Preview the New Free “Tally Climate Action Tool” (Tallycat)

PHIL NORTHCOTT: Welcome to this sneak preview of the new free Tally Action Climate Tool, TallyCAT. We've been working on this for about 18 months. We're very excited to share it with you.

Here we are. These are the guilty parties. I'm Phil Northcott. I lead C-Change Labs, and I led the software development of TallyCAT, which I'm also the lead developer of EC3.

ELTON GJATA: I am Elton Gjata, Digital Practice Manager for Perkins and Will, and I contributed BIM and design process expertise to the project.

JESCE WALZ: And I'm Jesce Walz, a designer at Perkins and Will, and I hope to pilot the EC3 tool, another tool for building transparency, in 2019, and I'm contributing architecture and lifecycle assessment expertise.

ELTON GJATA: Here's a quick overview of today's presentation. First, we want to share the story of how our collaboration came to be, why we did this, and what we're hoping to change, what the tool does, workflow, import, visualizations, sharing. We'll do a brief demo, and finally, the question you're all probably asking, when can you get your hands on it? So we'll give you an idea of a release schedule. Our goal is to get you excited about TallyCAT and to have you clamoring for the tool, when it comes out.

So just a quick story about our collaboration and partnership. The core team for this project has been building transparency, Perkins and Will and C-Change Labs. We also wanted to offer a big thank you to Autodesk and our many other supporting partners for their ongoing support and funding. Primary funding for this project has been provided by the province of British Columbia, through the Clean BC Building Innovation Fund.

The Clean BC Building Innovation Fund provides incentives to BC manufacturers and new technology developers to create new energy-efficient and low-carbon building technologies, designs, and practices. We're very grateful the province saw value in our tool proposal as a lever to promote the specification of lower carbon materials in industry by bringing EPDs earlier into the design process. We wanted to share this as a huge success story. Their funding has allowed us to build a tool that may have not been otherwise possible without a market mechanism and a tool that's helping tie together these digital tools with the global community.

PHIL NORTHCOTT: So TallyCAT's IPE is held by Building Transparency, which is a nonprofit based out of Seattle, which also has a branch in Canada. Building Transparency's core mission is to provide open access data and tools necessary to enable broad and swift action across the building industry in addressing embodied carbon's role in climate change. The nonprofit was established in January, 2020, to host the EC3 tool and is led by a group of independent directors who you can see here. TallyCAT is a free tool, like EC3, and it's only able to be free because a large group of dedicated companies and manufacturers and associations are willing to pay for an enterprise-grade, high-quality, easy-to-use tool to be offered for free worldwide. None of this would be possible without these people.

ELTON GJATA: Perkins and Will has 26 studios, each rooted in a unique local context. Our research, however, spans the world, and our researchers and designers work together to investigate and discover. We conduct practice-informed research for our research-informed practice, and we have a rich portfolio of work that demonstrates our commitment to sustainability.

We have nine research labs that support this mission and many of the other long-range questions that deeply matter to us, including sustainability and carbon, through our material Performance Lab. We're not trying to tell you a story about how great we are but, rather, why it's important to partner with other people. From Material Performance lab, we saw an opportunity to broaden the work we were already doing on material health and transparency towards human and ecological health. We were involved in this pilot project with EC3 and saw this incredible database of environmental product declarations that they were creating and thought, wouldn't it be wonderful if we could bring this information into the hands of designers early in on projects, extending our reach into the carbon emission space?

And this really comes together from a combination of different tools and expertise. We started with EC3, with this great Open Database and carbon tool, owned by Building Transparency and developed by C-Change Labs. And there's another tool that many of you are familiar with Tally, which was created by Kieran Timberlake. In 2021, this tool was donated to Building Transparency, right around the time that we won this grant. And we realized that there was a tremendous opportunity to bring many of the great features and success of Tally but to continue to build on it.

JESCE WALZ: So why are we building a tool? There have been a plethora of carbon reduction tools introduced over the last several years, and similar to what Elton just said, working with another partner on open access data is really a huge key here. And we're going to explain in this section, backing up a bit, why do we care about carbon, and how is this tool different than other tools, and specifically how are we leveraging Building Transparency's work.

So starting from the beginning-- really, starting from now-- global building stock will double in area, by 2060. That's a stat that gets thrown around, and you can see on the graph here with the little red, dashed line. Time keeps going. We keep getting closer to 2016.

