By Steve and Pat Miller • NJ 50 x 30 BE Team
The NJ 50 x 30 Building Electrification Team hosts monthly talks on reducing your building’s energy consumption and lowering emissions. Here, we highlight tips and examples to meet these goals from three recent webinars.
2023-2-16 Yvette Viasus, the community solar engagement manager for Solar Landscape and a Sierra Club member volunteer, was the keynote speaker for the February webinar. She described New Jersey’s Community Solar Energy Pilot Program from soup to nuts—the benefits and how to enroll.
Community solar provides all the benefits of rooftop solar, but on someone else’s roof (or perhaps over a brownfield). It is intended for people whose roofs are unsuitable for solar—eg, renters or those in a multifamily building—or who can’t afford the upfront cost of rooftop solar. With NJ’s community solar, there is no upfront cost, and savings are guaranteed for the life of the project (currently about 21% below your local electric utility prices). The electricity produced is zero-emissions, making for cleaner air in the community and helping meet the state’s net zero target. Anyone with an electricity account and a credit card is eligible, and 51% of the solar capacity is reserved for those with low or moderate income. New Jersey’s program is designed to create local jobs and a local workforce. For further information and to sign up, visit bit.ly/3HwWedg.
2023-3-16 In 2023, Diane and John Burke moved into their new two-story home, which is designed to meet high-efficiency “Passive House” standards, which achieve up to 90% reduction in energy usage. They showed how their all-electric house was insulated and sealed to provide maximum thermal retention with minimal energy needed for heating or cooling. Continuous insulation ensures no gaps under, around, or above. High-performance windows and doors complete the insulation. Fresh air is filtered in, and stale air is expelled through energy recovery ventilation units. Heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning are provided by Mitsubishi heat pumps. The water heater is an AO Smith heat pump. This custom house was factory built with modules that were quickly assembled on-site. Diane and John plan to install rooftop solar to achieve yearly net zero energy, after assessing their actual yearly electrical consumption, including electric vehicles. New passive construction can cost only a few percentage points more than standard construction, and the savings offer a quick payback.
John stated, “We like windows, and we wanted big ones! They are really cool triple-pane European style with screens on the outside. We used Unity Homes to design our house. They built the whole model on a computer, and they made every single component indoors in a factory, so all the pieces fit together when delivered.” Diane stated, “We love it! It’s just perfect and really comfortable for us. If you come here and feel the atmosphere of the house, it’s really clean and quiet.”
2023-4-20 In a talk titled “Best Practices: Using Heat Pumps in Energy Efficient Buildings,” Bill Amann, president of M&E Engineers, discussed heat pump selection criteria and relative efficiencies among many possible system designs, depending on building and land characteristics. He emphasized the use of “cold climate air source heat pumps,” such as Mitsubishi Hyper Heat. Characteristics include variable flow refrigerant, which provides 100% heat capacity down to 5°F, and operation down to -13°F. He also discussed several ground-source heat pump system designs, including the “greenest office building in the world,” a net zero building located in Amsterdam that uses an aquifer thermal energy system (ATES) to heat and cool the building. Amann said the Dutch track the depth, direction, and speed of the various underground aquifer flows near each building and use that to their advantage.
New Jersey’s Stockton University has adopted an ATES model. During the winter, the school pumps groundwater to the surface, where it chills, and then returns it to an underground storage zone. This is available for cooling buildings during the summer.
Alan P. then reviewed design decisions for his all-electric four-story 4,300-square-foot “beach house.” He discussed the value of the Tesla solar tile roof and the challenges with maximizing solar roof coverage to reach net zero. His design includes four Tesla Powerwalls (batteries) to provide backup. He stated, “We have not yet built our house, but there’s been a lot of thought into making this house completely electric and able to go 100% off-grid.”
See https://qrd.by/y8noi1 for an index of all webinar dates, recordings, slides, and Q&As, and sign up for future announcements of future Building Electrification Team webinars.
Pat and Steve Miller are cofounders of the NJ 50 x 30 Building Electrification Team. Steve Miller is the building electrification issues coordinator for the NJ Chapter of the Sierra Club. Email the authors at stevemiller@comcast.net and patmiller@comcast.net