Russian Apartment Retrofits

A Glossary of Acronyms A list of some organizational acronyms used in this issue. ASHRAE The American Society for Heating, Refrigeration and Air-Conditioning Engineers CANMET Canada Centre for Mineral and Energy Technologies, NAtural Resources Canada GBIC The Green Building Information Council (Canada) IEA The International Energy Agency E&WEPP City of Toronto Energy and Water Efficiency Pilot Program LBL Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories RAIC The Royal Architectural Institute of Canada

Background

Some history may be useful. As of 1992, the "enterprise sector" (i.e., state-owned industrial enterprises) was responsible for operating forty percent of the urban housing stock in Russia. Following the initiation of reforms, enterprises were expected to become self-financing entities and, at the same time, to carry the financial burden of their housing stock - clearly a difficult combination. During the mass privatization program of 1992-94, ownership of the enterprise housing stock was assigned to municipal governments. Despite the transfer of ownership, many enterprises remained responsible for financing and managing their former housing stock, pending divestiture of these responsibilities to local authorities.

Enterprises now have little incentive to spend money and other resources on their housing stock since they no longer own it. Another disincentive is that their employees occupy no more than half, and sometimes less than 20 percent, of the apartments. This situation has led to deferred maintenance and lack of capital repair which, in turn, is reflected in the deteriorating condition of the housing stock. Full privatization is impeded by the extremely poor condition of the housing stock and by the long process required to develop joint tenant management of large buildings through condominium associations. At the present time, about 20 percent of Russia's housing continues to be financed, maintained and operated by enterprises.

The Project

Financing will consist of a repayable World Bank loan of $300 million U.S. plus local investments. This looks like a lot of money, but the program designers anticipate an expenditure of only $600 to $1,000 U.S. per dwelling unit, minimal by North American standards.

A measure of urgency underlies the project because the cost of space and water heating, currently heavily subsidized, will rapidly rise as Russia moves towards world market prices for oil over the next few years. Thus, the work will have to be done effectively, economically and rapidly.

A positive factor is the active leadership of the six Russian municipalities and relevant ministries. The standardized design of Russian apartment buildings will also aid in economical implementation. The main obstacles are the scale of the problem, the short time available to implement solutions and the lack of technical and management experience in the application of energy retrofits.

The project will be run out of Moscow by a team of Russian and foreign professionals, builders and managers. The organization will consist of a central Project Implementation Unit, which will oversee the operations of a Procurement and Engineering Group and a Technical Advisory Group. Each of the six cities participating will have their own Local Implementation Group. Two main phases are currently foreseen. Phase 1 will begin in October 1996 and will focus on metering of heat production, distribution and consumption, all intended to provide performance benchmarks and field experience. Full-scale implementation will take place in Phase 2.

A group of energy experts from the Battelle Pacific Northwest Laboratories have already carried out preliminary reconnaissance work. They assessed a representative set of buildings in a suburb of Moscow in April 1995 and instrumented three buildings and a district heating substation for monitoring purposes. They also carried out wall U-value measurements and blower-door tests on 50 occupied apartments. The challenge in launching the larger-scale project will be to establish partnerships with Russian organizations, to initiate training programs and to devise retrofit programs that produce the largest energy benefits for the least cost.

The total project will probably involve skilled participants from several countries and the Canadian building industry has a major opportunity to participate. A strategy for Canadian participation is currently being developed by The Bayswater Consulting Group Ltd., CMHC and NRCan, with some support from Environment Canada. An anticipated annual reduction of some 950,000 tonnes of CO2 when implementation is completed illustrates the environmental significance of the project.

There are opportunities for individuals or firms to participate in a central engineering support unit and for firms to take part in at least one all-Canadian demonstration project. For the project as a whole and over the long term, significant opportunities exist for firms with expertise in large-building energy retrofits and for suppliers of materials or equipment who may be able to establish licensing arrangements with Russian partners.

The Canadian organizing team is now actively searching for suitable Canadian industry partners with the requisite expertise and a willingness to work in partnership with their Russian counterparts. Firms with Russian-speaking experts on staff will have an edge.