Every month, the equivalent of another New York City is built, and that will continue for the next 28 years, which is pretty crazy. And this is important for us to think about with this tool and particularly with BIM, because the buildings that we are modeling have materials, and those materials have sources. We've been talking about operational carbon for a long time, and mostly, we talk about it in terms of energy and energy use reduction and intensity and understanding how to reduce that.

Embodied carbon has been more of a hot topic the past few years, and so as you may well know, that is the carbon impact of building materials. And most specifically, we're looking at manufacturing, transportation, and installation, especially the manufacturing process. Most embodied carbon in a building occurs before it opens its doors, and so it's a significant impact.

And pie charts can be sliced up in different ways. One way, when we look at global carbon dioxide emissions bisector, is to say the building operations are 28% of that pie. And then we have other in transportation, and then everything else that's here is really manufacturing, whether it's building materials or non. They start to blur together a bit.

So we have core and shell, which everybody here now is steel, concrete, sometimes timber. And then there's other manufacturing, which could be interiors or finishes, and that bleeds in a bit to non-building manufacturing. So this question is, how much carbon impact does a building really have, and the answer is-- and also how would that be divided between operational and body? That's going to be a little bit different for every project.

And there's a high demand to understand where impacts are coming from, so that we can reduce them. You can only reduce what you can measure, but I would also say that you can really only reduce what you can understand. And when you can understand the way that it's connected to other things, then that provides a huge opportunity. So in the case of cement, for example, if we can reduce the cement content of one concrete mix and provide a document to show how that happened and incentivize competition to have other manufacturers do that or to place value on the reduced cement mix, that doesn't just impact buildings, but it impacts all of industry and infrastructure, other things as well.

So we're looking for small changes that we can make that can make a huge change throughout our system, because we have a lot of work to do by 2060 or 2030 or whatever line we want to draw in the sand. This chart is from the embodied carbon and construction calculator. That's the EC3 tool, and that's an acronym we'll be using a lot. And mostly, it's focused on embodied carbon.

This one chart in the tool will show us a project's projected operational to embodied carbon, and the operational curves off. Because we are assuming that the grid is going to clean up by a certain time, in this case 2050, and eventually, those operational impacts-- while we're still using energy, the energy will come from a clean source, and that's shown in blue at the top. And then over on the right, we see a scatterplot of different states' grid impacts. And you can see Wyoming, Louisiana, Washington, they all have very, very different impacts.

And when you say one grid has double or triple or quadruple the impact of another, you could be using the same energy for that building but see a significant shift in the results of that energy, depending on where it's procured from. That comes into play with LCA, and it's a much more granular study, where we're looking not just at the grid impact but also the energy use. And sometimes there are processes that release emissions, and we're looking at that-- I use the term LCA, that's Lifecycle Assessment we are exploring that across stages of a building, and there's a tool to do this called Tally, which we've spoken about a little bit. And Tally covers all the stages-- product, construction, use, and end of life, from raw material supply all the way through disposal, and it also includes beyond. We'll highlight that next time, but beyond would be if there's credit for recycling or other things.

We are focused very much with TallyCAT and EC3 tool on upfront carbon, in particular what we call cradle-to-gate. So that would just be half of what's outlined here, and it includes raw materials, the transport between plants, and the manufacturing process. That impact for most projects is going to be the largest impact for a project. It's also immediate. It occurs before the building opens its doors, as does transport to site.

It's important to note here that transportation usually accounts for 2% to 4% roughly of a project's lifecycle impact. So if we were to go back to this slide here and look at the whole stage of-- all the stages of a building's life, transportation is a sliver there. And so we really need to pay attention not just to where our products come from but to how they're manufactured and to incentivize competition for manufacturing of lower carbon products.

But how do we do that? That's huge. That's so much to understand, and the answer is really great. There is a document called an environmental product declaration and we've used the term EPD. That's what that is.

This document is standardized, and there are rules that are followed, and it's verified by a third party. And there can be EPDs, or Environmental Product Declarations, that are more generic and industry-based, where they relate to a number of products. However, there are many EPDs that have been verified for one product from one manufacturer. And that is super interesting, because that's when we can start to look at two concrete mixes and pick the one that has a lower impact. It's like a nutrition label, but for a building material.

And part of the reason that we've partnered with Building Transparency is that these, while they are standardized in terms of what they have to include, they are not standardized in terms of how they're produced. So some of them were on paper. Some were not digitized into PDFs. They all have different formats, and Building Transparency came along and said, we can use this.

This is a powerful source of data and developed a platform that's essentially a catalog of EPDs that have been aligned, so that they can be compared. And when we are comparing, we're not comparing-- you can see this graph here has concrete and finishes and all sorts of different things, wood.

