improvement is, what are some of the things that we are thinking about with regards to how to tackle the opportunities and the problems. As a way to start this let's look at the entire economy with regards to home improvements, and that includes all the trades that do anything in homes after they already exist and the home performance market, where we've actually established a whole house program from bringing the energy efficiency to homes to comprehensive audit and recommendations for whole house performance and improvements. That hasn't quite reached 1% of the home improvement market. So, we're a long ways from being noticed by homeowners. It's not to say we have not made some great successes in terms of establishing in new industry from scratch and we're proud of that but we have a long ways to go until we've actually got it to work. We've got energy efficiency and whole house home performance as something that's understood by all the trades that do improvements in homes - a long ways away.

The path isn't so clear but we've made a little bit of progress in thinking through to what are some of the potential strategies and I want to give you sort of a quick highlight of some of the opportunities that might be pursued. One of them is to consider the challenge of if we can get all additions to meet the new construction standards. Wouldn't that be great? That's almost 20% of the market. It wouldn't be 20% of the energy efficiency though so we've got...that's not going to be a solution in and of itself.

The next, I think where the real savings are going to come from in the existing home market are going to be if we can tackle these two sectors, which are actually more than two sectors. But let's take a sort of high level lens to this and just imagine that if we could to get it to be common practice in the marketplace for HVAC system improvements to happen every time you call a mechanical contractor. Anytime you do anything cosmetic to your house you improve the efficiency of the envelope. That ends up being more than a third of the economic activity in the home improvement industry, including remodeling, additions, etc., and repairs. So how do we tap into that? That's the $64,000 question that we're asking. We don't know yet. There are a few ideas.  

This graphic is an early graphic that I developed just to, sort of start the talking about who are the trades, what are the types of upgrades, and what might we do in those spaces. This is not set in policy or anything. It's just some of the thinking that we've been doing about how to get the home improvement activity to start paying attention to energy efficiency in a way that we can lead the whole market towards whole house improvements. Eventually we're going to have to tackle these things. How we do it and when and what's the sequence and how much funding we get, those are all unknowns at this point. We've got a lot to figure out.

That's where I'm got to leave you with the innovation pipeline. Hopefully that's encouraging. What I want to talk about for the next few minutes, about 10 minutes, and then I want to leave the rest for questions and for the guidance and tools. The reason I want to talk about that is that's the area that once we've demonstrated the technologies or practices work and they improve efficiency, they improve performance, and they reduce risks, then it seems like it ought to be obvious. It ought to be a slam dunk but it ends up not being so because of imperfect information. There are literally hundreds of thousands of contractors or builders, independent companies out there, and getting them educated, getting their somewhat transient labor force educated and skilled in building science solutions is not a simple task. So we've got a lot of work to do to figure out how to get that information about best practices, about technology practices, and business practices out to that whole very diverse market. One of the most important things that we've been focused on recently for doing that is having a single source that makes it easy to get answers to that kind of thing, so technical questions, in a form that you know it's the most up-to-date without having to search through a research publication and that's the Building America Solutions Center.

We will talk about that really briefly but I am not going to go through all of the slides. If you want to look at the slides deck that is posted on the internet then you can see some of the specific slides. The best bet for you to get comfortable with the Solution Center is to just go to it. You can type in BASC in Google or BASC, I think it's PNNL. It's hosted on the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory's website. The basics of it though are that there are several different components. I won't talk about the building science explorer but that's pretty cool for all the building sciences who are looking for research reports, etc. The two parts of this tool that are designed for industry include the component explorer and that's where if you're an HVAC contractor or you’re a builder and you are looking for solutions for foundations efficiency, or whatever, this is the portal you would go through to get to specific solutions.

Just a snippet of some of the types of solutions that you can find in the Solutions Center - I'll show you some pictures of what some of those screens look like. For instance, each solution that you get to - say you want a solution for attic knee walls, it's going to show you the scope for how to do this, the description specifically for what it is. Ensuring success is really a positive spin on what are the risks that you need to avoid, then, climate specific issues. We've got training, mostly pictures. There are some videos in the Solutions Center, then CAD drawings, where appropriate. Compliance is where we are starting to build a library of code compliance briefs. We've just started that but it's something that we're excited about because it will help builders to avoid some of the trip ups that happen when you're trying something new that your code official hasn't seen before. We have guidance for how to deal with those kinds of issues. All these are features of each of the different measures that we have at the Solutions Center. It's fairly intuitive, easy to get around, but I'm not going to...I will show you some of the pictures really quick so you can see the value. There is, specifically for training purposes, it's not only accessible for these pictures through the individual measures but there's also - you might notice on the left side of your browser. Under browser there's an image gallery. If you click on that you can just search for specific images. There are hundreds of them in the Solutions Center. They are all free and available for download, categorized, etc. CAD drawings - the same thing, then as I mentioned, code compliance briefs and some other information. We also have there is the image gallery, which makes it easy to get ahold of that specific related images that show how to do things properly. We also have a mobile app that helps you to take the solutions that you want to take into the field onto your mobile application or your iPad or something like that, your tablet.

