VX Greenbuild Panel: In the Near Future, 2020, All Developers Will Be Building ‘Net Zero' Homes

Tom DiPrima: Let me tell you a little bit about a project we recently did in a partnership with the city of Lancaster, BYD, and KB Home. We set out to build a production home in a very affordable community price range, starting in the high ones. We wanted to do it in a quick manner, and we set out to do a home with solar energy and something new in battery storage.

This project is in Lancaster, California. The community is called Alamosa. It's actually a community we took over that the previous builder had walked away from. We worked with the city-we've had a long-term relationship in the Antelope Valley. The house has many features-we worked with the design board of the city of Lancaster to implement one of the first WaterSense-labeled communities. This is an area in the desert, and a lot of the homes are using about 1.2 acre-feet of water. Through some of the changes we've done with WaterSense appliances, with low-use appliances, Energy Star appliances, such as low-use dishwashers, and drought-tolerant landscapes. The turf you see in the back is all artificial turf. All this vegetation is either native or very low-use. It's point-drip irrigation, and it has water-sensing devices on it, so it's very low water-use. Additionally, we installed four kilowatts of solar on this home. There are a lot of other energy features, but the one we talked about the most is that this is the first home in the United States to have a smog-eating rooftop.

The home was built in 36 calendar days. That was from the day we started trenching to the day we did the tour with the city. That included all our decorating, furnishing, and so forth. The home is an Energy Star home, which is a standard in our company for all new communities. The home has solar and features, such as all the lights in the home are LED lighting. The home has high-efficiency Energy Star rated windows and heating ventilation and air conditioning. It also has the ability to go off-grid.

One of the things about solar, which is not a brand-new technology, is that as it generates that solar power, that power goes into your inverter, and that power from the inverter goes directly into the grid-side of the panel on the electrical panel. In the event of a power-outage, you can generate solar, but you can't use it. Your home would be dark in the event of a power-outage. In this house, because of the battery-supply back up, which has the ability to provide ten kilowatt-hours of power, and based on its low-use, could run the home for a few hours. We picked some select circuits, such as the refrigerator, a light, and some monitoring areas, such as the TV and radio, so that in the event of a natural disaster you'd still have the ability to monitor services...

...Additionally, the house has smog-eating tile. Basically, the way this tile works is a chemical embedded that neutralizes the nitrogen oxide in the air as it comes down in contact with the roof. It also destroys algae. As it rains, it washes all those, now clean, off the roof. The roof has a LEED certification for reflectiveness and it also does not hold as much water-it doesn't get as wet-so it dries out in about half the time.

Just a little bit about the battery back-up system: right now, currently, this home is in Southern California Edison. We have a tiered structure. The way our tiered structure is set up is that once you reach peak rates overall in your bill, then you pay the next rate of power. But we do not have real time energy charges. In other words, you pay the same amount of price per watt at two in the afternoon as you did at two in the morning. In the future, as we go to a tiered structure, where you would pay more at peak-use and less at off-use, you can actually program this inverter to go on at two o'clock, download power onto the battery system, and then actually use it at two in the afternoon or sell it back into the grid, substantially reducing your energy use. When we set out to do this home, we did not set out for the home to be net-zero. Because the home was so efficiently built, we ended up being basically net-zero on electrical. We are actually producing more electrical than the home would use.

However, the home's not a net-zero home. And the reason it's not net-zero is we do still have gas for heating and gas for cooking, which services a gas-electric furnace and we have gas appliances, including a gas tankless water heater. Now, we could have put an additional 1.5 kilowatts to offset gas use, which would have made the house completely net-zero. We chose not to because as it is, this home is not going to have an electrical bill, and there isn't a structure in place where you would get an additional refund check on a monthly basis. You'd still have a gas bill, but then you'd be paying additionally for the solar. We set out to try to find that balance between net-zero.

