How to Meet Your 2030 Challenge Goals with Revit and Insight 360

PRESENTER 1: All right, we'll go ahead and get started today. Thank you guys for attending our class, Pursuing The 2030 Challenge With Iterative Building Performance Analysis. In today's presentation, we want you guys to go ahead and take some of these key topics away. Who we are, what, and where, and what is the 2030 challenge, and why? How it all begins, and how you can spread awareness throughout your firm, as well as doing team communication as well, which is a big, big factor in this process.

Building performance analysis and how to run those tools and capabilities. We have an acronym BPA, you'll see that a lot in this presentation. We want you guys to know the total environmental impacts of the work you're doing, and then at the end, if we have time, we'll go through a couple of case studies.

So this is our BPAT team. BPAT building performance analysis team. Aaron Ketner, the gentleman to my right, Intern Architect, Energy Specialist, well AP, LEED green. Am I missing anything? Master of architecture, he's pretty much a stud.

I'm Luc Wing, I'm a Building Analyst and a Design Technology Leader. And the gentleman on the far right side of the screen is our boss, Brandon Garrett. He was the one that initiated this for us and went to bat for us to get this approved by our leadership. In order to get this signed off on, we had to convince leadership that was worth it and brings value to our firm.

And so our firm, we practice architecture, landscape architecture, interior design, as well as urban planning and structural engineering. We decided to go ahead and bring another service to the table, and I'll let Aaron introduce that for you guys.

PRESENTER 2: Thanks, Luc. So we're getting into our building performance analysis. This is initiative that, as Luc just introduced our team, moving forward trying to integrate into the design process. So we'll show you a little bit more about that as we progress through the presentation. First, why are we doing this? We want make the greatest impact, and over the next 20 years, an area equaling a staggering 3.5 times the entire built environment of the United States is going to be rebuilt, reshaped globally.

And so within the United States, you can see the building sector here on the entire US energy consumption scale. About 45% is used for buildings. So if you think of the whole cumulative built environment in the United States, this has greater impact on our energy consumption than even all of the diesel trucks out there idling on our roads, and so on. So to put that in perspective.

Now, on a greater scale, the electricity consumption sector, by sector, buildings tick up about 3/4 of our electricity demand on the US grid. So we have a pretty large impact if we all work together on this initiative. And so we look at the 2030 challenge. Does anybody know what 2030 challenge is? It's been around for a while now. It's actually developed by Edward Mazria out of Santa Fe, New Mexico, where we're from. And basically, it's a global initiative so that way by the year 2030, we reach carbon neutrality, fossil fuel energy consumption is zero on site.

And so we incrementally, today, we're at a 70% reduction from a baseline that I'll show to you in a second. And by 2020, just in to two years, or basically one more year, 80%, and then 2025, a 90% to help us get there. And so how do we get there? We look at different strategies.

First, we look at passive design strategies, which we'll be going through how do we visualize and convey this information for our design. But where we can see that passively and a lot of our larger commercial projects we're able to obtain a 40% to 50% reduction there. And then we can also look to have fossil fuel free energy generation, either on-site or off-site. The off-site is renewable energy credits.

And so this is a big metric in our world. This is energy use intensity, you'll see this pop up throughout the presentation, and basically what this does and why it's so powerful is that it's the amount of energy and kilo BTUs per square foot, per year. This way, within the same building type, say, a school, that the design iterations are various sizes, the footprints are different sizes, we can break down the amount of energy per square foot so that way we can compare apples to apples. Very powerful.

And so this is the metric that this challenge is using as well. And the 2030 challenge references this commercial buildings energy consumption survey, also known as CBECS, and this is basically off of a national survey of our built environment back in 2003, to establish a baseline of real building buildings in the United States and what their energy consumption level was per function type.

You can see here, K through 12 school site EUI baseline is 58.2, compare that to the college or university building at 130. So those are very different numbers, and that's based off of the functions that are happening in those building types. This way, we know a 60 EUI college or university is actually doing pretty well.

So we have two different commitments here. We have our national commitment in the United States, the AIA 2030 initiative. We'll be going through this a little bit more and how we implement this. But this is more like real time tracking data. And then we just purely have the 2030 initiative that I just went over. All it is really that chart of making sure you're hitting benchmarks. There's no lead submission forums or anything like that. It's just purely be there so we all have a common goal.

