I am a climate refugee, or at least, I was for nearly 2 weeks after Superstorm Sandy hit the NYC metro area. What is a climate refugee?  It’s someone who’s been displaced due to the effects of climate change.  Millions of people throughout NY, NJ and CT are now official members of this latest category of citizens.  Climate change has been called a moral issue because impoverished nations are supposed to be the first impacted.  Sandy illustrated that rich localities can easily become the Third World when the web of infrastructure we depend on collapses.  It’s a good bet another Sandy will hit the region within five to ten years. It was the second hurricane to ransack the northeast in two years.  Let’s hope the next downpour isn’t a category 3 or 4.

Climate Refugees Map by UNEP

The aftermath has brought about two major ways of looking at our future.  One is to explore how the region can become more resilient and adaptive to climate change.  The other calls for “rebuilding stronger than ever” and implementing sea walls to protect the Big Apple from surging water.  Both paths are extremely challenging, because we are facing three-front fight.  We have to adapt to how our footprint has already altered weather patterns. We have to muster the willingness to continue eliminating further damage to the climate, and we must unlearn what we think modern society is.  Lastly, we have to do this as budgets and debt make it impossible for expensive solutions.

My Experience

At around 7p.m. on the night before Sandy made landfall, the lights in my house flickered and then went black.  It would be nearly 14 days before they came back on.  My house was built in the 1960’s – it is a beautiful vintage, mid-century style ranch home.  When first built, it was a model for the future. Everything in the house is electric from the hot water heater to the space heating to the air conditioning.  Three decades ago, electricity was cheap.  Now, homes with electric-centric mode of operation are a financial burden.

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As part of our involvement in the AIA 2030 Commitment Program and to support our commitment to designing high-performance buildings, we at HOK are applying energy modeling strategies on the majority of our projects. In 2011 our AIA 2030 report included more than 39 million gross square feet, with modeling performed on over 68 percent of that space.

Our firm has been conducting energy models on projects since the 1990s; an early example of this is the National Wildlife Federation Headquarters in Reston, Virginia. In 2000 that building was added to the US Department of Energy’s Database (DOE) for High Performance Buildings and became a DOE-2 energy model. We also did energy modeling for the US Environmental Protection Agency’s new campus in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina and SC Johnson’s Commercial Products Headquarters in Racine, Wisconsin. That same year we published The HOK Guidebook to Sustainable Design; it features a section on integrating energy performance.

By quantifying energy reductions through early architectural and engineering interventions, we can reduce the size and budget of mechanical and electrical systems. This allows us to apply those resources to architectural measures that enhance our clients’ spaces.

During bid and concept phases, we initiate energy benchmarking to guide the design team and owner through a discussion of energy use and metrics. We discuss CBECS (Commercial Buildings Energy Consumption Survey) benchmarks and the typical loads of the equivalent building type, develop an Energy Star target score and formalize LEED goals.

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When you compare those states that consume the most energy with those that consume the least, something jumps out at you. The states topping the list in terms of BTU per year are also the most populated states in the country: CA, TX, NY, FL, IL, PA and OH. This pattern holds true at the other end of the spectrum; the states with the least energy consumption are also the least populated. Vermont, the state with the smallest amount of energy used per year, has just over 60,000 more people than Wyoming, the least populated state in the U.S.

The energy behavior of states is complex and can’t be over-simplified. There’s the amount of industry and manufacturing within a state’s borders, the dispersion of its population, the number of structures and size of buildings, the total energy efficiencies embraced, and the age of the things that use energy like people, buildings, and technologies. In large part, most of these items are constants. They use the same amount of energy, day after day and month after month, with a slow decline in effectiveness over the years (usually more like decades).

However, this is not the case with buildings.  Buildings use energy differently each day and each month. This is a factor of weather, temperature, humidity, building type, spaces, and occupancy. The weather varies dramatically as you go from region to region, as well as from season to season within each state. This is where the energy consumption of the states and their populations begins to breakdown.  Look at BTU per person (AKA energy intensity) and the story looks completely different.

Texas and California are both gigantic states in terms of energy use and population, but of the two, Texas ranks in the top 10 (or top 47 for that matter) in terms of energy consumption per person. California ranks below Vermont. Although the state of New York holds the country’s third largest population, the energy consumed per capita ranks 50th of the 51, beating out only by Rhode Island. The question is, Why? And more importantly, can this investigation provide a radically different strategy for energy reduction in the U.S.?

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