welcome everyone on behalf of the belmont high school building committee i welcome to you to our energy summit tonight my name is bill apollo and on the chair of the belmont high school building committee we're going to talk tonight about energy carbon emissions embodied carbon for the high school project and maybe for how belmont use projects and our built environment going forward tonight i do want to say that we have a couple of our belmont high school building committee members here tom caputo and jamie shea i see out there and i know that others are busy night telma i guess because we've got a lot going on we've got a couple curriculum nights we've got some caucuses going on so hopefully we'll see people joyous as those events tail off later in the evening i have a simple agenda tonight i did hand out we did have a little handouts for everyone hopefully you have if not if you raise your hand or have someone drop them off go got to get someone to do that preface my slideshow we have a simple agenda if you look at it on here tonight the agenda is simply going to start out with the introductions with her give briefly and then i'm going to just quickly go through a update on the project very brief and then we'll get right into our presentation discussion tonight this is sort of a roundtable discussion that i straightened out the engineer and me straighten out the table to be linear but that's because we want to make sure that everyone gets seen but it's really a roundtable discussion with our nine panelists will do that for about an hour and then open up the mike for public comments questions and so forth and and i think we'll be out of here before the certainly for the second quarter tonight patriots game so  i want to start with introductions i'm so excited to have the group of palace here and i'm just going to quickly introduce and then ask them to maybe just say a note about themselves we have our director of belmont facilities i kind of joke with him  i said i was a naysayer a couple weeks ago but now having bit visited similar sized sites as the high school really looked at the technology hard and talked to some installed base operators i'm a  think this workforce i think it's a good choice after my name is patrick cunningham i work with perkins and will have been with the firm for about fifteen years and we're a leader in sustainable architecture and i've spent my or partner with him posse as bill said we are consultants to this is a design team our specialization happens to be high performance and specifically zero net energy buildings we have completed several buildings that have a chieved zero net energy operation we have several more in construction or design so that my role is to bring that expertise to the project team and i'm back hider i'm chief sustainability officer with scant i'm also the former  general manager for belmont light really excited do appreciate the opportunity to be on this panel i think you know one this is a great time to be in the energy sector you know it's experiencing unprecedented changes and as a key cornerstone to achieving a climb climate goals both locally and nationally and beyond and so really a focal point is to help belmont get even my name is roger cult and i am the chair of the dominant energy committee i'm a little different from most of the other people here tonight and that i'm not here in the capacity of my day job i'm here as a volunteer on  engineers and similar to deem are pretty much what i focus on is zero net energy buildings and we have a few though and a few more big ones similar size some larger in design right now so it's i'm john abi i'm a founder of sun while we own and operate over fifty commercial rooftop solar projects in the greater boston area and i'm here as a concerned resident and i hope when my two kids go to belmont good solar thank you john i want to just take a quick step back and tell you about the project for those that don't know much i'm going to try to do this in sixty seconds how's that but the project is a seven through twelve high school it is a school school solution that was made possible by the belmont school committee with their decision in early this year to say that middle school and high schools the right combination for this project simply to to help alleviate all the growth issues in a role in the district so the seven through twelve school is total square footage of four hundred forty five thousand one hundred square feet the current school building is about two hundred  sixty thousand square feet so two extra grades clearly not enough space so it's a bigger building by far the total project cost is two hundred ninety five million that was that it was a project cost that's pretty shocking to some people  but it is than very very closely monitored by project a three estimators three estimators consist of our pros some projects done by one estimate there must be a says to we did three so we used our  architectural firm of perkins a well who created one hundred ninety eight drawings to really detail this project for the schematic design level that we're at then we took it and had our own as project manager was here data was projects they did their professional estimate and then our reconciled and came to a total project cost of two hundred ninety five million dollars that is consistent on these scale projects with other schools in massachusetts that includes all of this is a noble components that we're going t about today this is not something where we have to add that on what we'll be talking about is what belmont solution is which i'm pretty excited about and i think at this point i was talking to the war committee last night and they had a lot of questions they really drilled me on cost but they were also very interested on operational costs and that's something that we're really going to get into later on in our discussions so finally on the schedule talked about i was actually right here last night talking to the wellington in the spring of next year so we're going to put shovels in the ground the spring of next year wolf will complete phase one which is the high school phase the nine through twelve in the summer of two thousand and twenty one so the nine through twelve students will enter their new school in the fall of two thousand and twenty one as i was watching parents trying to figure out where their kids are going to be you know when that happens but we'll also then be able to start our phase two project which is the middle school the seven eight because that will then allow us to take portions of the high school down and then build on top of that where the seven of eighth grades let's face two and that will be done two years later in the fall of two thousand while the summer two thousand and twenty three so that in the fall students will now be in the completed building  have with the table will keep going back to this which sort of as a segue into our next our next group but i want to start with roger coleman i mean you kind of started already roger on what mission to do but there was a lot more dialogue that happened back well before two thousand and nine but then there was a town meeting vote that really started to change how belmont looks to the future so maybe you could talk a few minutes about  indeed again my name is roger colton and i chair the town's energy committee back in two thousand and nine at a special town meeting ten meeting overwhelmingly approved a climate action plan and that climate action plan called for an eighty percent reduction in emissions by the year twenty fifty and i come to you tonight with both good news and bad news the good news is that we've really done incredible things in the last ten years through the energy committee and i'm going to say we a lot and i'm going to change the we but nonetheless we as a community for example that are better homes not through better homes belmont a three year program the town of  a statewide record on the number of households in belmont they have had their homes audited and it set a statewide record in the number of homes or the number of households that actually had to a record in the number of rooftop residential solar units that has been stalled through a municipal community solarization program in the commonwealth now we're operating the  drive's electric campaign as of this month belmont has the highest number of electric vehicles of any single zip code in the commonwealth of massachusetts so belmont is making is taking incredible steps toward meeting the in the town meeting objective that's the good news the bad news is that the energy committee did a and emissions inventory