STANDARD 1550 BACKGROUND:
Northeast Home Energy Rating System (NEHERS) Alliance formed an Embodied Carbon Working Group in the spring of 2020, after seeing the 2019 NESEA Building Energy Boston Keynote Address: Carbon Drawdown Now with Chris Magwood, Jacob Deva Racusin and Ace McArleton. This presentation made it clear that common sense substitutions of materials that are already available in the market could significantly impact the embodied carbon footprint of a building, and in some cases, actually turn the building into a carbon sink, where carbon is stored for the life of the building.
We invited Chris and Jacob to present a webinar for NEHERS, Beyond Energy Efficiency: Why Embodied Carbon in Buildings Matters NOW in June of 2020, in which we learned that data from a 2017 study showed that nearly half of global carbon emissions came from either building operations (28%) or the production and distribution of building materials (21%). This galvanized our working group to focus on the following two initiatives:
- Advocate for the development of a RESNET® Standard on Embodied Carbon.
- Explore the potential role of HERS® Raters in collecting the data needed to support embodied carbon tracking in the U.S. residential building sector.
We realized that the use of high embodied carbon materials can unintentionally offset the benefit of operational emissions reductions from energy-efficiency programs and new building codes, so we set out to encourage the building industry to consider both operational and embodied carbon emissions simultaneously. The working group evolved into a formal NEHERS committee, intent on exploring the role that the HERS® Rater could play in capturing the “low-hanging fruit” of embodied carbon savings—emissions that enter the atmosphere before a home is built or occupied.
We wrote the NEHERS Embodied Carbon Position Paper to explain what we wanted to do and Andy Buccino developed the NEHERS Embodied Carbon Built Environment Checklist of the key data points required for embodied carbon assessments that HERS® Raters were already collecting. We estimated that 60% to 90% of the data that Raters already collect for a HERS® rating could inform embodied carbon assessments, with variation based on the home’s overall design features.
NEHERS began formally advocating for the development of a RESNET® standard to create a common definition for measuring embodied carbon with the video below, which was presented at the 2022 RESNET Conference.
WATCH OUR VIDEO (1 RESNET PDH - Register for Quiz)
THE LETTER OF SUPPORT
In conjunction with the above presentation, we requested letters of support for the initiative:
SHARE WITH YOUR NETWORK
And we requested that supporters share our position paper and checklist with their network:
By the end of 2022, support was growing among industry stakeholders across North America. To view the chronology of the RESNET Standard 1550 development, please click here. The standard is currently in its final round of public comment and is expected to be adopted sometime in 2026.
SPECIAL THANKS FOR HELPING GET STANDARD 1550 STARTED: