USGBC award

Belfast, Maine–October 7, 2011–The GO Home, built by architecture and construction firm G•O Logic LLC, received the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) 2011 LEED for Homes Project of the Year Award, presented at the 2011 Greenbuild International Conference & Expo in Toronto yesterday. According to Nate Kredich, VP of Residential Market Development for USGBC, the award recognizes dedicated leaders for their important contribution to the residential green building community.

The GO Home is rated LEED platinum (USGBC’s highest designation), and is Maine’s first Passive-House-Certified home, a 1500-square-foot elegant and functional model of the German Passive House Standard. The Passive House standard requires 86% improvement on a home’s space heating loads compared to the typically constructed home, which translates into significant financial and environmental savings. Annual heating costs for The GO Home will amount to approximately $300.

The GO Home is rated LEED platinum (USGBC’s highest designation), and is Maine’s first Passive-House-Certified home, a 1500-square-foot elegant and functional model of the German Passive House Standard. The Passive House standard requires 86% improvement on a home’s space heating loads compared to the typically constructed home, which translates into significant financial and environmental savings. Annual heating costs for The GO Home will amount to approximately $300.

“Our aim is to revolutionize home construction standards in North America,” said Matthew O’Malia, Principal of G•O Logic LLC. “The USGBC Project of the Year Award affirms the level of energy performance we’re pursuing, and that is demonstrated by The GO Home: the next generation of housing that maximizes comfort, energy efficiency and cost while providing all of the amenities of a standard home.”

The GO Home combines a broad range of winning features that set the bar for affordable green building, including: a heat-recovery ventilation system rated at 95% efficiency that provides consistent fresh air to the interior; an open floor plan with large, German-built triple-glazed windows; and affordable construction costs of $160 per square foot. For more information, visit: http://www.gologichomes.com.

The long-term financial benefits of investing in a GO Logic home based on Net Present Value Calculations

GO Logic is an architectural design-build firm, building super energy efficient homes designed for cold climates. As a design-build firm, the efficiency of project delivery from concept to completion is improved over standard design-bid-build delivery systems. The result of these efficiencies is a shorter planning and construction period, but a finished product with improved long-term energy performance for space heating. These improvements in process and product result in both first-cost and lifecycle savings for the homebuyer, saving money on construction and the long-term operating costs for the home.

To demonstrate the investment value in a GO Logic home, we have compared the construction cost and lifetime energy savings of a GO Logic home vs. a standard built home in today’s dollars using a Net Present Value Calculation. The NPV (Net Present Value) calculation compares the lifetime (30 year) costs of each build method in today’s dollars, taking into account inflation and operating costs.* Because we are comparing the benefit of reduced operating expenses over the life of a mortgage, we expect to see a favorable NVP calculation expressed in a negative numbers, or dollars saved.

Based on the time period of a standard 30 year mortgage, the NPV calculation compares the total cost of a GO Logic home to a standard built home. Given this time period, we estimate that the cost saving for a GO Logic home in today’s dollars to be $55,150.

Not discounted to today’s Net Present Value, the model projects total cost savings resulting from a GO Logic home’s super energy efficiency over the course of a 30 year mortgage, including material estimated energy inflation, to be a remarkable $147,268.

To provide background and insight into the assumptions made for the NPV calculation, the Energy Performance, Cost of Construction and Financing and Inflation rates are explained below:

1. Energy performance: A GO Logic home, built to the German Passive House Standard**, is showing performance in the model home of only 10% of the energy used for space heating of a standard built, code-compliant home. Given Maine’s cold climate, this level of energy performance has a significant impact on the life-time energy costs of the home. In standard built construction, the cost of space heating is typically 75% of the total energy used by a home, with the remaining energy balance divided roughly evenly between the domestic hot-water and plug loads. Reducing the space heating demand therefore has the greatest impact on reducing a home’s total energy consumption and related energy costs. In terms of the actual cost savings of space heating on an annual basis, comparing a 1500 SF standard built home with a GO Logic home, the savings for space heating is estimated to be $1,300*** in the first year. For the NPV calculation, we have modeled the annual space heating cost for a GO Logic home to be $400, and that for a standard built home to be $1,700.

