Pending Countywide Retrofit/Renewables Program
including sustainable solutions for historic houses

At today's Heritagate Network meeting (April 10, 2010), Mark DeBacker spoke about pending legislation that affects all buildings in the coming years.  The plan is generally positive, but can be detrimental to historic homes if not addessed with an exemption.  A list of historic structures that would be affected needs to be put together soon to get them included in an addendum. Please contact Mark if you have any homes to add to the list.

Synopsis:

The Program:
The Good- The program is primarily a single-stop clearing house for all energy efficiency improvement funding incentives and to a lesser degree, solar panels. It will provide a uniform standard that will apply throughout the county. All of the inspectors and contractors will be certified to ensure quality is maintained. It hopes to create jobs. The “Basic” program recommendations are roughly in keeping with those of the Secretary of the Interior and the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Though they had overlooked preservation in the draft program, they are now interested in addressing preservation concerns, offering to identify older buildings to put them on a separate track and certify a cadre of experienced preservation contractors.

The Bad- No credit is given for energy efficiency work already in place. The model mechanisms that have been selected for the implementation of the program simply do not address the special approaches required for working with older construction materials, methods and finishes. It will be very easy for in inexperienced or thoughtless contractor to disable effective existing passive functions or unnecessarily damage character defining elements. The work will be expensive on all homes, but even more so on historic ones. “Do it yourself” is not an acceptable option in the program. The payback period will be approximately twice as long in our mild climate as in the Midwest, Central Valley or Lake Tahoe areas. Perhaps the most onerous issue is that it could become a MANDATORY program in certain jurisdictions or if it appears to be failing to meet its objectives. The whole approach will need to be re-evaluated if this happens and certain types of structures MUST be excluded (such as privately-owned Sonoma adobes, un-conditioned round barns and special structures like Luther Burbank’s greenhouse). In its current form, nothing would prevent triggering multiple mandatory $10,000 upgrades in a single year (or month). There is no exclusion for new buildings that are already “net-zero” emitters either. . I will not go into the program’s minor impact on county greenhouse gas emissions, even if it fully meets its target of 200 homes per day.

The Documents:
“Sustainable Solutions…” is a large, Dept of Energy document prepared for the town of Samoa near Eureka. Its recommendations are the most pertinent for our climate yet encountered in over a year of searching. The chapter on insulation is extremely relevant to the proposed county program. Most local jurisdictions are a bit less flexible than those in the Windows section and the recommendations regarding wood-burning heat in Chapter 5 are unlikely to fly with the Bay Area Air Quality District or the local Lung Association. It would be good for readers to review this prior to reviewing the BIG checklist.

The 2009 LEED update is a good example on how national and state standards have begun to migrate to the “sustainable” approach in lieu of the previous (but currently popular) “Green”, tack-on technology approach. That said, USGBC, the authors of LEED had only a short time to incorporate this complex issue and it is disappointingly weak in the latest edition.

The Build It Green (BIG) Existing Home checklist is a critical item. BIG is the default standard for most jurisdictions here, but one only needs to scan the list to realize that it still seems to be more directed at new construction, the checklist from which is appears to have been derived. Would the owner of an existing home REALLY demo the homes concrete and wood structure to replace it with concrete containing fly ash or “rapidly- renewable” stud framing at a greater spacing to get points? What does having a porch that faces the street, adding 2 inches of mulch to your landscaping or the ability to add grab bars to a bathroom have to do with reducing one’s energy bill or greenhouse gas emissions? Only 93 of the approximately 215 points have anything to do with directly reducing energy consumption. IMPORTANT: This is one of the key documents I need people to review to consider if there are actions that would damage historic fabric or disable existing functions in their homes.

“GREEN approaches and exemptions” is a summary of the paths selected by other communities. I would be interested in what people feel is reasonable for application here.

Online home energy evaluator by Dept. of Energy and Lawrence Berkeley Labs

Finally, the draft of the program itself. I would direct readers to pages 10 through 14 for the BASIC and ADVANCED track descriptions (begins on the 14th page of the document).

Added 6/2/2010,

Programmatic Agreement - CA retrofits

Speech by Donovan D. Rypkema at The National Trust Annual Conference - Portland, Oregon; October 1, 2005

HERS II- Inspection Assumptions - On-Site Inspection Protocols