We're not necessarily comparing the impacts of concrete to wood. We're picking one category, and we're saying, OK, what are my filters? I know that I need to get this concrete within a certain radius. It has to be a certain strength, and then what are my options to choose from? And that's all based on the environmental product declaration that can tell us really powerful information about what products have more impact than others.

I love this screenshot, because when we first started partnering with Building Transparency, in 2019, I think there were 20 something thousand environmental product declarations for concrete, and you can see now there are 85,000. That's three years, huge increase. There are also several more categories than there used to be. Each of these bars represents a different category, where there are product declarations.

And you can see, for wood, there's 233, so it's not a small number, and that number is increasing exponentially. So as Elton said, this is a lever that we can press on to make a huge change in the industry. That change has started in North America and in certain parts of Europe, but it is global. This is another screenshot from the EC3 tool, and it just continues. And we really are looking forward to seeing this information get more into BIM, so that we can continue to communicate to manufacturers how essential it is for us to have this data, so that we can continue to support reductions in this very sensitive time.

This diagram is a process about using Tally and EC3. We've told you a little bit about what EC3 does. It's a catalog of environmental product declarations. It's also much more, and so we'll demo that along with the TallyCAT tool.

And Tally, as I mentioned when we looked at the graph of the different lifecycle stages, Tally is a plug-in for Revit that will assess each layer of a Revit family, and we can associate it with the material that the plug-in understands. It develops a list of quantities, connects those to data, and then provides a really great report. Tally is behind a paywall, and then so that's one thing that we are looking to address with our tool is that it will be free. As in the title-- new, free.

And then another thing to understand is that Tally can connect to EC3. We can press send to EC3, but usually teams are looking at that in the construction documentation and procurement stage. So we would like for them to look at it earlier, and that is the goal of this tool.

So TallyCAT is the best of Tally, which by best we're saying it connects to Revit, and we're getting the A1 to A3 data. And also, it is closely integrated with the EC3 tool. It's free and open access, constantly updated data set based on environmental product declarations, and then it will allow users to share templates and assemblies between projects and more.

So we're trying to get all of that data that I've been talking about, just so much potential early, into the design process and connected to the families that we are building within Revit, so that we can make much more informed decisions from the get go. Now, this is a diagram showing that open data is at the middle of our process with manufacturers, the design team, and the contractor, and the key here is that, for every project where we get data, that cycle continues to encourage more development of product declarations and better projects in the future. I'm going to pass this to Phil who is going to share our demo.

PHIL NORTHCOTT: Thank you. So just a quick reminder about EC3, the embodied carbon and construction calculator, it's a large open access database of every EPD we've been able to find and digitize, combined with a project planner that's a lot like a cost model but for carbon. And the basic equation is always that the quantity of material times the intensity of that material is the upfront embodied carbon of the material in that building. And in general, what we find is that, through material selection, there are very substantial cost savings, and you'll see a little bit more of that as we go.

What TallyCAT does is export, extract, and export material quantities from Revit into EC3. Then, you work with a tool to identify each material. TallyCAT will start you with a reasonable guess to avoid the busy work, but you will go through and refine each material search, in order to make sure that, when you're comparing materials, you're getting ones that do roughly the same job.

It'll help you evaluate the climate impact based on the range of product-specific, third party-verified EPDs for products that are relevant to you, visualize the hotspots within your building and where the biggest savings opportunities are. Generate graphs and reports that are useful to your client and management, synchronize the environmental information you gathered in EC3 back into your Revit project, so that you can reuse it later. And also do visualizations within Revit and save libraries and templates, so that you can share fully annotated projects. So now, we're going to get into each of those.

So TallyCAT is a free Autodesk plug-in. It will be on the Autodesk store, when it's released. Don't try downloading it right now. It may not be available, until it's released at Green Build, but that's where it will be.

Once you've installed it, it'll be in the Add-Ins toolbar. You can see here TallyCAT in the Add-Ins toolbar, and it will ask you to sign in to EC3 so that you can load and store information from the cloud. All your data is stored securely. All data that you send to EC3 is private, by default. There are management functions to allow management within your company to view and control projects, and there's access control functions that will let you share it with a selected list of internal and external people.

So once you are signed in, there's a configuration you do. You'll create an EC3 view using the standard VV visualization controls to determine what parts of your building you want to bring in to EC3, and then you can export it. Building Transparency will give you a report showing what we were able to figure out and what we were not. Once you're satisfied with that, you should open it in EC3, and there's a side-by-side view of the EC3 view of the building on the right and Revit on the left, and you can work with them in tandem.