So how it all begins in our office. First, we sign a letter of commitment. This is what our Steve Perich, of Dekker/ Perich/ Sabatini at our office, signed a letter signing on to this initiative that we will have all new construction projects at least log their EUI, don't necessarily have to obtain the 2030 challenge, this way we're creating reports and seeing progressing.

And then next, we designate a leader. In our case, this is our sustainability specialist, Amy Smith. She's a lead AP in our office. Manages a lot of the lead projects and was the perfect candidate to help shape this initiative within our office. And so within the first six months, she had to create four action items for our office. And how are we going to pursue this, and basically that evolves into a sustainability action plan. This is both internal and external. This is establishing recycling programs at our office, making sure we're practicing what we're preaching, even in our workspace.

So that's why I like this initiative. It's not just on the face of what's leaving our office, but it's also tapping into how we function as a group. And then the exterior here. This is the energy modeling and reporting. The external, this is largely what we'll be going through as we progress through our presentation.

PRESENTER 1: So you guys are probably used to seeing a workflow similar to this, where the design team's working on a project and they send it out to get analyzed, and two weeks later, you get back your data. Well either it's too late or it's out of budget or it's now no longer even up-to-date. So Aaron and I proposed this new workflow in our office, and it's more of an Integrated Workflow, where the BPAT team is represented in the color path and the design team is in the gray.

And what we're doing is we're both working towards a goal at the same time and we're coming in and meeting with these different strategies we're trying to implement, and we say, yay or nay, and try to get them incorporated as soon as possible. The sooner we get the owner aware of it and start talking about it, the more likely it is to be incorporated into the project.

So Aaron was talking about our strategies, and this is how we break them down. We have design strategies, and this is where we can make the biggest impact on our building and reduce the most amount of energy. Then, we can look to technologies and systems. Either integrated to the building or not. They could be site solar panels or a covered entry way with PV, or ground source heat pumps, anything of that nature.

And then if you're still just short of the challenge, we can then look for off-site renewable energy credits, which are known as RECs. You can only have a maximum of 20%. So say you have a site that you're developing and you're trying to expand over the next few years, you can use RECs in the meantime to achieve that goal while you're getting your systems expanded out.

So in our building performance analysis, these are our tools and capabilities. This is like our tool belt, and we do our benchmarking EUI with a set of tools using InfraWorks, FormIt, and Revit. Oh, insight, I'm sorry. Totally different top-- and then we do solar insolation, daylighting illuminance, and solar irradiance all within the Revit software.

Then we also do renewable PV energy using Revit, and then we take it a step further with Aurora, and that's really how we flex our PV strength and knowledge, we can give up-to-date pricing, and financial advisors through all these reports, and Aaron will go over that a little bit as well.

We have interior daylighting for LEED version 4 within Revit, and building envelope heat transfer. This is a free software online from the National Science Foundation. I suggest you guys check it out, it's very easy to use, 2D, but you're applying thermal properties to these 2D elements and then running a thermal analysis.

We use flow design in--

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

PRESENTER 1: --yes, ma'am. It's called energy 2D, they also have an energy 3D as well, and we'll introduce that a little bit later as well. And flow design for the wind tunnel, so we can test for canyoning winds and items like that.

PRESENTER 2: So a large portion of this is, not only being able to perform these different tools and capabilities, but how do we convey this information to design teams and clients? And so a large portion of this effort is spreading awareness. Example deliverable of our capabilities overview with in-house that we keep on our servers so that way anybody who is interested in having this on their project, they don't necessarily have to track us down. They can go and peruse this document. It's basically this presentation in document form, and showing example deliverables and such so they know what they're expect what they're going to get if they bring us on to the project.

And so our process. We actively reach out to all of our areas and we look for new construction projects. We work on some renovations, but a lot of that we don't have as much of an impact and our commitment is for new construction. And I think by the year 2030-- on a side note here-- if any renovations, you're supposed to bring down the energy consumption by 50%, not necessarily net zero. Net zero is for all new construction.

So we work with landscape, commercial, education, government group, health care, housing and interiors. And basically we have this 2030 reporting built into our process as just setting benchmarks and logging the project as we progress. And so that's our hook, and then we have the additional services.

And after we give them our EUI analysis, we give them an impact analysis, and figure out which additional so this might have the greatest impact for their design. Every project's different, so it's not an easy recipe, but we can help them find their way a little bit easier. And so we add these onto our EUI, but this is the foundation. And after running other analysis and implementing, we run another EUI analysis to figure out how we're progressing.

And so we have forms and team communication. This is so projects pick up and get put on hold all the time. We actively log all of the project information that we're going forward with. All of that is also documenting-- you don't have to if read this- but this is just showing the form documenting the current values and everything, the target numbers. So if someone even joins the project, they know what has been discussed and what's still open for discussion.

And then we have points of contact as well. So trying to determine who's the mechanical engineers that we can just call them up instead of-- try to make this as efficient as possible. So this way we're starting on the right path with all of our tools along our integrated path there and avoid road signs like this on the left.

And so this is an example even early on this is the process, right. We're all sitting in a room sketching, creating massings. And so what we can do is we can provide additional insight into each of everybody's iterations. So not only were you looking at site priorities like site access for the client, visual views across sites, we're also providing information on how much this iteration or this massing, how demanding is that going to be energy wise?

So we could that into account to come to a nice well-rounded choice to move forward with. And in this case, you'll see this building pop up through our presentation. This is the massing that ended up going forward. Perfect.

PRESENTER 1: So this is where I jump in. I took the massing into FormIt, and really quickly just massed it out to get a quick idea of what it's going to look like, how it's going to sit on the site, how it should be oriented. And if you guys aren't familiar, FormIt's very similar to SketchUp. I believe they pretty much took the exact layout and rules and all the tools and just put it within Autodesk logo.

And it works really well. So really rapidly we're able to mass this out, get a nice little site study, and then there's some analysis tools in here as well. So we went ahead and ran a radiation analysis or solar installation, and it helps us start to address issues on the site immediately as far as shading or overexposure. And so you go ahead and see you run a cumulative test real quick.

And you can see the purple areas are well shaded where the bright yellow and orange we might need to discuss some shading strategies. We either scrim or some interior blinds or something simple. But from here, we go ahead and we add levels to the model, and you can send this up into Insight right now and start doing some design decisions. But Aaron and I like to take it one step further, and we put it into Revit just to get a little more refined analysis. We have just a bit more options in here. This place here we go.

And what you do is you go ahead and import your FormIt model. And you see it comes in like a mass just like SketchUp would, but the ability is that all those elements are separated. It's not just a complete block, so I'm allowed to then assign walls to walls, floors to floors, roofs to roofs, such and such. These are now actual Revit elements right off the bat. We're not dealing with just a massing block.

We set the location. You always want to try to use a trusted weather site. An airport, Air Force base, something around that's not just an amateur weather guy putting data up. And then Autodesk has been developing these types of settings in energy setting. So they've dropped the ball on the conceptual types and the detail elements they've stopped really developing those, so you're not going to get as accurate as analysis.

But what they are, conceptual types are very, very high level walls are reaching this building type, floors of this type, such and such. They're not even targeting exact R-values. Where you go to the detailed elements, you're actually using your modeled elements. That requires you to go into your materials browser, set R-values, thermal values, and all these scientific things are probably way too time consuming for a quick analysis, right?

So the schematic type is where Aaron and I like to fall into. And what this allows us to do is go and set R-values, or target U-values. So these might not be close to the actual systems that you're going to be putting on the building, but we can for sure say we're targeting R 38 roof system of some kind. It's going to perform the same.

And so we go through all of these different categories, and we check them on and override them. And then this is where we'll go ahead and send it up to Insight. And so you'll see our energy model pop up. Green is good for the walls, blue is for floors and roofs, and you have gray as shading devices. So you can see over here these are being classified as shade. If you get orange or red, you might want to check your model there might be an issue.

Sometimes doors are classified incorrectly, or if you're seeing if you're seeing gray on your walls, that mean you have a hole. Your floors aren't connecting to your walls or you have a hole in your roof. Really, really common when you have base-level modelers coming in and just getting it done really, really quick for 2D documents, right?

PRESENTER 2: And all of these tools are now integrated with Revit 2019. So you don't have to go download and add in for your other software.

PRESENTER 1: So update as soon as possible. And so this is Insight. This is where all the magic happens. What you're seeing down here in the bottom, they're called widgets. And these allow us to study different design iterations rapidly and very quickly without having to change our model. So you see the slope on the top left, least efficient, least expensive. On the bottom right, most efficient, most expensive. The triangle in the middle, that's our BIM setting. That's what we'd say in those detailed those detailed settings from Revit.