2. Cost of Construction: The cost of construction for a GO Logic home is similar to standard code compliant homes of similar durability. The 1500 SF GO Logic prototype home was built in 2010 for $150/ SF, resulting in a total construction cost of $225,000.**** The cost of construction for standard code compliant homes of similar durability is approximately $145/SF, resulting in a build cost of $217,500.**** For the NPV calculation we have assumed the GO Logic home’s construction cost at $150/SF and the standard built home at $145/SF for a 1,500SF home.

3. Financing and inflation rates: The long-term cost of a home is determined by the difference in rates between the interest for a fixed 30 year mortgage and energy inflation, the latter likely being the greater and more costly of the two. The historical rates of inflation for heating oil in the North East have fluctuated significantly in the past 20 years. We have conservatively set the annual energy inflation rate at 8% for the NPV calculation. Likewise, the mortgage interest rate has been set at 4.5%, based on the average interest rate today for a 30 year fixed home mortgage.

*Net Present Value-NPV, www.Investopedia.com
** Passive House Standard, more information visit- www.passivehouse .us
*** Estimated space heating costs for 1500SF home in Maine: standard built $1,700, GO Logic $400- Space heating costs based on energy modeling using Mid-Coast Maine climate data, at today’s oil heating oil price, $2.76/gal.
****The cost per square foot and construction costs include the site work, foundation and mechanical systems.

Speech for PowerUp America- MidCoast Clean Energy Jobs Day

May 2009

My name is Matthew O’Malia of G•O Logic. G•O Logic is a design build collaboration that I started with my partner, Alan Gibson. In this company we have brought together my technical German architectural education and Alan’s many years of green building experience- in order to build the next generation of sustainable, energy efficient homes. I am here today to speak about how the Clean Energy and Security Act will help Maine, and how G•O Logic is already on board to implement the changes in building performance proposed by the Act.

G•O Logic designs and builds homes that are targeted to be 10 times more energy efficient than standard construction, and we build these homes at costs working families in Maine can afford to build, and more importantly afford to pay for heating in the future. In simple terms, a 10 times more energy efficient homes saves an enormous amount of money and energy- Saving around $90,000 in heating costs, 22,000 gallons of heating oil, and 285 tons of CO2 over thirty year mortgage. Now imagine if all new homes in Maine were built to this standard.. I can assure you, the global energy crisis would begin to look very different. In Belfast, we will be building this vision next year, in a sustainable development of 36 homes at the Belfast Area Cohousing and Eco Village…

As a small business owner, I see a huge opportunity in the state of Maine to provide quality, energy-efficient housing that people can afford to build and heat. I also see the opportunity to generate local, skilled jobs to meet that demand. But to move the current economy and people’s awareness to where this future can be realized, intervention is necessary.

The American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 is the type and scale of intervention that is required to realize this vision.

The key components of this legislation that benefit Maine businesses such as G•O Logic, include:
Updates for new construction to the National Model Building Energy Codes and Standards. Which would require a 30% improvement of energy efficiency now, and a 50% improvement of energy efficiency by 2016, with the eventual goal of creating net zero buildings.
One key requirement in the Act is that all improvements made to buildings must be cost-effective over the life-cycle of the building.

Now, how realistic is it to improve energy efficiency by 50% in a new home? Entirely realistic! G•O Logic has developed home designs that reduce energy consumption by 90% for space heating, and 80% overall. These houses look and feel like custom-designed, conventional homes. The energy-efficiency comes from very basic, design improvements—thicker walls with a lot more insulation, better passive-solar utilization, and an air-tight envelope coupled with a heat-recovery ventilation system. These homes are cost-effective because, even at today’s energy rates, the simple payback on the improvements is only about 10 years.

This legislation also creates an entire market for new green jobs. It provides funding for existing homes in Maine to have an energy audit. Based on that, a plan of action will be created and implemented to improve each homes performance. The higher the energy performance achieved in the renovation, the greater the tax incentives become. So now when I look at the thousands of old homes in Maine, I see an emerging market for green jobs that are local, skilled, and valuable to the economy.