One of the things we've learned in this process is homes going far in the future, in 2020, are all going to have to be net-zero. The real question is: will it be net-zero from an electrical consumption or net-zero from an overall consumption? To do that, we would have to eliminate gas in the homes. I look at it as a very clean and renewable resource, and, as a cook, I'd rather have gas than electrical.

Additionally, we set out as a builder a couple years ago to improve our sustainability and our green footprint. We are the first public builder to file a sustainability report. It's never pretty to do, but you have to start somewhere. As I always tell people, if you're improving your strength or losing weight, you have to start from somewhere and measure where you're going. Subsequently, we have been recognized for a lot of things. I'm happy to say in 2010, we were recognized as Green Builder of the Year and we were also recognized by CALPERT as one of the leading-edge builders in sustainability. We're really proud of our efforts.

One of the things we've learned from this project is that maybe we need to relook at net-zero. Currently, this roof tile we have on here, because of the size of the roof, because of the size of the home-about 1,800-square-foot home-it reduces the same amount of smog as a car driving about 11,000 miles a year. There are no credits back in the housing industry for doing this, yet this is an area where we are globally improving our carbon footprint. There are going to be some new things that need to be looked at with regard to how we get to net-zero, what credits you could give for other things...

...I'm currently building a multi-family project, which we hope to be our first LEED Platinum multi-family project. We're doing a case study on that project with Southern California Gas, and we're looking at a lot of new initiatives to reduce our carbon footprint while improving affordability. Affordability for the home can't just be driving the price of the home down-how do we take all the back ends of the home and reduce those? One of the biggest is our energy consumption.

Chip Fox: I'm the New Construction Manager for Southern California Gas Company and San Diego Gas & Electric, so I spend a lot of time on the train between here and San Diego...I want to talk a little bit about what Sempra's doing for net-zero.

You all know that Ed Mazirian, who was an architect, put the 20/30 challenge together, which the National AIA officially adopted. It wasn't long after that that the California Public Utilities Commission convened a series of workshops that the utilities, architects, cities, and a lot of stakeholders were involved in, to develop what now is referred to as the Statewide Strategic Plan. In California, that is the roadmap that all of us are on. You heard from Tom about KB's dedication to that plan, participating in the utilities programs that I managed for Southern California Gas Company, which help him as a builder to offset the increased cost for putting in this type of equipment by providing incentives to make it more economically attractive as a builder to consider, as well as the ultimate occupant of the building.

In both San Diego and Southern California Gas Companies, we have a very robust net-zero program. We have energy-efficiency incentives that we provide to both builders, whether that's a home builder, a commercial office builder, whether you're going to put in a class-A office building, biotech, whatever it might be, that does exactly what this is intended to do, to offset those incremental costs. If we're looking at net-zero, this is not cheap.

Let's just all face it. This is not a cheap thing to do. It's like any of you that are into home theater. You've the early adopters that want to go to the 7.1 surround sound with the Blu-Ray player. There are guys out there that want to be the first adopters, and they don't care what it costs. In this industry, you're going to find that there are the early adopters that really see the message, they are the pied pipers and they are willing to do these types of projects.

But there is incremental cost that has to be absorbed that, even with the incentives we can offer on a cost-effective basis, sometimes can't be overcome. That is some of the challenge that we see. You've got the early adopters-but how do you get the KBs of the world and the Brookfields, people like that, the production builders, that will then want to make this a standard. That's going to be the overriding challenge from a cost-standpoint.

We have two commercial net-zero projects that are out the gate in San Diego. You've got one which is an architectural office building in Pacific Beach. It's been built for almost a year. That is currently-we're tracking it now for almost 12 months-producing more energy on the grid than it's actually using. It had a very aggressive day-lighting strategy-facing west, oriented the perfect way, pulls in all the west-facing cool air, and expels it through computer-controlled skylights-it's been a phenomenal project for that group. They got a LEED-Gold rating off that project. The construction company DPR just completed a 24,000-square-foot project in San Diego. It was a total gut rehab of an existing building that is now net-zero. You can go online and see what that building is using on an hour-by-hour basis, based on what they've got in there.