And what we're trying to do here is we're trying to target something that's reasonable. We're not going to obviously slam the slider all the way to the right and be like, oh we can get this building down, down, down because budget doesn't allow for that. Design doesn't allow for that. Your project team is not going to want to go with all those decisions.

And so in some of them, you see we leave a range as well, and that's to account for user behavior or just things that you can't account for. And so they like us to go ahead and give us a little CYA on that. So we go through all these widgets, we try to target our design strategy our systems that we want to go infiltration, window, R-values, orientation, PV. So you'll see all these settings being adjusted real quickly.

And at the end, you see our nice EUI dial goes down, and we have something we can work with. And this would be our goal to go ahead and implement these strategies in, and then we can look to the next phase.

PRESENTER 2: What's nice about this is, you can see here, this is also comparing to ASHRAE 90.1-2010 now. They updated that from 2007. This way, if you have LEED version 4 on your radar, you can see how you're doing in the energy consumption category. And then we have our architecture 2030 goal coming in down here. With the HVAC systems, one other thing I'd like to add is I like to think of those, the far left, I always select those in sets of three as low-tier, mid-tier, and high-tier.

It doesn't give you a lot of HVAC system choices and that's fine. That's because we're targeting and we can lead to a discussion saying, look with our mechanical engineer maybe we should explore some of the high-tier because that's showing a pretty big impact. And sometimes that high-tier is just right there with the mid-tier. So we know that we shouldn't go ahead and waste time exploring those options. Let's get something in the middle tier.

So it's a very dialogue and communication provoking way to communicate with your engineers, or mechanical engineers are finally getting on board and they're like, how does that look? Before they actually run their full, sophisticated modeling for thousands of dollars. So it's exciting to see that communication. We're a bridge now between architect and engineer, instead of just being a one-way path of information. So we found huge value in this and promoting dialogue.

And so we end up with our first EUI benchmark. After going through what Luc just took us through, and we enter our schematic designs from conceptual, we start to refine the design a little bit further. The example deliverable. We provide a brief narrative helping explain so we don't have to be there with these graphics. This can be kept within the design team or passed on to a client if they're trying to convey why they made a certain design choice. As well as some key graphics here.

We provide some of the higher impact widgets from Insight. Our EUI dial and we have our scale on the right. And then a nice looking view of our analytical surfaces of our building.

You see there the red. This is because that's just purely a screen wall for the systems on the roof, and it's not enclosed, so we know it's not analyzing that space either. There's just an example there. You can see the gray walls here since they are not enclosed. They become shading planes for this model.

We can take this to a whole site scale as well. This was a great project. This is Solaris Station in New Mexico, northern New Mexico. They received a lot of snow there, and keep that in mind as this project keeps popping up. But the architect came to us and was like, I think our buildings are looking pretty good. Let's run some quick analysis and let's see where we should spend some of our time.

And so right away, we're able to see across the whole campus, we're hitting about an average of 43% reduction in energy consumption from our ASHRAE 90.1 baseline. And that's important because the project was pursuing LEED. And then, also we were able to figure out which buildings were the outliers? You see B1 and B2 here. These were on the upper end of the range for the entire campus.

And so right away we know OK, maybe we should look at some certain strategies to implement into just these two buildings, to help bring them down and match the rest of the campus. So this is something within the day we had direction and knew where we should go for the next day.

PRESENTER 1: And so this is where Aaron called upon me to flex the flow design skills. And this software provides such pretty graphics, that clients can sometimes even care less about what it's trying to convey and they'll just get lost in the graphics. So I'm going to Show you guys a quick video. Well first, a deliverable. So this is the deliverable we provide to the project team explaining our findings from the analysis.

We'll give a quick-- just highlighted areas of concern where we found canyoning wins. And it's a northern climate, snow, so canyoning winds, ice, and snow build up. You need to account for that for your maintenance crew or putting ice melt systems, correct.

And so with this wonderful video we put together, the project team was able to visualize the wind so we're looking at a winter wind coming from the north at 25 miles per hour, and we're able to explain to them, these are strong gusts, you got Canning winds hitting up to 63 feet per second. That's enough to knock an old lady down carrying her groceries or seriously hurt somebody and cause some issues.

So we went ahead highlighted them and we worked with the landscape team and also the architecture team to try to mitigate some of these. And Aaron will discuss some of the solutions we came up with right after this.