This legislation also provides funding incentives on a state level to achieve the goals of energy-efficiency in all new construction. And the higher a state performs on reaching these goals, the higher level of federal funding the state will receive. And given the industrious and hard working nature of the people living in Maine, I think Maine will be in a great position to reap the rewards of this type of incentive plan.
Finally, this legislation proposes to create a building energy performance labeling system, with the purpose of providing home owners both the insight into a homes long term energy costs, and place an increased value on high energy performing homes. It is the same thing as monitoring miles per gallons on cars. Soon each home buyer can evaluate their choices with new important financial information. For G•O Logic, this is welcome legislation, finally there will be a federal certification establishing home energy performance, which will spur on the demand for energy-efficient homes.

The American Clean Energy and Security Act that is now before the Senate can open new doors to future green jobs, a green economy and energy security. G•O Logic, among other innovative companies in Maine, is ready to help lead the way, with the skills and vision necessary to implement this ambitious plan. Supporting this bill provides the support for a green future in Maine.

I am all for economic stimulus- especially stimulus headed in my direction. Given the new administration, and that I am in the business of building super energy-efficient homes that save homeowners money and the planet a lot of pain and suffering, you would think I would be buried in Stimulus, right? Sort of- but not really.

The recent Stimulus act extended, and in some cases, expanded tax breaks for weatherizing your home (insulation, windows, roofing material, etc). Given the poor energy performance standards of most in this country- that is a good thing. The recent Stimulus act is also getting behind renewable home energy systems like wind, solar, and geothermal. And while expensive renewable energy systems are not the most cost-effect way to spend your tax dollars when it comes to saving energy, why not? They look cool, and it gives your neighbors something to aspire to.

But here are the rubs about the rules in the new Stimulus Package:

RUB 1. Existing vs. New Construction: When it comes to energy efficient improvements to homes, insulation, roofing, windows and door tax credits only apply to old houses! If you are building new, you need to foot the bill for the energy efficient upgrades yourself. Doing the right thing with building shell upgrades (which is the most cost-effect option for saving energy) in new construction is not supported by Uncle Sam! One could certainly make the case that older homes need more help with improving their efficiency- but the fact is, depending on how you build a new home, it needs the same amount of upgrading if you really want to make a dent in the global energy problem. So, if tax incentives are not used to improve new construction, then the government should raise the building code’s standards for new construction energy efficiency. Use a carrot or stick- but do something!

RUB 2. No Passive Solar: If you are renovating your old farm house in Maine, and you are going to be adding new windows to seal up the drafts, let the sun shine in and make the most of passive solar gain, I have bad news for you… The only windows that the stimulus package will pay for are windows that reject 70% of the sun’s heat energy that hits the glass! In other words, your south facing windows will loose more heat than they will gain. That sunroom you are renovating is going to be a net loser of heat with your fancy new stimulus-enabled retrofits! How?

Windows have two basic ratings to determine their energy performance. The first is the U value, which, in a nut shell, describes how much heat conducts through the window unit, (or how much heat it “loses”). The second rating is the SHGC (solar heat gain coefficient). This number describes how much solar heat energy passes through the glass (or how much solar heat the window “gains”). In a G•O Logic home, that SHGC number is .6, meaning 60% of the sun’s energy enters the home. The stimulus package window requires the SHGC to be below .3 or 30%. If you are in Texas that’s just fine, because Texas has many more days that you need to cool than days that you need to heat, so blocking solar gain is generally good. But in Maine (and the rest of the northern portion of the US), that number is a huge disadvantage! Solar energy is the largest free energy resource, and to think people will be incentivized by the government to avoid its use is crazy–is W. still in charge of the energy policy or what? To give an example of what a SHGC does to heat load in a residence in Maine, I revised one of our energy models to show the difference between the tax incentive windows vs non–tax incentive windows in a typical G•O Logic House.

tax incentive windows (.3 U, .3 SHGC) and the resulting energy use and space heating cost per year in a 1500 sqft G•O Logic Home:

253 gallons LP ($708/yr space heating costs with LP at $2.80/gallon)

non–tax incentive windows (.19 U, .6 SHGC) and the resulting energy use and space heating cost per year in a 1500 sqft G•O Logic Home:

94 gallons LP ($264/yr space heating costs with LP at $2.80/gallon)

That translates into a huge amount of wasted energy and money over time–the difference is approximately $444/yr in space heating! You will spend your $1,500 tax credit in extra heating costs in less than 4 years and you’ll be losing money every year after that. If the government is going to provide incentives to save energy, they should at least do something that will make a difference!