update two years ago  well for the first time ever the missions in belmont are going down the rate of reduction in emissions is not sufficient to meet the town meeting approv of an eighty percent reduction by twenty fifty and so the energy committee has adopted a new road map that will get us to an eighty percent emissions reduction and as i'm sure chris will talk about that road map will involve what's called strategic electrification where we need to do in belmont as we need to move our energy consumption to more electrify the community that has adopted a strategic approach called strategic election electrification and we have to do that in order to achieve the eighty percent emissions reduction goal one last thing there are a variety obviously a variety of things that contribute to emissions and dhamma but we found in our emissions inventory was transportation was one of the big ones what we found was that heating is  of the biggest contributors and contributing to the emissions from the accurate unity of bama and those are two of the places that we have to address in order to achieve the town meeting approved goal of eighty percent emissions and what you're going to hear about tonight is directly in not in compliance but directly further that community objective because there has been a lot of work in talking about not merely how to beat do this at the heating consumption but how to make the heating consumption at the new high school emission free and we  p to get into their grant program and we were accepted on this project which is why the project moved forward in two thousand and sixteen the building committee was formed and back in two thousand and sixteen the first thing we had to do was create a team a professional team of designers and project managers and eventually construction managers and we were approached the building committee was approached by some of your group if you remember in early two thousand and sixteen i'm standing here today as a moderator i don't i'm not an expert but i like this position because i'm going to be able to ask a lot of questions and learn with a lot of other people so i started learning back in two thousand and sixteen when when folks from the energy group came up to me and said what you really need to be looking out what the the two thousand  referendum was the vote and how we're going to do this this is going to be our biggest building in belmont this needs to be as the any building at that point i heard the term and a little bit about it but since then i've learned a lot and what i've learned is that when i am actually design feel so i know that if you're going to do something you need to start from the very beginning and so so right away they are of p was crafted to say that we have an aspiration to reduce operational  missions to reduce operational cost of the super energy efficient the m s b area partner was very interested in that because their their mission is to partially funded design and construction of projects and they want to make their projects very sustainable they also want to reduce costs so they were very supportive of it and i'm just going to go off and just say that since then we've been continuing with the m s p a we've obviously hired the eighteen the way i like to say with  consultants we've got our o p m who who's been very engaged in and we have to go who has done these types of projects with belmont and across the country you hear an m s p a has has accepted the belmont project  behind us the scope that you see here and the cost and committed to reimburse belmont eighty million dollars towards that project so as i said before we as a project cost up to ninety five but the state said we'll give you a grant of eighty million dollars so that's phenomenal that shows that they're committed to the project and it's been a wonderful process of dialogue but i i do want to i want to ask maybe patrick do you see a lot of our requests from communities with that specific goal in mind is it becoming more the norm i guess i remember a decade or two ago lead was the thing everything has to be lead as a matter fact people still come up to me so the anybody is going to be lead maybe you could respond to that question we do see it first ones out there that's what i'm trying to you know it's not the first ones out there and we see it more and more specifically from owners who are going to hold on to their building it's very interesting well  a building that uses as little energy as possible in the first place so we start with a very efficient building from an energy standpoint and having done that then offset that energy use with renewable energy  so rather than slap a bunch of p v panels on top of a building that uses a lot of energy we first try to make the building as efficient as possible and that's a really key important consideration because that built in efficiency pays dividends for the entire life of the building so we're building in the future reduced operating costs zeani is different in a number of ways i think one of the one of the most important differences and one of the reasons why i am so excited to be involved in zero net energy is because it's real measured absolute performance so often we design and build buildings we don't we don't really measure how we did with z any you'll know for sure whether you complicate your goal the meters will tell the story and with that come a lot of challenges and that's what makes it exciting and interesting and engaging it's not business as usual if it was business as usual we wouldn't pay attention to things like the the massing of the building how it's oriented on the site of the program what kind of systems we would just do what we've done on the last three schools and call it a day but in any you really look at every decision through multiple lenses we always look at every decision the building process through how much will it cost how how can we operate it will it meet the program of the facility in this case a school boat zeani we add an additional lens which is how much energy will it take and finally most importantly it's not about just what the design and construction team does zeani is to bill's point about an attitude it's an attitude and it it's really something that engages the occupants and the operators of the building it changes the relationship that people have with energy you know we often ask the question of people do you know what your energy bill is now i made the mistake of asking that in a workshop here in belmont and a number of people that did know what their energy bill was because they had solar panel in other communities people don't think about it they're not aware of it they're not aware of how their behavior impacts energy use in asean the building the occupants becoming engaged and start to understand and develop a new relationship to their behavior and the linkage of what they do and how they live to the energy impact which then has a direct relation to carbon and missions so for a school in particular this is a very powerful thing because everyone who goes to school here everyone who visits the school the parents the community will have the opportunity to learn from the building and it will it will help develop a whole generation of belmont residents who have a new understanding and appreciation of energy they will look at it is not something that's abstract and out there that they only think about maybe once a month if they pay a bill but rather something they think about all the time and specifically how they they will think about it in terms of their behavior and the across the entire year and for this climate there are times of the year when the building will probably use more energy than can be harvested from the renewable energy systems there will be other times of the year when there are no systems will be putting out a lot more energy than the building can use now in our particular project we're not we're not thinking that we'll be able to get to one hundred percent in the on site but if we were doing it on site this would still be the same case where  over the course of the year sometimes the billing uses more sometimes it gives more back to the grid but what we're looking at is what happens over the course of twelve months and our the course of twelve months the goal is that we use no more energy or even less energy from the grid then we put back to the grid from renewable sources to your point bill where your question about how long has it been around it's been around quite a while back into the seventy's you know  people were looking at taking their houses off the grid putting p v panels when turbans and so forth and it's only been in the last i'd say ten years or so this really started to take off the early adopters have been the same early adopters we saw in the general sustainability movement environmental groups schools and universities and government agencies have really taken hold of this but in our practice we're starting to see it in commercial  so it's entering the mainstream and it's it's definitely gained traction across the entire building industry there are some statistics i want to share from the new building institute they do a yearly update on the status of energy projects and you can see from the chart on the left that sort of the indicates the uptake of this it's grown exponentially in the last several years and the graph on the rate is really interesting because it breaks down  what types of buildings are pursuing zero net energy and educational buildings are the by far the the largest group and within that group k through twelve schools are the largest educational building type so there's definitely a precedent  will not be the first you have good company which means are a lot of lessons learned out there which is a good thing and if you wanted to do a net net energy billing these days just like you can do a get a lead certified building that kind of demonstrates your commitment to overall holistic sustainability you can also get third party certification for your net energy which is another indication of its market traction and the transformation the building industry the fact that there are people out there project there are two critical things that we need to address early on in this are the how are we going to define for our particular project how are we going to define how we account for energy use and how we're going to generate our renew energy so there have been a number of organizations that have weighed in on this the first to really try to classify this was the national renewable energy laboratory and they started looking at all the different ways to account for energy  you could account for it on site which is the way most people think about it which is what you're meters read you could look at it back at the source which starts to take into account the inefficiencies in say the electrical grid you know the amount of energy that goes in at the utility generation plant is much more energy than you actually use at the site from electricity because all the losses on the way you could account for from a cost standpoint or you could account for it from an emissions standpoint now by  far most zero net projects are looking at their energy accounting from the site standpoint because it's the easiest to understand this is what you're meters are recorded but there's nothing wrong with looking at it from say a source standpoint it's just what you decide to do at the beginning of the project there's no one right answer here but it's important to understand it and clarify right upfront the next thing to really start to understand is where are we going to get our new one or g from and again national energy laboratory took a look at this and came up with a hierarchy to kind of focused project teams on the hierarchy of renewable energy that they felt would have the greatest impact on the environment i should say the least impact on the environment that the most positive attributes what's not shown on the chart that's up here is that you know you start with reducing the overall energy needs of the building the first place before you even think about renewable energy but once you start thinking about renewable energy you know the hope is that you can get to zero net energy building within the footprint the building itself you're not taking up any other land it's on the roof  and this works really well for small buildings one or two story buildings that don't have a very intense use inside of them can achieve zero net energy with within the footprint of building and  direction is that you try to optimize that you maximize the amount of energy you can harvest within your print because that is going to have the least impact on the environment you're going to not going to take up land and other things for that the next step down from that having done that then  is to look at what you can do in your site maximize what you can do within the footprint you're building next place to look at with within the boundaries of your site can you harvest additional renewable energy and then there are two more classifications including  projects are trying to achieve this within the footprint of the building or footprint the building plus the site however there are limitations to that the bigger your building the more intense or use it becomes very difficult to do it within the footprint if you have playing fields soccer practice fields football stadiums you can't really put p v arrays on top of these these site areas so there are limitations to on many projects to how far you can go within the site itself for four belmont we're probably going to be looking at you know trying to get as much as we can on the building there may or may not be opportunities to add v on the site but certainly there would be the opportunity to purchase any additional new energy in the form of rex or more credits finally the last definition that is out there which is the depart energy came up with a few years ago is very similar to the other and real definitions of i just want to put it out there let you see that there are multiple ways of looking this but they're all very similar but the department of energy has defined your net energy as accounting for energy at the source so they really want to go back to the source because they're really interested in the emissions side of this thing so just looking at the meter side doesn't tell that the whole story the impact of energy use going back to the site captures all of the energy inputs and all the emissions that come with that and the other thing that the part of the energy has in their different definition is that they're they're trying to encourage that zero net energy be accomplished on site this doesn't really force you to use any one of these definitions there's nothing there's no right or wrong answer but you need to be aware that there are multiple ways of looking at this and it's really finding the right fit for belmont and the right way of approaching this for for your on this in april after the energy folks came to us and put the the p r and so forth i got my first petition as a chair that was you know what to do with it but i was pretty excited and it was signed by fifty seven residents of belmont encouraging that this project reach any standards and i was pretty cool but it was topped i have to say by in december of last year high school student come to a public meeting and she came up and she hunted she she presented another petition from over one hundred students in the high school that was petitioning for the building now blown away she handed the envelope to me and that was those really cool and so there's definitely a movement in belmont to clearly roger talked about that and it's building and clearly we're here in school buildings where it's an educational thing bill can i just yeah i just want to make one last comment because i think this is i think this is really important i mention how as easy any building can change your relationship with energy and one of the reasons why it can change your relationship with energy and one of the reasons why eneral and part of energy is really pushed for looking at your renewal energy is what you can generate on your site basically what that does is it creates an energy budget it says i'm going to live within this footprint and that's a very powerful thing because no no longer is it i can get as much as i want i can use it it doesn't matter now and you have have to make decisions so it's just like your budget at home you have a certain amount of money you are going to spend it in a certain way and you have to you have choices to make we don't typically think about that with energy we only think about it when we pay the bill but we don't go back and think about all the choices we made that use that energy so what i would say to belmont is  what's what's most important is not where you get the renewable energy from in my mind what's most important is that you decide to live within a budget and you only allocate that amount of renewable energy and then work to live within that budget because that is where the real impact occurs so in the case of purchasing if you if you were in a situation of purchasing a new one and he credits we could determine this building if operated should