PRESENTER 2: So along with the wind, we also want to look at the amount of solar exposure across the site. This is an irradiance analysis. So this is purely the amount of energy striking the ground surface within a specific instance. So you can see here, we have nice, easy to read scale, where the reds are the high exposure, and we have the deep blue's, which is low exposure obviously on the north side of our buildings, but we wanted to gather for the winter months.

This is the winter solstice 9:00 AM, noon, and 3:00 PM. And what I did was overlaid them in Photoshop, and so that way we can highlight areas that are receiving little to no solar energy throughout the day. And so we pair that with the wind analysis, we can start to see where snow might be collecting and not getting a chance to melt. Also overlaying this with our landscape team, we found that these are pinch points here. We have walkways and hardscape coming between the buildings there.

So not only are they not getting exposed, they're also becoming these wind tunnels. It's funneling, just like fluid dynamics. Funneling the wind between our buildings. And so the change we ended up-- our housing projects were largely driven by parking, so we don't get to change too much, but we ended up shifting those two buildings there along there long axis by about 12 feet.

And that was just enough to help cut down how quickly. You can see here, this is basically a straight path through here and this was a nice playground actually, a center feature in this cluster of buildings. So the northern wind was coming straight through this cluster and also we not getting much exposure, and actually, this building ended up shading the wall of this building.

So we shift, we open that up a little bit, we slow down the wind coming through here because it has to go around the building or get pushed up over, and we ended up shifting this playground. Out of the evening, you can see there this line heading up to the Northeast. That's the shadow line for the evening hours. We moved the playground out of the evening hours and put it between the buildings. So the buildings are protecting the playground from the wind, and also gets nice exposure in the evening hours.

So it's a warmer environment for the children after school. And also we were able to convey with the client, as your site management team, able to manage snow removal or de-icing in these areas, and if not, these are the extents that we need to implement snow melt systems and the hardscape. And one of another projects, we also were able to reduce that amount. They went ahead and implemented snow melt under the hardscapes, most of the hardscape. And we ran this analysis, and we were able to show that they were able to reduce that and save some money and just implement it into the areas that actually needed it.

And so after a few more strategies, the project's progressing, we're implementing these, and here we are entering the design development phase. So we perform another EUI benchmark to see how we're progressing.

PRESENTER 1: Perfect. So at this point, I'll step in. I'll do some solar insolation analysis. Not insulation, people confuse that all the time. Someone last year put on our comments that I spelled insulation wrong, and I thought that was pretty funny. But anyway, this is straight out of Revit it with Insight. In 2019, it comes with it, but it prior versions you'll have to download it.

But really quickly, it wants you just to select the masses, and then select your type of analysis. And it's going to give you the same analysis that we ran with in FormIt. So what this will do is go ahead and verify that software as well. And we can see with the changes we made to maybe the form or the orientation of the building, how it's actually going to perform on site.

So we can see we've cut down a lot of the really intense light, and we can still maybe even address some shading strategies in these areas. This is the example of the deliverable we gave. So this is actually our office building, and it was just a test run for the project to verify. We had these lovely row of cottonwoods right here, and they shaded our building really well.

And we have a raised floor delivery HVAC system, and it's really sensitive. And over here, you see this class box, right? And so when they cut this tree down, we were getting so much more solar exposure to that side of the building, it's really thrown our HVAC system off balance. So people over here are now super hot and they have the air conditioner on all day, while people on this side of the building have space heaters on. And this is year round. So it's really imbalanced, really messed up, but it shows the importance of thinking of these types of decisions when you're going out to a site.

PRESENTER 2: So we can really work with a team that maybe has they're setting their building or design amongst a bunch of existing trees, we can help them evaluate, is it really important to keep these, or so on, along with the other priorities that the site may have. But just another piece of the pie that we can help inform them with.

So here we move to the inside of building. This is daylight illuminence measured in footcandles, or luxe, for anyone outside of the United States. This is purely the lighting level striking, within the space, striking a surface. So on the left here, this is a photo I took in our office. And I went into our Revit model and placed the camera and ran our analysis at the same exact date and time. You can see it's a nice comparison validating what we're getting very quickly even out of Revit. So I like this comparison here.

You can see real life has a lot more bounces, so we're getting more definition on the bounce on the ceiling. But within Revit, we're still getting some highlight, it's just not as many bounces as real-life. So it's a nice comparison to see where that threshold is.