Hemp on the Horizon

For Further Information contact : Craig Crawford

Hemp is an agricultural product well suited to many Canadian growing regions, and it has properties that make it environmentally efficient and practically useful: low energy and resource inputs, high strength, adaptability to many different uses, and bio-degradability. Potential building-sector applications include textile products for office furniture, floor coverings and backings, insulation materials, particle board and medium-density fibre-board, fibres in roofing materials, and paints and adhesives.

Speakers from Germany, where the industrial use of hemp is relatively advanced, England, the U.S.A. and Canada discussed trends in Europe and North America, examined the role of hemp in bioregional development, describ ed methods of processing and talked about issues in product and market development. Following the event, some forty participants convened a meeting at ORTECH Corporation to identify barriers to implementing a domestic hemp industry in Canada. As a result, an Industrial Hemp Network has been established and national working groups have been formed.

It looks as if a serious effort is at last being made to take advantage of hemp's excellent qualities. If these efforts bear fruit, the result could be long-term economic support for certain agricultural areas, a reduction in the use of less environmentally efficient materials and a new building material that has attractive functional properties.

E&WEPP....

For Further Information contact: Richard Morris, Fax: 416 392 1456

The E&WEPP is a two-year pilot program which is expected to result in $30 million worth of energy, water and other building retrofit projects. If successful, the pilot program will lead to a full-scale program that will have an estimated economic impact of up to $3 billion.

To achieve its aims, E&WEPP uses performance contracting, a technique whereby specialized firms, called performance contractors or energy service companies, take a lead role in identifying, carrying out and paying for energy improvements on behalf of building owners. In Toronto's case, such contractors are called energy management firms.

Let us detour for a moment to explore some of the principles of performance contracting. Energy management firms are paid for their work out of the difference between the original energy operating costs and the new, lower, level of energy billings. The process of establishing an agreement and carrying out the work typically takes two years: the repayment period may be as long as eight years. The concept is philosophically neat. Even owners who have no interest in performance per se will see advantage of a specialized firm carrying out work that will increase the value of their buildings, at no cost to themselves.

The performance contracting concept has already been adopted by the federal government, in its Federal Buildings Initiative, which appears to be working well. Two factors are worth noting: performance retrofits are only worthwhile if the work includes some items with quick payback to balance out those with longer payback, and; the energy management firm must have some control over how the building is operated after the work has been completed of the work, since the energy management firm is guaranteeing the energy payback over a six- to eight-year period.

Back to Toronto. The pilot program will be launched in April. Three energy management firms have been chosen to carry out the work, including provision of comprehensive turnkey services for energy and water efficiency improvements in a representative cross-section of about 100 industrial, commercial, institutional and multi-unit residential buildings. The sample represents about one percent of all buildings in the city, and is expected to reduce CO2 emissions by about 40,000 tonnes per year. Tangential benefits will include about 430 person-years of employment and a reduction in building operating costs of more than $3 million annually. The City recognizes the need to balance long- and short-term payback measures and has made this an explicit part of the program provisions.

The Toronto program differs from most performance contracting initiatives. Typically, performance contracting has involved a one-on-one relationship between the energy management firm and a well informed client. However, the E&WEPP program is trying to reach a wide spectrum of building owners, including some who may be totally unfamiliar with concepts of performance contracting or, dare we say it, even energy performance. To reach such a clientele, the energy management firms will have to do some initial marketing work. After that, the process is common to most performance contracts: identify cost-effective measures, design them, obtain financing, implement, commission, monitor energy and water consumption, train building operators and obtain repayment.

The City is assigning two senior engineers to expedite projects through the building permit process. Also, since some clients may be the owners of relatively small and financially insecure operations, the City has set up a $2 million fund to protect the energy management firms from payment defaults. Toronto building owners are having a very tough time in the recession: many office building owners are obtaining net rentals (after operating expenses) of only about $45/m2, which is less than half of the carrying cost of new construction. In such an economic climate, it will take energetic measures to interest building owners in improvements. The performance contracting approach therefore looks very attractive.