use this amount of energy we could figure out how much energy could be harvested on site and then we could figure out this is how many wrecks you should purchase and that is your budget and if you if you live that way you would gain more of the benefits of having a z in the school than if you said well we'll buy as much from new winners as we need it doesn't matter how much we use we just buy additional rex so i think it's important to understand that it's not as important as that in terms of where the new when he comes from as it is in my opinion to define a budget and then attempt to live within that budget that energy budget that's really where the impact l change occurs with zeani building and that's where i was leading into it's really as an attitude to some degree and it's it's a lifestyle it doesn't need to be a drastic change i've learned over time but we have our some of our design  team here and what i've learned too is this building will have controls and will have sensors and of things so that when you when you're leaving the room the lights go off the power goes off and the air conditioning goes off because there's no reason to to heat and cool room to extreme to comfortable temperatures are there people aren't aren't in it so i go to the zine i guess i'll go right to patrick now and ask the question you know how how do you design a building to reach these goals and at what time do you start  late it becomes harder and harder to when those ideas come early they can become part of the formation for the ideas of the site use and of the deal and that's critical how do we form a building that's so we're going to go through a series lies that really just talk about the strategies that are our baked into the project at its current form right now as bill said it's kind of in a price tag it's in those hundred ninety eight drawings that the committee and the design team work to produce a cost talking to you about you and your team about the carbon impact embodied carbon and making informed decision not only for our our cost but also for the long term environment that's right  public in the very near future but we're really excited to see you advance your eighty by fifty climate action goals both on the operational and on the in body carbon and we're hoping that this kind of cool interactive stuff i don't have young to work with a lot of younger employees and i know that they love interactive stuff so we're hoping that these sorts of things will also in gauge your risk because after all this is and i would i would also say that you know prequalification what we're tempting to do to really get the best quality for the best price and those things are not mutually because if you have controls lie within the mechanical trade contract you folks like to break that out to a separate big controls contract steve's over there shaking his head so you have a fully controlled system that's integrated with everything and not just the mechanical side because as patrick said before we have sensors in the rooms we've got lighting control from got all that and steve's over there saying you know it's got to work day one place there are also mechanisms through the one for you on a process whereby you can be very selective with the materials you're putting in the building but do so in such a way that don't violate any competitive laws and that's something that takes a lot of extra paperwork but it's something you have to do if you're going to take the manage things like office your materials and i know having been involved with a couple of projects in in cambridge right next door here that one forty nine it does not preclude ultra low energy school construction the m l k project is performing  geothermal solutions use the constant temperature of the ground or other sources to reduce the need for energy and to do the job really helped along the job of heating your he pumps at home if you have them here in the north certainly in washington where i live we all the time they use as they use air for this but here in boston the air gets so cold in the winter that he really don't do the job they can't do the job in the cold winter months but the ground stays warm enough to do the trick so geothermal piles geothermal wells are a great way to work with the project team to install the ones to deliver the best value for this  project we're also not strangers to leading edge technology in one building we're currently working on we're installing these type of power modules the take the direct current directly from the p v array to the plugs that serve laptops an acquits is sort of like a fast pass lane for electricity no stop no conversion to alternating current no power loss and yet this is such a new technology that we might want to performance schools know nothing if not testing in the the value of making sure that the kids are third party certified right when they leave they've taken the test you know what they've learned this will give you all the confidence that the building has been built and designed that it's been built of the way it was designed and that all the inevitable little bugs have been worked out so that you are  have it running like we also know that there are critical milestones and deadlines for school projects and we also know that renovation and net zero energy projects can also together pull surprises so we will build the appropriate amount of time into the schedule to account for those and then even after the school is up and running usually nets energy projects and rob i don't know what your times in different grades throughout the course of the phase construction will be planning for temporary power heating and cooling as necessary during the phased construction period to make sure that you know  critical to the success of a project particularly as the any bison about it steve i think you had some folks tell you how vital it was for them so we have not heard this presentation among one another  so this is new information that i'm hearing for the first time so i consistently asked people what are the lessons learned from your installation and they told me two things that i just heard today and i'm very comforted by it one is the controls piece almost everyone says not enough investment was made on controls controls of the key to efficient operation the other thing i heard consistently was about commission g everybody walked away everybody it's table left and said good luck and it was during that commissioning period which i've heard some people say should be as long as two years is that time when we figure out whether it's really working asked described whether everything is performing per the manufacturer's specs in when we go in and rebalance the system and learn from that prior twelve months so i'm really thrilled to hear bill that we're somewhat limited and we've been talking with our owners project manager and it's very likely that belmont will actually have our own commission component specific to this piece that we're talking about today the energy and we're going to start that as a team or right after november that's right because right after november we're going to go into our test wells and mark i think that's a good segue to you because that's some of the first studies that we have to do on the build side to understand what our final design components are for mechanical engineers one thing just to add to tie this back to the building culture that we want to create is that by investing in controls in particular investing in metering those controls you help giving to give yourself the data you need to create those health insurers so that each classroom each wing each kind of subculture within the building knows well how much energy they're using and how they might change their culture those do you going to have an app on his phone and he could just monitor the hourly use of the school where it was he owes the life or more importantly bill will have real information about performances school over time and when you start to see that performance slipping you know you'll start looking for why it's slipping and you actually find that you can do some preemptive maintenance ahead of failure over time you can probably find the operation of the building and use less and less energy going forward so it just keeps paying dividends this this heightened attention to the energy use the control systems and the metering pay dividends over the life of the building in how you can operate the building to be as efficient as possible to do that and i was shocked to find that these systems not very resource intensive at all the i r s facility which is almost a mirror