So creating it across the whole floor plate. You can see here this is March 21st. That was 9:00 AM noon and 3:00 PM here. You can see how far the light is coming into the space and if we should address any shading systems. In this case, you can see June 21st. Maybe if we were to provide this analysis at the time this building was designed, we would be able to extend the window shades that were added to the building just a little bit further to help block out that direct sunlight coming in during our summer months.

So we can find that exact threshold when those get cut away fully. And then in winter, we have some lower sun angles coming in and penetrating deeper into the floor space. So this is ways that we have to mitigate with potentially interior blinds, which is nice because we're still getting the solar heat gain to assist the heating, but we can reduce the amount of daylight reaching our work surface.

And these are filled with workstations. So that's definitely not good. Example deliverable. This is where you can take this pseudo color scale of the light, and we start to define, what are these colors good for? We have high visual demands. Yellows you don't really want, that's definitely overlit. You can see our lobby atrium space being very bright. Our front desk secretary actually puts up an umbrella sometimes.

This was back in the design back in 2006.

PRESENTER 1: 2004, I think.

PRESENTER 2: So we weren't there yet, but we get to show them everything that we could do. And so we start to-- high visual demand is about drawings, electronics, works, labs, very tedious tasks. Getting all the way down into low visual demands. The greens are like dining, restrooms, warehouses, and so on.

So that way you can start to highlight maybe areas you know we definitely need artificial lighting during this time of the day at this point, we need to help mitigate some overlit spaces here. So we can start to balance our day lighting and go through various iterations very quickly, and just compare them side by side.

PRESENTER 1: And so I don't know if you guys have ever used Revit to report for a LEED before, but it used to be a big pain and it looked old school and archaic with these point grids. Every foot with some luxe value or footcandle value. It really wasn't a pretty graphic, so we worked together with our lead committee at the office, and we got them to accept these graphics and this analysis to report for LEED.

And it's using the same exact tool that Aaron was just showing, we just use a different scale for it, but we're really trying to communicate through this the spatial daylight autonomy to get the LEED credit for that, as well as for the illuminence calculations. And what we're looking for here is the ASE, which is the annual sunlight exposure, and that's overlit spaces, or the SDA, which is the spatial daylight autonomy, which could be helped find underlit spaces as well.

This is the deliverable we give to the project team, to the client, and anybody that's going to be trying to get on the project or put it in the LEED packet as well. In which lead us to the shading.

PRESENTER 2: So we start to address some of those issues that we might have seen from our analysis once we start to highlight where we should prioritize. A nice easy-- this is a typical window for this project. We wanted to show the reasons why we chose a two-foot horizontal projection. And we can convey that by the summer cycles being blocked completely when we don't want any solar heat gain. But then, potentially if this is a space that can be well lit in the wintertime, the horizontal projection allows a lot more winter sunlight to come in, and solar energy as well, to assist the systems.

Or, if this is a space that they want to control the lighting a little bit better, we show the value of this three-foot vertical panel that stood off from the window and how that successfully shades and performs for the space. So for this project, this is the current design. We went forward and we wanted to see how best we could improve day lighting and how we could reduce the EUI as much as we could. So this one is a 16% reduction from baseline pretty early on. And we have our day lighting levels here. No exterior windows shading and then exterior window shading implemented above the windows, those projections. Before and after.

And we go through and we start rotating the model. In this case, the building footprint was pretty much set by the client. And so we we're looking at different orientations really to see how we could adjust lighting levels. Before and after here, 18%, a little bit better at a 180 degree rotation. Then we also did a long axis mirror. So we're mirroring basically just taking the north side to the south side.

And you see here, about a 23% reduction and a roughly estimated savings of about $1,000 per year on utility costs. If occupants are using the building in a manner that we're analyzing, but also this provided some really nice day lighting in these spaces. This is a nice public work space for various activities like a big multipurpose room. So we're able to control the lighting here a little bit better than some of the other offices, but you can see the success before and after here.

PRESENTER 1: All right. And so this is going to get into the free energy 2D software I was explaining to you guys earlier. And so what we had is a client approach us and they wanted to nix the continuous installation around the building. Thought it was useless and we were trying to pull one over on them. They were on a reservation, they didn't have a code requiring it. So we tried to tell them, hey, this is going to provide a lot of value to your project, especially since you're in a warmer climate, this is going to keep heat out, not just in.

And so it works two ways. And so we did a lot of searching trying to convey this information and how we could do it the cleanest way possible. And so I found this free software, and what it does is over an hour and 20 minutes you can simulate the heat transfer through a wall cavity. So this would be in a section cut, and you can see just in one hour and 20 minutes we have a six degrees Celsius heat change at the interior of that stud. And so you multiply that times 1,000 or 2,000, however big your building is, that's significant heat change.