That's a quickie on the Building America Solutions Center. One other thing about the Solutions Center that's tied to program specifications, and I'll show you some examples here, is that Building America have historically, and we will continue, to help support the development of, through early demonstrations, etc., and also work out technical specifications, for voluntary programs like Energy Star and Zero Energy Ready Homes. So those specifications are...one of the coolest things about the Solutions Center is that we built the next part of the module, I mean, of the Building America Solutions Center after the specific checklist. So for instance, if you want to comply with Energy Star version 3 and you need to know how to do one of those specific requirements, you can just go through the Energy Star program checklist in the Building America Solutions Center and it will walk you through each of the individual requirements of that program. The same with the EPA's indoor airPLUS program and the Zero Energy Ready Homes program. There's also now a Renewable Energy Ready module for solar photovoltaic and solar hot water heating checklist. So all of these checklists are currently available. We are also working on checklists in the future retrofit applications for existing homes. We are excited about this because we think it gets the technical information to builders and contractors when they need it and for the programs that they're working with.

Here is just a snapshot of how it looks. It is kind of one of those accordion structured things where you can see the whole checklist or you can drill down one level at a time depending on where you are in the planning stage of your project. That's a quickie about the Building America Solutions Center and the program specifications and hopefully you got how those are all linked together.

One last thing in the Guidance and Tools department that I want to highlight is something that is under construction. It is actually in the early idea phase and it's, what about risk management tools. This is particularly important for managing moisture in high performance walls and so we are trying to envision right now what is it that builders will need in order to be able to be confident that building the wall design, for instance, that they want to do to achieve a high level of energy efficiency for their walls is actually not going to cause them moisture problems. There is nothing easy to do on the market that helps you solve those problems so what is it that we can do within this program with the significant amount of information that we have building science experts developing and putting into the Solutions Center. How can we help them manage the risks?

One concept from our idea expert, Sam Rashkin, is that I'm excited about is to figure out how can we quantify. We know how to quantify the cost of what an upgrade is. We are beginning to know how to quantify what the performance is that we can expect to receive from a specific measure but what about the risk? How can we quantify that? We're envisioning something that might look like this. This is of course early crude conceptualization but the idea is that for all of the measures in the Solutions Center, can we help to identify, you know, what are the risks, costs, and performance on a sort of comparable scale? We think this will be a valuable tool. We're not sure if we'll turn it into a tool specifically or just guidance. We want to work with industry to figure out what people need and want but that's the concept for how to address the risk issues that we'll be working on over the next couple of years.

Just a couple other issues I want to touch on, the codes and standards innovation activities we are working, or we affectionately call it CSI at Building America over the last couple of years, includes three different activities. One is developing code compliance briefs for the Building America Solutions Center. We've only just gone. We've only got three in three in there right now. We plan another 15 this year. We're also doing Building America R&D projects that help to validate high performance alternatives that have encountered code issues such as fire code restrictions, vapor barrier issues, ventilation standard issues, etc. Then finally the roadmaps that I talked about earlier will actively address what are the provisions of the codes and standards that we are going to need that will enable better performing walls, HVAC systems, and ventilation systems. So I think we have fully integrated with the ability to help with the development of intelligent standards industry would want to follow through the Building America projects and the strategy that we're going forward with. The very last thing I want to do is talk about the student design competition. Gail said I was going to so that's one reason I want to do it but also because I heard a bit of news yesterday that was very exciting.

The student design competition is now in the beginning of the second year. Last year we did it and we were planning on doing it every other year, alternating with the solar decathlon but we decided because last year was so successful we decided to go ahead and do it every year.