image of what we're trying to do as one point two five have right now maintaining systems at the high school so mark this we've talked about geo tech who exchange we talked about source energy into and out of the ground give us a little insight into what a geothermal well field is and how does it work but before i go there i just want to say owning a zero net energy house my building the monitoring systems i have every circuit in the house listed in my first my geothermal furnace went down last winter i knew it immediately i was alerted you have an app for that i have an app on my phone i watched the app for use of energy and i what it is what we're doing and i think beth indicated it is taking energy out of the ground the ground stay somewhat constant so when it gets heated up by the source which is the sun so one hundred percent comes down but half tickets radiated  up again in half because into the ground so keeps the ground at somewhat of a constant temperature all the time look at the next slide is this gives you a sense of the temperature of the ground in the boston area around fifty five degrees and we talk about geothermal here we're not talking about iceland you thermal which is steam geysers unlike what we're doing is we're using the ground is really as a battery we sensi putting energy into the ground and we're taking it out we're geothermal works really well is in the shoulder involved is is you a sense the drill a well into the ground typically somewhere in the six inch range eight inch range and you put in this really three different types of geothermal wells one is a standing column well which is just an open  borehole you pump from the bottom up and you discharge it back into the top those have gone out of favor in the boston area specifically because of some of the bad examples we have had a number of places that we because of rock a sense the degrades over time as water flow goes sorry it's as the border flows through the it all roads the rock and we end up with a lot of silt and fine content and what we typically gone to now in the boston area is loop which is a dual pipe system one is a supply one is returned and what you do is you pump down into the well and comes back up the other side and a chain exchanges that heat that you have an ability whether it's cooling or heating depending on which mode you're in this gives you sent somewhat of the of a diagram of what you have so you have your read which is a good let's say that supply and the blue is the return to comes up into you through your heat exchanger and he just changer is just what i think i think beth or yourself said it's essentially a heat pump but we're going to plea in this case from water to air or water to could be to water  do is we put in the field of wells i don't know exactly yet how many wells we would need here at belmont high school and that will come from b r plus a coming up with what the need is for the school and then you've sized the number of wells and each well give you some number of tons of energy back and on a sequence these wells go from anywhere from five hundred feet to fifteen hundred feet so they did not in significant and belmont as bill luna to is not unknown to have geothermal wells we have them to the senior center we also have two of them at wellington school at wellington school we only use them for cooling during the summer and the senior center it's one hundred percent grant a small building but there is no boiler and i think just a two wells there also right correct last light in the design of this we typically use an eighty twenty rule we don't design our geothermal field for all the peaks of what occurs and what you see there is the red is the heating season the blue is the cooling season we sense the design for something lower and what's nice about this being a school we don't necessarily have to air condition at all summer so so a lot of that blue can essentially be taken away yeah but what i did find is that we do need your conditioning in the building so we don't have air conditioning in all the schools throughout we just this school we have it here in the main office but the classrooms aren't but our buildings become so tight i've learned that they can't relieve themselves of heat and they need to be is that true patrick because i asked you why do we have to put air conditioning in school and you said you need some even though it's not a lot of energy it generally for the high school in be moving air you have in these type buildings you need to move air all the time and i'm being reminded that you just have to speak in these mice closely or everyone you so skinny so my comment was that the intensity if you set a high school for summer o i'll start with jacob i mean you could talk a little bit from your experience on you know how do you operate a building of you know how does it change over time you know that sort of thing just a real general i don't if slides for this your experience and steve might have some just by talking but you do a lot of this right thank you so as was said earlier i think rather well when you get the keys to a typical building unit with a lot of surprises and what's great about the process of designing and building and commissioning a zero net energy building is that there's a focus on a goal and to hit that goal there's a level of effort that's involved through that process to make sure that you hit that goal it actually reduces your operational risk and reduces the surprises and changes that you're going to see over time in his ear and energy building and we've we've really built great relationships with clients in that process where as you commission a building a good get a set up properly to hit your energy budget you build that relationship with that client and they they value that because then they have this much smoother operation compared to business as usual case now of course of any billing things change over time the use might change they might use it more in the summer and so you want to monitor that and again a billing that is being monitored and cared for in that way and has that data available to the billing operators and ideally also to the occupants it makes it easier to identify those issues before they become a broken system that's an emergency so it allows you to be more proactive in addressing those issues i know we do this i'm going to say a quick story when we were working on our i must be a reimbursement with we go through these things called percentage  of points so these are points of rebates or the grant that they give us percentage points and so one of them is called maintenance operation and you have anywhere from zero to two percent and we're sitting across from the table we went in and started talking with them and they read through and i said you're getting two percent the whole two percent we've never seen any other school district at the full two percent maintenance and operation so i think jacob  and obviously stevens just getting into it being first year of belmont i think that belmont is poised to really take care of this and to really dig into it and really to maintain it well as you're saying because that's been the history and the other great thing about zero energy buildings is that some of the strategies that are being used like the geothermal system the closed loop sealed plastic pipe that goes into the ground and it's crowded places is buried and also the solar panels on the roof they don't have any moving parts right normal building systems particularly with a traditional building that has higher loads less high performance on below is going to have bigger air handlers bigger chillers bigger boiler plant and all those things have moving parts and that's typically what fails in a system so zero energy strategies are reducing those risky components and investing in things that just sit there and do their job and so that's that's another great thing for our town and so the other part of that is what mark said and before i leave this topic which is that we're only we really only want to size the well field for something like maybe a percent or  may be that you think of that therefore as a heating dominated building what's interesting is that when you account for a really good on blow and very efficient heat recovery that the design team has done in the design  you've now dramatically reduce those peak loads so that you can then size the system to handle those conditions and the other interesting thing is that the the peak load ends up often being a summer load in part because when you're bringing ventilation air into a building you not only have to cool it but you have