And so the one on the left, it captured all that energy and it's still within the stud, and there is a zero degree heat change in the interior space of this building. Client saw this was like, oh, I get it. Let's go ahead and throw that insulation on there, that, when you can break out the calculations and see how much they're saving in energy through running their HVAC system, versus putting that two inch insulation all the way around. So they were really happy and convinced that they should do it.

We also use this to go shame our engineers or structural engineers. And so they love doing these canopies that penetrate through the building, that stick out and cover and shade, and Aaron and I are like, oh, that looks great. It's pretty, but can we suggest maybe doing a thermal break? We're losing a lot-- they don't really think about the energy side of it. And it wasn't a big deal, they're like, ah, 12 penetrations, it's not going to be a big deal.

OK. So we went and showed them a thermal bridge versus the thermal break using an isosorbide, I think it's called. And we gave out just a little bit of the results, and if you can look here and see some of this information, it sells itself. Right off the bat, we have the thermal break of the building, the EUI at 102, with the thermal bridge caused an increase of 5.5 EUI. And also, for the comparison, I thought this was some of the most interesting information down here, but you see 0.98 square feet of the thermal bridging caused an increase of 5.5 over 1,756 square feet of the lower performing glazing had an increase of 16.

So people will spend that money on high performance glazing, but they don't want to go ahead and put that thermal break in there. And I think the ratios speak for themselves when you weren't addressing an issue like that.

PRESENTER 2: Basically going from a thermal bridge to a thermal broken steel, per square foot of penetration, is 5.6 EUI difference, where high performance glass going from low performance to high performance, per square foot of that glass it's only 0.009 EUI of a difference. So that puts it in the scale of-- I mean, we always have a lot more glass square footage, so that ultimately has a big impact on the building, but just how quickly having thermal bridging in your structure through a building envelope. How quickly that can add up and create an impact on your building.

So here we are, going into technologies and systems. We went through a lot of the design strategies, how we get informed through the design process, and so in the technologies and systems, typically a little bit later in the project, but we can also do them earlier. We look to potentially solar PV analysis. In this case, the example deliverable here for out in California, and this one is in New Mexico. We're able to very quickly, within Revit, this is very similar. You see the orange and yellows, this is that solar insolation analysis.

We don't even have to take the model out of Revit. We just very quickly select our roof surfaces, run the analysis, find areas that can potentially have a lot of solar exposure for PV systems. And with some of our math and formulas, we're able to highlight areas that would get them to the 2030 challenge, just showing the extent of where they should put PV on the roof to obtain 74% baseline reduction in this case.

And so this project is also pursuing LEEDs, so this PV system would also add about two credits for renewables and six credits for energy performance categories, as well as some early insights in the amount of production, estimated savings, and a payback period. So that way, when we go to ask them, would you like renewables on your project? They're informed, instead of just being a yes or no at that moment, they can say yes or no based on some information in front of them.

In this case, they said yes. They actually said, how do I say no? Which was nice. And so we take it a step further. We are actually, our team, we can design some layouts using panels, and modules, and inverters that we know typically get used in our locations. As well as seeing the production month to month. And you can actually see-- it's very subtle when it's this large-- but you can see the reductions in the hotter months because heat actually makes the inverters have to derate a little bit, so you actually end up getting a little bit less production in a very hot environment.

So you can see that successfully happening there, as well as some financial impacts. If we know utility information for the specific site, the rates, and the cost of the systems for your market, where you are, you can get some insight into net present value, profitability index, and your payback period. You can see here this is happening about 10 years for this system.

And this can get handed off to a PV installer, where they-- we handed off to three-- and they put in basically their bids, and we ended up selecting-- we actually analyze each response to our proposals here and see which one is the best, since everybody does it differently. Yeah quick question?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

PRESENTER 2: No. In our case, we're using the string inverters we found in our climate. So in New Mexico, high desert, we get very cold and we get very hot in the different seasons. The micro inverters we're actually having a lot high failure rate, just because it wasn't very temperate. That's just our case. I do love microinverters because you get information per panel, and I like that high resolution information flow, but unfortunately, the string inverters are still the ones that we typically go with in New Mexico.

AUDIENCE: How does this software take into account changes in energy prices?