Environmental Strategies in Norway

Stattsbygg owns about 2.4 million m2 of floor space in Norway and abroad, and its building stock includes office buildings, colleges, courthouses and diplomatic residences.

The paper outlines a strategy that starts from global concerns and extends down to building cleaning operations. Naturally, an eighteen-page policy paper cannot include

For Further Information contact : Stein Rognlien, Fax: 47 22 34 28 06

many details, but if the results are consistent with the strategy, the policy will be a very impressive roadmap for future construction and operation.

At the global level, the report states that...Sustainable development is dependent on a far higher level of environmental efficiency (the satisfaction of needs in relation to environmental impact) than is practised today. If the quality of life for future generations is to be secured, environmental impact must be reduced to ten percent of current levels within just a few decades; i.e. environmental efficiency must be increased by a factor of ten.

Stattsbygg, like most public works organizations, must also operate as a cost-effective developer. Hence it....must choose those solutions that entail the lowest environmental impact while also meeting pre-defined needs. In other words, the activities of the Directorate must be environmentally efficient. This approach is strengthened by another section that states...Environment must be a line responsibility (not a staff function) in the same way as quality, finance etc.

Unlike many organizations venturing into the field of environmental impact, Stattsbygg has integrated urban development, urban transportation and land use issues into its strategy. This extends even into areas of compatibility of buildings with aesthetic and cultural/historic factors. We were shown a separate document (in Norwegian only) which attempts to develop these factors to a practical level.

The strategy addresses some specifics: avoidance of mechanical cooling; heat recovery for a sixty percent reduction of energy required for heating of ventilation air; and limitations on envelope air leakage in office buildings. The approach to envelope design provides a prescriptive path but states that... these U-value requirements may be departed from providing that the overall energy framework is retained.

Other sections cover property management, building operations, environmental audits and associated research. We cannot describe the complete contents of this excellent strategy document in this space: suffice it to say, it is a clear and logical exposition of an approach that is likely to strike the right balance between environmental goals and operational realities. Assuming that it is implemented.

BC Quality Assurance Project

For Further Information contact : Toby Lau, BC Hydro, Fax: 604 528 1552

it is interesting to note that BC Hydro and the City of Vancouver are considering the establishment of a quality assurance requirement for buildings. For BC Hydro, the program would complement existing demand-side management programs: for the City, it would complement the existing Energy Utilization by-law and address the growing number of building envelope failures in the city.

Building envelope failure is an issue that we are hearing about from a number of sources in the BC region. For example, an Ottawa building science firm has established a Vancouver office but can not find enough skilled staff to handle work relating to analysis and remediation of building envelope failures. The BC Ministry of housing recently released a report dealing with quality problems in low-rise and wood-frame residential construction. The report identifies causes that range from inadequate inspections and poor training to ignorance of the nature of the building envelope. The problem is especially acute with respect to stucco finishes, which are very popular in the BC region, though it is not clear whether the report is referring only to traditional stucco or to EIFS-type walls as well.

Building defects can be expensive, and the legal responsibility for poor quality control can last for a considerable time. A recent Supreme Court judgement (see Engineering Dimensions, Jan/Feb 1996) expands design professionals' liability to subsequent purchasers of a building, at least for those failures that relate to substantial dangers. The issue, therefore, involves money as well as performance, and the amount of money can be substantial once lawyers are involved.

How does all this relate to energy efficiency? Building envelope failures usually involve the migration of moisture into exterior walls and in the Canadian climate (even in BC), the performance of insulation can be markedly reduced. The structural integrity of wood frame walls or brick ties can also be affected. Even less dramatic failures can have significant impacts on energy performance and the quality of the indoor environment.

Of course, energy performance encompasses more than just the building envelope, and this is reflected in the proposed BC Quality Assurance program. The draft document outlines a broad range of initiatives, including a requirement for air leakage tests of the building envelope, wall assembly construction inspection reports, testing and balancing reports and performance testing of major HVAC, plumbing, power and lighting systems. There are also a number of proposed guidance measures, ranging from types of construction suited to the BC climate, performance monitoring, IAQ tests, training of personnel and the retention of as-built documentation.

The BLISS of Building Performance

For Further Information contact : Overall Project: Steve Selkowitz, Fax: 510 486 5064 Max Sherman, Fax: 510 486 4022 BLISS: Steve Selkowitz, Fax: 510 486 5064 Frank Olken, Fax: 510 486 5891 CIT and PETT: Mary Ann Piette, Fax: 510 486 6286 Max Sherman, Fax: 510 486 4022

competitive world. Providing designers, builders, and operators with consistent information throughout the life cycle of a building opens opportunities for reaching performance potential. Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories (LBL) recently initiated an internally funded project to explore these issues, with the goal of creating public-private partnerships to develop workable, cost-effective solutions to assuring building performance.

Commercial building performance consistently falls short of its potential, with costly results to people and institutions. Energy use in commercial buildings accounts for $85 billion per year, more than half of which could be saved if the experience of a few unique, carefully designed and operated buildings could be widely replicated. Occupant health and comfort also suffer in poorly ventilated and conditioned spaces, resulting in lost productivity and a growing incidence of lawsuits.

The goal of the LBL project is to develop and standardize an interoperable set of software tools to correct these problems. The tools will respond to the needs of each phase of a building's life cycle and will be linked by a shared informational infrastructure, the Building Life-cycle Information Support System. BLISS will serve as the backbone of a dynamic data archive for each building. Once the BLISS data archive is established, the marginal cost of supplying additional tools with building data should be small compared to current practice. Interoperable tools that share information should provide considerable efficiencies and cost savings throughout the building life cycle. The tools developed in this project will not be limited to commercial buildings, but because of the existing infrastructure of building operators, computer-assisted design and EMCS, large commercial buildings are the logical first target. The same principles can be applied across the spectrum to single-family residential buildings.

LBL's effort will focus on three projects:
BLISS;
commissioning information tools (CITs); and
performance evaluation and tracking tools (PETTs).

Building Life Cycle Information Support System (BLISS)

The goal of this effort is to create a software infrastructure that can be used to share information across disciplines and to link interoperable software tools throughout the building life cycle.

This project has three major elements:
to specify the distributed systems software architecture;
to build a life-cycle database; and
to develop a mechanism to capture design intent.

The distributed systems architecture will describe how various building software components will communicate with each other. The building database schema will specify the structure and semantics of the database, providing a common vocabulary for the software components. The data structures will be able to accommodate both object-oriented building descriptions and extensive time-series data from performance tracking tools. BLISS will also be able to capture and represent design intent (goals, specifications, and decisions), a critical set of information that will be updated as the building design evolves. Data on design intent will provide information that is necessary later in the life cycle for successful building commissioning and operations.

Commissioning Information Tools

Commissioning is the process of inspecting and testing a building to ensure that it operates as intended. A cost-effective commissioning process will produce buildings that have lower operating costs while providing a healthier indoor environment that will increase productivity and user satisfaction. The initial project goals are:
to develop the conceptual design for a complete CIT; and
to develop an operating software module for one building system that is ready for field testing.

The software will specify procedures for commissioning, monitoring guidelines and electronic documentation requirements, along with methods to continue using this information in the operations phase of the building life cycle. The initial focus will be on developing a chiller commissioning module. A new building on the UC Berkeley campus will serve as a living laboratory for developing and testing these new tools.

Performance Evaluation and Tracking Tools

The goal of this project is to develop information collection and interpretation systems that allow the building's performance to be continuously evaluated and tracked as part of normal building operation. The first-year effort to produce PETTs will have two elements. The first is development of information resources that describe how the building should perform. This will be accomplished through performance metrics and accessing and updating the design intent and commissioning results inherited from earlier life-cycle phases. The second element will capture how the building does perform, based on real-time data acquired from the building EMCS.

Partnerships

This program cannot succeed without involvement from building-sector partners-as financial sponsors for the next phase of work; as research collaborators; as sources of information where LBL does not have experience or expertise; and, most importantly, as development partners for the tools and processes in this program. LBL is actively seeking interested partners to expand this program.

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