to dehumidify it and that dehumidification of the air is actually a very large load compared to just heating air in the wintertime and so the peak load may likely be in the summertime and you can easily do that with an electric bass system to move away from fossil fuels and then you already have the infrastructure in place that can easily handle the peak heating load and so that's something that of course the design team will develop in more detail as the project progresses but that's what we've seen in our cases for the zero net energy buildings is that you can easily handle the heating peak with the system you need for cooling and then you don't necessarily have to size the geothermal for the peak cooling lo which is the higher load because you can use very efficient electric systems if you need to supplement that condition so that these i think are details that will be worked out but it's been very successful in our experience but now we  were getting on to the electrical socket we got all the systems running and we've got to supplement our electric with with energy so chris i'm going to move over to you now and i know we've talked about this but about to say zooms out a little bit not just it's not just a political to the high school project but the uniqueness of the utility side is it can we touch everyone and so some of the theme  if you go to the next slide some of the theme you know to recap what we've heard is we need to manage earn a g on site right so we have the solar we have the most efficient envelope possible you know and we have town activity will past present and future to continue that trend and their cost effective options and so the graphic on the left comes from the energy committees rolled back which i expect to see more and more of as time moves on but it's a similar approach so if you look at you know some of these things i think expire some excitement and some change in mindset and so starting with twenty twenty two in this particular example that moves to a fossil free power supply on the utility side and so i'll get into in the next slide a little bit but the theme here is you know what costs but this is the shift of that mindset a little bit and so staying on that theme to be seeing me in belmont and this is not just be a jess in the schools with this is belmont as community and so as you can see here we come in fossil free electrifying transportation electrifying heating and all that is in the same philosophy is electrifying the building because really the only way forward to become to meet our climate goals is to switch to an energy source that cut can come from carbon free renewable sources and so as soon as you buy combustion engine as soon as you buy an oil fired or gas fired furnace you've already lost and so and these are technologies if you put it a gas furnace that's a thirty forty plus year vestment and and twenty fifty seems like it's far away but those are twenty thirty forty year technologies and so you're not magically going to make your forty year old furnace eighty percent non emitting you know in twenty forty nine rolls or if you go to the next slide that ties in with why can we do it in belmont what makes us special and so the key point is that top on public power community driven and so you know we are you know on heroin leave the investor owned utility model is the is the primary model that everyone refers to in here is about when they read the news or when these folks go out and design buildings in boston and cambridge  watertown and those folks are transferred you know are managing their park folio in accordance with mandates from the state because their answer to shareholders not the community and so why we're special why this is different is one hundred plus years ago belmont had the vision to say we can do this better locally and so we answer to these community values that are reflected in roger's points about town meeting votes by resolutions and so be the fact that the community owns utility we can then and xeni is important to high school we can also shift our power supply on on the broader scale to non emitting carbon free resources so if we have a situation where we can't cover all of our energy needs onsite you know do decide restraints was certainly comes into play to get more and more urban all that surplus energy can then be sourced by ruble carbon free options off was saying though is that we should start on the top you know a or b worked out so i had people come up to me and say why don't we just put solar arrays all over the parking area why don't we do some of that in a conversation with you you know that in this example i think you said that the rate payers is a tax payer but some to some extent you know is that the best investment for tax dollars of building structured solar arrays or or is you know there are opportunities that could be better on the community taking that zoom out approach right not it so we want the whole community to have access to xeni status right so we're not all building new schools we're not all building new houses and homes and businesses right so we need a solution that can be  to renovations to just to be delivered to that status and so that roadmap hits you know we all will buy a new card some point you know we will have failing heating systems those are all normal progressions of technology over the course of the lifetime of buildings and look and so while this is a great opportunity to start from scratch the class d level and belmont light's role is also to help everyone else  every other situation achieve that xeni status through electric aid and so the key component you know is to not only utilize our audit programs to get that efficient envelope but then also to make sure we shift to an elect discussion but there's not to be some level of dialogue going on what that future of those options are for those projects exactly so these articles are community goals he saw that not only applies to this high school project but as we talk about the libraries and the police stations those are how we're going to meet the climate goals for belmont at large but what we have one last question they have and that is i guess what comes back to boma what is we heard some credits acronyms and you know is that sustainable whatever duration yeah even in talking to friends in the community about this initiative and about syria energy the first thing they ask is what was the cost and how long does it take to pay back and what's really interesting is that you always think of it that way right you're going to pay more to get something back but in our case we're funding this project under a bond so all we ever see as a town or as a taxpayer is a payment to pay down that bond over thirty years and so any time you pay more for an investment on the building the amount you pay back periodic lee as you pay down the bond is going to go up incrementally so the fundamental question is is that increase in the bonds payment that all the tax payers in belmont are going to pay for is that incremental increase to achieve net energy smaller than the operating savings because the total cost of ownership is the bond and the operations and the operations is maintenance replacement energy personnel and so forth and so if we look at the design teams excellent and detailed lifecycle cost analysis of the zero to energy ready design of the geothermal system you can see that day one it costs less to own this zero in an energy ready building and that is such a mind shift that it kind of takes you know a kind of us slap to the face to kind of realize  it's a different way of thinking about things and it's all about that bond payment again the light this is through a life cycle cost analysis exactly can you just really not show explanation of what that it is going so life cycle cost analysis looks at all of the costs over the lifecycle period in this case i believe was a thirty year life cycle cost analysis that was designed done by the design team and it looks at all of the costs it looks at the upfront cost the operations cost maintenance replacement of components over time as they need to be replaced and the normal life cycle and of course the energy costs and incentives and water costs and everything so it's a really holistic picture of what's happening financially and it's and it's a very accurate representation if it shows a savings that means because when it's all funded through a bond if that lifecycle cost is lower it means day one it's lower and day two it's lower in day three it's lower and every day through that time frame it is less expensive to own this geothermal zero energy ready building