One of the key things that you'll be doing is going into each material, such as this cast in place concrete, and refining it. Telling us not just that it's concrete, but what job does it need to do, especially in terms of things like strength and exposure? In order to make sure that, when you do your material comparisons, that it is actually a concrete or a steel, or whatever material it may be, that can actually do the job. It also imports the address, because EC3 has geocoded all of the manufacturing plants we've been able to find that make each of these products, so that you can calculate both availability and transportation.

Here's an example of a search screen. So this is the search screen for concrete, which was developed together with the concrete industry and structural engineers. It focuses on things like compressive strength and early strength and a variety of other performance-related characteristics of concrete. It also allows you to choose the location.

And what it gives you is a range of results. So-- whoops. Sorry about that. So it gives you a range of results, which you can see on-- the green bar in the middle runs from an achievable target, which where 20% of the available materials are better than that, up to a conservative estimate, where 80% of the materials are better than that. That gives you a pretty good idea of the range of what's possible, and from this, you can do things like set an upper limit as a performance requirement, or of course, you can select a particular mix.

So here's an example of comparing a set of manufacturers against each other. Each of these manufacturers has a range of products available that are, in this case, 5,000 PSI concretes, in Washington state. You can also, if you're narrowing it down to a few mixes, you can compare them against each other and see how they line up against the population of available concretes in general. As you dig into this, you will see that there are very large differences between the top and the bottom. It illustrates very large savings that are available by careful selection of products.

We generate a number of useful visualizations that give you an idea of where the main savings are. So this is a Sankey diagram. It runs from very detailed on the left to the entire building on the right. In each case, what you will see is that-- I'm sorry.

In each case, what you'll see is a section up at the top, which represents the available savings, and a section at the bottom, which is the emissions you're likely to have, no matter what your selection is. In each case, if you mouse over any of these boxes, you'll get the details about it. And that rolls all the way up to the building as a whole, and you can see if the savings that you could get if you did a very good low-carbon selection on all the materials in the building. It is not unusual for this number to be 40%.

We generate a number of reports, either in CSV format or in Excel. Some of these reports are useful for management. Some may be useful for importing directly into your internal tools within your company. Others are specifically designed for owners or for lead point submittals.

Once you've completed your work in EC3, or indeed, at any time, you can annotate the work back into EC3. TallyCAT does that automatically. That allows you to do a number of things, including visualize in 3D within your building, where the hotspots are.

In this case, this is a heat map showing where the greatest savings potential is. In this example, we've made some very good selections of our concretes for the floors, and we've still got some work to do on the steel columns. You can see within TallyCAT, within the Revit plug-in, what information has been back annotated onto your Revit project. And this process of asking people to give you environmental product declarations and using it as part of material selection has a real impact.

So we started EC3 in 2017. In 2019, Microsoft started using it routinely to do procurement on their Redmond campus, and we've been tracking concrete mixes in Washington state ever since. And what we see is a consistent Downward trend, as competition drives high-carbon mixes out of the market, and companies are competing to have the low-emitting, high-performance concrete. So if you ever doubt that even just getting the declarations can make a difference, this is an example of a case where exactly that happened. You can affect a whole building industry in an area by enabling this sort of competition.

ELTON GJATA: So the moment you've all been waiting for. Hopefully, you're all very excited about our wonderful tool. We want to give you a little preview at our project's release timeline.

As you can see, we are planning this in three steps-- beta, a March release, and continuation for the project. As this all started from Tally and EC3, and they will continue to be supported. We're planning for beta release by November of this year, and we're planning for release for TallyCAT by March, 2023.

The preview release that we're planning for November we're affectionately calling Tally kitten will allow you to do many of the base tasks, like quantity takeoffs, the mapping of materials, creating reports, all of these things that are ready and you're able to use on your projects now. The full release, by March, 2023, will include some additional features, a library of content that you can use in your own projects that has the carbon information, in BIM, ready to use from the beginning of a project. It will also allow you to back annotate to Revit any additional materials that you select through TallyCAT and through EC3.

For those of you that are watching the recording of this project, we're sorry that we weren't able to connect with you in person. You can scan the QR code on screen now, if you are interested in signing up for the wait list for TallyCAT or if you're interested in supporting the project, either in its development or in its continued existence. We're very excited to have a conversation with you. So please, reach out.

Thank you very much for your time and attention today. We're all very excited about the TallyCAT, about this tool, and about the really important work that this is doing to decarbonize our industry and sector. Thank you very much, and we look forward to speaking with you soon.