2018-04-30

Mountain View has recently commissioned a second Environmental Sustainability Task Force to look at how the city can get back on track for reducing its greenhouse gas emissions. As part of this effort, they held a public input event. I decided to sit in on the Buildings table. Here's a summary of the recommendations our group of public citizens put together:

New Buildings

• Increasing requirements on commercial buildings ahead of California state requirements. Example: Pulling Zero Net Emissions requirement to kick in at an earlier date. Problem: Imposed cost might be too high, so can modify this to: require new commercial buildings to be all-electric/renewable at an earlier date, since Mountain View electricity is renewable, and this is more manageable than ZNE. Can also allow for waivers in exceptional cases. (Most of Mountain View’s commercial space is offices or retail, where this shouldn't be a problem.)
• Incentives for high-performance buildings. Example: higher allowed FAR, expedited permits, and/or tax abatements for PassivHaus / LEED Platinum / Living Building Challenge buildings.
• Eliminate minimum car parking requirements in favor of minimum bicycle parking requirements, allowing market to determine appropriate car parking for each project.
  • Encourages active transportation (walking, biking, transit)
  • Costs nothing to the city; carbon benefits harder to quantify but definitely nonzero.
  • Cuts embodied energy/carbon in materials used to construct parking (concrete is very carbon-intensive) & reduces heat island effect.
  • Makes more space available for housing people, reducing the number of people who need to commute in from further away.

Old Buildings

• Facilitate gas → electric water heater conversions at heater replacement dates via “concierge service”.
  • Mail out up-front information about electric and solar conversion around 10yr install anniversary to help with planning / persuade people to switch.
  • Can pull dates from permitting; but might need to supplement by conducting surveys or inspections of existing homes not in the data.
  • Main cost of the program is up-front: to create materials and to load all the expiration data into a database; ongoing operation is relatively minimal. However with water heating being a major component of gas usage in California buildings (~37% of gas usage statewide), impact on reducing carbon emissions could be huge over the next 10 years.
• Facilitate energy efficiency upgrades and retrofits by providing financial support such as zero-interest loans.
  • Energy-saving measures such as improved insulation and sealing reduce energy use while also improving occupant comfort and reducing their utility costs, providing incentives to make these upgrades. (Replacing a gas furnace with electric can have carbon benefits, but does not come with these consumer benefits.)
  • Barrier to upgrades is often up-front capital cost; since costs for energy-efficiency upgrades are recouped over the lifetime of the upgrade, loans are an effective way to finance, breaking down the initial investment into easily-manageable yearly payments that are largely offset by the utility savings.
  • Local banks can be leveraged to administer loans, and to advertise the program and guide customers through the process. (Supports local businesses which in turn support the program, reduces administrative and financial load on the city.)
  • Energy efficiency upgrades reduce peak load on the electric utility as well, making renewable electricity generation more effective and potentially helping to reduce demand on fossil fuel generation elsewhere.
  • Requires skilled city staffing to qualify projects—may be possible to integrate into existing permitting process.
• Streamline process and eliminate permitting fees for energy upgrades. (City should not disincentivize energy upgrades.)
• Require assessments at key transition points:
  1. Require energy audit as part of disclosures during real estate transfers.
  2. Require electrification assessment as part of any permitted electric work. (City could provide funding to subsidize cost of assessments where necessary to make them reasonably cost-effective.)
• Require electrification retrofits / apply higher energy efficiency requirements to renovations passing a certain threshold, e.g. $100K, as in Palo Alto.

General

• Advocate for stronger state-level carbon-reducing building requirements.
• Look into “green lease” programs to help solve the landlord/tenant cost/benefit disconnect for efficiency improvements.
• Make sure our website has very good, very clear, very easy-to-follow documentation for all our programs. Step by step, 1, 2, 3; integrating all city/county/state/federal-level requirements and programs—and keeping it up-to-date—to make things simple and understandable and accessible to the average person.