and then working with john on the solar analysis we said ok well we've got this very efficient building that's running on the geothermal where off fossil fuels or what happens when you add the solar to the roof and again there's a bond payment impact there's a maintenance cost impact there's an energy cost impact and also you then generating these renewable energy credits so you take that again as a holistic analysis and guess what day one you're saving money and all the way through that life cycle period you are saving money by having the solar on the building and then the final step as as was mentioned earlier we're not going to be zero in energy on the say we're going to need a little bit of extra help from the grid from belmont light or from purchase of renewable energy credits or rex as they call them to get to the true zero net energy level what's great about this whole system is that we're also getting credits of another kind so the state has set up a system where you can receive alternative energy credits now they're not renewable they're alternative because they're based on the geothermal system which is an alternative to the fossil fuels so we are going to generate through running the geothermal system these alternative energy credits and guess what you get a bonus on the value of those alternative energy credits if you achieve zero net energy and that bonus is worth more than the cost to buy the renewable energy credits to achieve the any and all seems a little crazy but the whole point is here at every step up this ladder to achieving our carbon neutral goal the financials get better and better and better from day one and through the entire lifecycle of the building so that when you go to wake me up from this dream seriously that this is all good news and this is this thing about this is regulated and that is not just system you're grandfathered in and there is no sunset date so we look at that thirty years it actually keeps getting better after that to some of these systems less longer than that and you continue to generate those credits for the life of the system so mark great way to sort of end our discussion on all this money that's fallen out of the sky right we do want to touch on john has some slides about the solar but i just want yes but i just want to say something so last night i was at the war committee and i actually also saw some home school committee i said someone's going to have to help so there's another step there's like another group of people that needs to get engaged in this project very soon to start registering or getting planning in place so that when we start to buy my understanding and i apologize for i'm getting some of the details of this wrong because i'm not as involved in town politics as i probably should be but my understanding is that the school budget itself is managed by the town administrator even though it's ultimately the school buildings are under the school department the funding for example to purchase those wrecks could be addressed by the time is traitor and the selectmen have a role in defining what is the directive for the town administrator so i think that the people that are really leading our town play a big role in deciding whether we're going to continue down this path and  it or not it's funny because when i talked about energy credits with the war committee last night their ears perked up in the so who gets this money so that's that's a discussion through town minister's office and selectman and and really understanding how how this  plays out and i'm thinking you know after november we probably need that we start that conversation to start the education you know that's great and so you're right there a few more slides just to finish up that john you wanted to talk about what he means batting clean up just three quick slides this slide is to just to point out that solar's really normal it's everywhere this is a five hundred kilowatt system that we just recently completed at windsor park that's ground that's going to be like the same way in the high school rather similar and this industry is huge there's over two hundred fifty thousand solar employees across us over ten thousand in massachusetts so the contractor base the engineering base is skilled and very robust so not only is it everywhere it's very very simple so this is a solar project again you know very few parts the equipment has a design life of thirty plus years this mounting system which is basically between the modules in the roof is actually made by a company located north andover called panel cop they make more of these mounting systems than anyone they have about forty percent market share they've been around for over ten years and the next slide it's i know is a cloudy day but solar's beautiful least to me but if you want to grow with me you don't have to look at it because it's such a low profile in the roof barely anyone will be able to see it and of course has to take up and everyone said it's also beautiful because it's cash flow positive from day one especially in the case of this project but i think there's a couple of things that i've learned one is really not much of a where from because it's absorbing all the energy and to on this project you can't be seen from the houses because that's that was it's not on slope groups so very low profile very low profile and a roof is up there few stories so all in all even though we're talking about p v no one's going to see it doing all this great work although on the third floor roof we are putting it down in an area next to a learning center that allows students to come out and touch  feel and learn and we've talked to our design team about possibly through the our through the purchasing process having a teaching station that's part of our eighty five ninety thousand square feet of p v on the roof i don't know if that's even in the realm but we could write p that just says that there should be some type of a teaching element that's associated with it i just think that's wonderful for students coming into this era where more and more i mean i think they'll be driving cars and they would p v on the roof whether you ask for it or not well thank you guys it took a little longer to get through than i was planning but it was a lot of information i think that what we've learned is we've met our goal for this project and it's not just the building committee doing it was the community of belmont that came out strong at the beginning of the project and informed the building committee which has been a great process throughout the whole project on what's right for belmont through the working with belmont folks you know the professionals at this table and others we've been able to achieve what i think is an awesome solution to meet the eighty fifty goals that were set back in or at least that were that were stablished as a goal back in two thousand and nine roger shaking his head so  so with that i think that i'd like to open it up if there are any questions tonight we have an expert set of panels what i'm going to ask you to do is come down to one of the mikes just introduce yourself and also because i'm so into the tonight summit it has to be only on energy i'm going to stop you if it's going to be anything but sustainable energy so i'm roger town meeting member from precinct five and have a question for john  trust implicitly in these matters should the parking lots have solar  let me answer from a financial perspective a low profile systems on the roof are relatively cost effective and when we ran the same model for the parks and i can appease they were not positive from day  s a stage two project roger just maybe not part of the original song offering when you say it's not cash positive from day one is it ever cash positive hands on where you think energy prices are going to  we had solar panels that we could pave it with i think there are some experimental ones in europe that do that because you don't cover them with cars right you know or snow right ok it's so i do want to say  in my comment that we talked about the solar arrays and it's reasonable to expect that we might put pathways or consider that for a future installation not investing in foundations or equipment right now but just it's important even though we're focusing on the high school tonight if i were chris four or if chris wright were were here one thing he would say is that we need to focus on the community as a  dollars can be spent on putting solar panels on the high school parking lot war dollars can be spent on incentivizing moving people from natural gas or fuel oil to putting in mini split heat pumps or into