RUB 3: Alternative energy systems: A Photovoltaic (PV) array is a thing of beauty. I am glad there are tax incentives available for G•O Logic homes to upgrade to net zero using tax payers’ money. But the reality is, PV is expensive technology for the amount of energy savings it produces. For example, in Maine, if you invest an equal amount of money in upgrading your home’s shell (higher insulation, better windows, air sealing, etc) and buying a fancy PV array, the money invested in improving your home’s shell will be four times more effective in saving energy than the energy produced by the PV array. So, I am glad people are excited about making a statement about their belief in saving energy and the environment with using PV, but the reality is, I would prefer not to have my tax dollars spent that inefficiently!

Now, having said that, we definitely believe in adding PV to a home that has undergone thorough energy upgrading, to the point where its annual heat load is in the realm of 5,000-10,000 btu’s/SF, or a new house with the same specs (about 10x less enegy used than standard construction). Here’s how it would work: the G•O Logic 1500 home is modeling to be in the ballpark of 5,333 btu’s/SF annual heat load, and if we meet that load with an air-source heat pump with a coefficient of performance of 2.5, the electric demand to meet the space heating requirement is less than 1,000 kWh/year. At today’s electricity rates that’s $160 per year for space heating (in Maine!).

If we meet this heating demand with PV we’d only need an 800-watt array, grid-tied to supply energy to the grid when the sun’s shining, and to take back from the grid when the sun goes down. We’d pay $6,400 for the photovoltaic array to cover the space heating demand, get 30% back from the tax credit, for a net cost of $4,480. If we put that into a mortgage calculator at 5% interest for 15 years, we’ll pay $35 a month for it (we also get to deduct some of the cost of the mortgage interest for another little savings.) Over 12 months that’s $420, but you’re saving the cost of the electricity ($160) for a net cost of $260 a year for 15 years. At that point, and all along the way, who knows what the cost of electricity will be. If it rises 6% a year, for instance, in fifteen years the rate will be $.38 kWh, and now that 1,000 kWh will be worth $383, and you’re saving all of that, making up for the PV cost and then some in a short while. It’s a hedge investment, but one thing we can all be sure of is energy prices are not going to be going down in the medium-to-long term.

The big picture is that if the government is going to influence how and what we spend our money on with tax incentives, they should at least support investment choices that make sense for the entire country and verify that those incentives result in cost-effective energy saving solutions.

For more information see:

http://www.energystar.gov/index.cfm?c=products.pr_tax_credits#s1

At G•O Logic, we know we can build super energy efficient, beautiful homes at an affordable price. None-the-less we have always had trouble finding the right words to really express what the affordable thing is all about; Inexpensive, cheap, low cost, reasonably priced, affordable- those terms all seem to imply that the quality of our homes might suffer in order to keep the first costs (or construction costs) low. When in fact, that is the exact opposite of how we design and build! We do not use cheap alternatives like vinyl siding and vinyl windows- we don’t even use anything less than triple glazing! We build homes that are durable, great to live in and will save a huge amount of money and energy in the long term. But a G•O Logic home does not cost more than most standard construction because of how we have unified the design and construction of our buildings. But how can we really express that concept?!?
I have a motto when it comes to building performance and sustainability: “when in doubt, look to the Germans”. And so I did. In the most Recent issues of Detail, Review of Architecture, 2009, series 4, the entire issue is based on Kostenguestig Bauen, or “Cost-Effective Building” (not a bad term). The editorial article for that issue, titled “Cost-Effective Building Means Sustainable Building” (no doubt something was lost in translation), by Dietmar Eberle, is an excellent explanation of the very concept that we have been struggling to express… The concept being the delicate balance between first costs vs long term costs, assuming the building will be used long into the future. Cost-effective therefore relates not just to how inexpensively a house can be built, but what is the most effective use of our resources today and in the future… (It seems that in the US we have real trouble with that idea of planning for the future.) In reading the article, Mr. Eberle brings up a few good values that we share at G•O Logic as well.
1. Not too small! Building the absolutely smallest house for the sake of costs or material saving does not make sense. Cleary we should live with less, but reacting too far in the opposite direction is also a mistake. Take public housing projects- they are not being taken down because they are a delight to live in. Creating a floor plan with space and flexibility to accommodate various uses today and in the future is key. Overly small and specific space planning does not gracefully accommodate changing needs and results in obsolescence in the future.
2. Build the best shell! As designers and builders we cannot control how people live in the homes we build. We can, however, control how well the building shell will perform in the long term. Today millions of houses are being retrofitted and upgraded to make them more energy efficient. We knew the energy thing was coming since the 70’s, but conventional wisdom insisted, “why bother with building for the long term, when you can build dirt cheap today”? Alas, now all these homes are having expensive and rather ineffective retrofits being done to their shells- it costs less to do it right the first time! In addition, the building shell is the most expensive long term investment that a home owner will make… and like any financial investment, why not put your money in one that will perform well and save a bunch of money in long term?
3. Be local! The US is a big country with a huge variety of climate conditions. The way we design and build has everything to do with the local climate, and the specific climate is the one factor that will not change over the building’s lifespan- if it was cold last winter, it will be cold the rest of the winters as well. Not accounting for the most basic realities is crazy.
So how do we describe our homes: Affordable?, cheap? Inexpensive??? I think I like the sound of cost-effective. It makes sense for the planet, and it makes sense financially to do the right thing!

With the launch of our website we’re offering a line of homes that prove great design, comfort, unparalleled energy performance and reasonable cost can coexist. We’re not here to throw around now-meaningless terms like “green” or “sustainable” to describe what we do. Let’s accept it: every new building on earth has an environmental cost, either initially or over the long term (or both, generally). Here in the frigid north a building can be made to produce more energy than it uses through the application of renewable technologies, but only at an enormous cost. Net-zero is possible and certainly worthy, but it’s affordable only to a very few. G•O Logic is out to show the most sensible approach to reducing energy use in buildings is to push the envelope on performance and at the same time keep costs affordable to the average homebuyer.

We’re in trouble, folks. I just read “Heat” by George Monbiot. In spite of years of official ignorance of the problem, it turns out climate change was and is happening, and the outlook is so dire it’s almost too depressing to think about. But as Mr. Monbiot is a true optimist he spells out a necessary path to survival in the next 30 years: reduce carbon emissions by 90%, nothing less. What does this mean for energy use in buildings? Again, we’re in trouble. Buildings gobble up around half of all the primary energy  used in the world (way more than cars and trucks do), but since heating oil has been so cheap historically we haven’t been too compelled to do anything about horribly wasteful buildings. Monbiot cites the German Passive House concept as a reasonable, proven method to reduce energy used for space heating in buildings by 90%, the same as his target. The passive house idea is catching on the the U.S. and we at G•O Logic are designing and modeling our homes to meet that standard.

Specifically what can we do? Create buildings that use the very least amount of energy possible for the various needs we humans have: staying warm, bathing with hot water, and watching episodes of Lost on wide-screen t.v.’s. What we as designers and builders can do is build a building that does such a good job of keeping out the cold we need nothing but the most minimal amount of electricity or firewood or body-heat to keep it warm; specify the most efficient water-heating appliances coupled with a solar-thermal system to cover half the annual domestic hot water load; remove the t.v. room from the floor plan and specify furniture with built-in chess boards. Who said architecture can’t be manipulative?

But don’t these homes cost a lot to build? What level of energy efficiency are we talking about at what cost? In the next series of posts  we’ll look at the numbers to see if this plan is affordable and and the reduction in energy use achievable.