Fast forward to 2014 we were hoping to get at least 12 teams. We ended up with 28 teams, 26 universities represented, and over 340 students. Sam has a great presentation that shows you some of the pictures of the students and the phenomenal entries in this program, designs that met all of those goals in those slides that I showed. The cool news that I found out about earlier this week was that the application process for schools to submit for or to participate in the 2015 student design competition the deadline was just last week. The counts are in and we have actually gone from 28 teams up to 40 teams this year, representing 33 universities including Canada, China, and Norway, and one of the coolest things about it is that one of the Zero Energy Ready Homes builders, Carl Franklin Homes down in Texas, has committed to building the top two designs - the winner and the runner up, which I assume will make the winners - the winning students, really proud of their work because they'll know a home was actually built to their designs. We're really excited about this new grant competition that we started last year. We're doing it again this year and it's early successes are really promising.
That's all I have to present right now. There's a lot more to talk about in regards to Building America Zero Energy Ready Homes, etc. but obviously that's all I have time for. I don't know if we have much time for questions but I'll turn it over to whoever runs this stuff. 

Gail: Well thank you, Eric. This is Gail. We have time for just a couple of questions. We got some great questions in from our audience. The first one is - utilities in our area are now increasing monthly meter costs while decreasing kilowatt hours or therm unit pricing. How do you see this impacting energy efficiency and renewable innovations in new and existing residential construction?

Eric: Wow, that's certainly not something I could answer in five minutes and nor is it something that I would want to attempt to answer comprehensively but I do have a quick answer I think, which is that the utility infrastructure is on the cusp of some very significant changes over the next few years. In some markets, San Diego and Hawaii for instance, we're past 10% market penetration for rooftop mounted distributive generation and that's causing some problems. We're going to have to figure out how to prevent those problems, managing those problems. We're also making some significant progress towards lowering the cost of that distributive generation for the modules and also improvements are moving forward rapidly toward battery storage technology, which could solve some of the problems for power quality, etc. It's also going to raise the specter that utilities need to radically revise the way they bill for their services. It's not a surprise at all that local utilities, like the one that the questioner is asking about, are changing the way they're charging for the utility service. I promise you there is more to come there. That's a very dynamic field right now. There are integration issues, smart meters, distributive generation, and you are going to hear all that stuff more and more coming up. One of the things from our perspective that's the most important is can we get homes to be so efficient that they have relatively flat loads with smart equipment that deliver high performance solutions? Then a lot of those problems are mitigated in terms of power quality, etc. and we'll leave the rest of the solution up to the solar experts. I hope that that was a useful answer. I know that it only partially touched the question but let's move on to one or two more questions and then I don't know if we'll try to answer the rest in writing Gail? How's that? Will we try to do that?

Gail: Yeah, we certainly will have those all in writing and we can pass those along to you if you'd like to follow up.

Eric: Okay, why don't we take one or two more questions?

Gail: Okay. We have one more and then we need to go on to our poll. The question is - why is lighting not included in your research focus areas? Lighting should be included in the envelope research.

Eric: Yeah, that's a great question. There's a two part answer to that question. One is that we have a very substantial investment in lighting technologies in the building technology office. I am talking primarily today about the Building America program, which is only one part of the building technology offices portfolio. The lighting program is actually currently, this year, funded at a higher level than the entire Building America integration program is. There is no lack of funding going into improved lighting technology. It includes a continuing investment in improving the quality and reducing the costs of LED lighting. They are also working on new technologies called OLED, organic LED, and so stay tuned. There's a lot of developments happening and in the works in the lighting space. As for why we don't, it's really a two part question. Why we're not focusing on the integration issues related to lighting at Building America is we don't believe that those issues are as critical to overall energy performance as the risks that prevent adoption of increased insulation and air tightening and HVAC efficiency. We are focusing on those core technology areas that we think will be necessary to solve in order to get to the overall efficiency but we acknowledge that lighting is an important part that requires some investment. So that's as much as I have time for now. Gail, back to you.

Gail: Okay, we'd like to ask our audience to answer three short questions about today's webinar. Your feedback will help us to know what we are doing well and where we can improve. The first question asks if the webinar content was useful and informative. To answer, click on the radio button right in the GoToWebinar panel. And the second question asks about the effectiveness of the presenter. And the third question asks whether the webinar met your expectations. Thank you for taking our survey. Stay tuned for the next Building America webinar on January 21 at 3:00 PM Eastern time. The topic will Central Multi-family Water Heating Systems and registration will soon be available on the Building America site on the meetings page. On behalf of the Building America program, I'd like to thank Eric for presenting today and our attendees for participating in today's webinar. We've had a terrific audience and we appreciate your time. Please visit the Building America website to download a copy of the slides and to learn more about the program. We also invite you to inform your colleagues about Building America resources and services. Have a wonderful holiday season and we hope to see you again at future Building America events. This concludes our webinar.