subsidizing electric chargers in their garages so in not even a much grander scheme but on a community wide which started in one hundred seventy one i was in tenth grade in the first year of the original high school forty six years ago it's very exciting to have a swimming pool and an elevator and of working theater and it's very exciting to have a new school  solar systems including car ports in concord where we have electric vehicle chargers and i think the value of having a visible solar installation that has electric car chargers is a psychological benefit as well as a financial benefit and putting the conduit in advance to be solar ready is a minimum to get to phase two but i think that a lot of units in belmont that do not have garages and do not have access to charging stations so the idea of doing the canopy not only keeps the vehicle school in the summer keeps the snow off them in the winter and can be designed supplies can get around them but is something that we need to do to psychologically courage people to purchase electric vehicles and  have one that's two hundred dollars a month on a lease i mean it's very affordable it's a lot of fun very fast and it's a chevy but i really want to ask about the inclusion of storage because our industry is not a solar industry it's a solar plus storage industry and the battery costs have come down precipitously similar to what has happened to modules ten years ago what we're seeing in storage now is a way that belmont as a municipal energy could reduce its overall peak charges when belmont municipal light purchases electricity at peak times everybody in town is paying more than they need to so if the school which is one of the larger users could be using the battery power to offset the peaks the town would benefit the school would benefit and the batteries would be a minimal incursion in terms of space and in the storage would be able to meet the peaks the building will be open like tonight when the sun is not shining and overproduction during the daytime could be discharged in the evening so i'd like chris to address that thank you looking at looking down the road a little bit you know and there was a reference to a phase two type of option speaking for the high school property we've you know as we look at how we would provide the the high voltage feed to the building we would also include in that design provisions for corporate and high voltage interconnect for the battery so we could use that for utilities utility scale you know purposes  would say two things about how p v we're talking about p v now it wouldn't be active or purchased it would be purchased until two thousand and twenty two i believe we've talked to skansen and they reached out to the state to see if that's  possible publically the laws and our attorney general said it is which is fantastic so that means that we don't have to buy now when we're bidding the job or next year we can buy that technology right before it goes in keep in mind we have two phases we didn't want to buy half of that one time and another half another so as we push that down the technology for storage and so forth might be even better and so we've been talking about a design team of ways to plan for that now and we'll see where we are in two thousand site as a whole probably missed a lot i was at a much earlier meeting and the focus concern because it was specifically on the building and not on the r p g for the site is all so i'm sure a lot has happened but the question is you know transportation is the most important source of climate greenhouse gas emissions is the most rapidly income the most carbon intensive and this is a huge opportunity to deal with transition too so i'm wondering you know in what ways did the project open put it in the in the pocket today so our site here is very much more pedestrian bicycle friendly than exists today by far the entire front of the building is connected by fabric  and not as convenient is it today and it was purposefully done that way to discourage or at least make it not the primary focus of how to get to the campus still people have to drive coming down the hill and so forth without having to drive particularly for school starts and stops and also community events and the design of the campus that the owners put together is actually reaching out to that area and bringing people safely back to the school so a lot of positive ways that people can now safely get to the campus versus where it's a little more challenging and finally i'll say you come to my meeting at eight o'clock tomorrow morning the traffic working group continues to work on solutions that are making life much more pleasant in belmont and in particular around the high school and the questions will involve opportunities in this area to create drop off so that there's not as much traffic that's going on the campus and reduce more emissions of people sitting in traffic so you know that that involves discussions of sidewalks and and driveways on both sides but it's a good discussion for good s in japan it's almost three times as high and everywhere exports being built for liquid natural gas and both the coast which should mean that the cost of natural gas will move towards the world price there's make sure that it's clear to people listening what you're saying is this solution reduces future risks yes and remember that companies pay dearly to eliminate or reduce financial risk right so there's and that benefit there for this project that we don't capture in dollars but we should remember to just towards its design approach in general yes so that makes it very value imagine if energy prices added another half million a million dollars a year their budgets and those of us who sit in town meeting we'd have a heart attack no superintending talks about that as full time equivalents right i mean something's got to go so great the other thing is support is very broad as you as you mentioned and i sent out this petition which savings on the table i urge town officials to please carry this effort forward by committing to the achievement of the class d zero net energy designation for the new seven to twelve school it's the environmentally sound and poignan policy where if you get any money from any other sources it got removed from your ground and in the beginning part talking with our o p m is this was a big concern of mine because i we knew we were going after a lot zeros these guys were talking about and i said i said well what's that going to do to our grant it's you know that if you get a million dollars but they keep producing it every time you get something back it doesn't make any sense so the m s b actually have a mission their mission statement on the front page has three driving forces educationally appropriate financially prudent and environmentally sustainable and here we are hitting the efficiency on costs and environment and they were knocking these credits back and so they just recently in the last probably couple years guys had a new amendment to their approach and the way we have  our project scope and budget agreement is written that will be signing has taken out or excluded cost for the p v so that portion of it and for the geothermal they've taken it out of the grant program they're not considering that as part of reimbursable expenses but that's all right because we're over the cap everyone goes over the cap on construction so it really did affect us the bottom line but what that does is allows all of this that we're talking about to come to our  f back into belmont with no reduction of the eighty million dollars so we're still getting the a million dollar grant from the m s p a and we're still going to collect all this money that jacob talked about and it has it's just  in chris to help the town meeting member precinct one and i'm on the warrant committee i had two questions one was and i was late so if it was covered earlier than just tell me and i'll ask somebody else but who would own the  solar panels that's one question and then my second question is whether or not some of the learning that you're talking about here can be applied to i know where the school committee is looking and then after that the town is looking at like the hockey facility there's going to be a project going up that's more narrow at the police station and the public works department so i'm wondering if there is a kind of learning the solar panels would be owned by the town they would not be owned by a third party so that would then be financed with the rest of the project i know a little bit later but  that was my question about that's where my was going with that question