BrightBuilt Barn: a Super Green, Prefab, LEED Platinum Net-Zero Building

At the New England Sustainable Energy Association (NESEA) conference in Boston this week, the BrightBuilt team gave an update on the Barn project – past, present, and future.

And it’s the future I want to talk about here. On Wednesday, we announced the start of the next BrightBuilt sustainable building project: BrightBuilt 2: Deep Energy Retrofit. In collaboration with NESEA and with the US Green Building Council of Maine, the BrightBuilt team is initiating a new open source collaboration, this time aimed at developing solutions for decreasing the carbon footprint of the 135 million existing dwellings in the US.

We chose a retrofit for our second project because:

1. Designing reproducible solutions for green remodeling projects is inherently more difficult than doing the same for new construction, because of the extreme diversity of the existing housing stock, and the uniqueness of each particular building’s materials, construction, systems, and history.

2. Each year, we build perhaps 1 million new homes in the US on average, compared to the 135 million existing homes. Even if we build each new home to NetZero standards, so that they have a carbon footprint of zero (which is highly unlikely in the near term, at least), these supergreen new homes will lower the average carbon footprint of our total housing stock by less than 1% per year, and will do nothing to lower the absolute amount of carbon being emitted by the existing homes.

3. A large percentage of existing homes are highly energy-inefficient: poorly insulated, not weathertight, with antiquated systems and appliances.

So,it’s clear that the greatest challenge, as well as the greatest opportunity, for decreasing the carbon footprint of housing in the US, is to find practical, affordable methods for increasing the energy efficiency of existing homes.

The BB2: Deep Energy Retrofit project will be run in several phases. First, we are looking for a building in need of renovation. It needs to be owned by a nonprofit organization (because we will be soliciting donations of time, materials, and money for the project). The nonprofit organization needs to be willing to take responsibility for the bulk of the funding of their renovation, and willing to work with the BrightBuilt team over an extended period to accomplish the goals for the project. We are soliciting nominations for appropriate buildings now, so if you know of a worthy NPO that’s thinking about a green renovation of its building, send us the details in an email to info@brightbuiltbarn.com.

The process of selecting the building from among the nominees will be open and transparent, and all interested parties will be able to give input via links from the BBB website.

Once the building is selected, the NPO will receive discounted services, discounted materials, and at least $10,000 cash towards the cost of the renovation.

The design for the deep energy retrofit will be developed in an open source way, with anyone able to contribute their ideas. We are looking to build a community of green professionals and enthusiasts, in order to advance the state of the art of green retrofits, and make them more affordable, accessible, beautiful, and reproducible.

Once the design is set, we will keep you updated on the process of construction, so we all can see how the designs translate into reality. All designs, specifications, and lessons learned will be available free on the web for anyone to use.

And finally, we plan to monitor the performance of the building for at least a year after the retrofit is complete, again to see how reality matches up with theory.

Please join us as we launch this exciting and important endeavor. A link on the front page of our website will take you to a fuller description of the BB2: Deep Energy Retrofit project, with information on how you can get involved.

I hope to hear from you soon!

Keith Collins