One thing I'd like to emphasize: when we're talking about net-zero, there are a lot of definitions of net-zero. For me, as the utility manager, the definition that I adhere to, believe in, and what we do, is what the CPUC tells us it is.

The Statewide Strategic Plan mentions that a net-zero energy home or building has to be both net-zero energy and net-zero gas. There are a lot of people that agree or disagree with that. We could go into carbon emissions and all that, and those may or may not change, but currently, in the Statewide Strategic Plan, that is the margin.

To Tom's point about natural gas, yes, we want to encourage that we can work with builders, like him and others, as well as commercial folks that want to make net-zero gas a priority. That's part of the equation here. Oversizing the PV system can do that or you can put in solar-thermal, and there are a couple opportunities here. Again, it's all at a cost, and if we can provide incentives to offset that, it makes it more attractive. That has to be a key part of the equation as we move forward, that it's not just net-zero electric.

Tom mentioned that all residential new construction will be net-zero by 2020, and all commercial new construction net-zero by 2030-some very aggressive goals. How are we going to get there? It's going to take three things. First of all, a California Energy Commission, which sets code in California, ratchets it down about every three years. That's somewhere between 8 to 10 percent that gets ratcheted down every three years, give or take. We're going to see that ratchet down probably 15 to 16 percent every three years.

That's going to take a concerted effort, and we'll hear this in the panel, when you do net-zero, you just don't build a code-compliant home or office building, and then throw a bunch of PVs on it and say, "I'm net-zero." That's defeating the purpose.

You want to make sure that you incorporate really deep levels of energy efficiency into the project-on the envelope, the lighting, the mechanical system-you really want to go after this aggressively, which is where the utilities and the energy efficiency programs can come in. The manufacturers, all the people that are involved in this-if you have a motivated owner and design team that wants to do this, we can step in and help. And then the rest is made up through renewables, which currently is either PVs or solar-thermal-there are a lot of different opportunities out there.

But when we look at that, that's the thing that really needs to be driving the boat. It's just going to be adoption, it's going to be conferences like this where all of you are aware of the Statewide Strategic Plan and the importance of us coming down the track to make sure that that happens, as well as educating builders, the media, and everybody else about the importance of this goal.

The goal that we're all going after is very important and worthy. We want to leave this world a great place for our kids and our grandkids, and so this is all part of what we're trying to do.

[Editor's Note: The Green Innovation for the Built Environment: Designing & Building Net Zero Emission Buildings/Homes panel at VX2011 was moderated by Steve Glenn, the founder and CEO of LivingHomes, a pioneer in prefabricated, environmentally friendly houses.

LivingHomes has helped build and design many single-family and multi-family homes, working with architects such as Ray Kappe, Russel Witten, and David Hertz. The standardized designs and integrated environmental programs that result from the LivingHomes design and construction process have set new standards for homebuilders, leading to reduced costs, construction time, and ecological footprints.

The Ray Kappe LivingHome was the nation's first LEED Platinum home, and nine Living Homes are currently in development designed to reach LEED Platinum. Although LivingHomes uses LEED program for external review and validation, LivingHomes has also established its own Z6 sustainable building goals: Zero Water, Zero Energy, Zero Waste, Zero Emissions, Zero Carbon, and Zero Ignorance.

The Belles Townhomes-three-story, seven-unit attached LivingHomes townhomes-in the Presidio in San Francisco-recently became available for lease. Designed by Kieran Timberlake, the Belles Townhomes are the only newly constructed residential buildings in the Presidio, and the first multifamily homes in San Francisco to receive LEED Platinum Certification. The were developed by Forest City and built in partnership with The Presidio Trust.

Most recently, LivingHomes announced a sneak peak at a new version of a new Kieran Timberlake LivingHome in Santa Monica. The new house will have two bedrooms, a bonus room, an indoor garden, and 1,585 square feet. ]