Northeast Sustainable Energy Association | Ben Sachs-Hamilton
Ben Sachs-Hamilton, Conference Coordinator of the Northeast Sustainable Energy Association, shares insights on sustainable building practices throughout New England. Discover how regional Pro Tours showcase cutting-edge facilities, including the new all-electric Burlington High School. Learn about low embodied carbon materials, indoor air quality benefits, commercial kitchen electrification, and innovative clean energy solutions advancing our progress toward Net Zero Energy. Explore how community members, building professionals, and local residents can engage with upcoming educational events and transformative regional sustainability networking opportunities.
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Ben Sachs-Hamilton, Conference Coordinator of the Northeast Sustainable Energy Association, shares insights on sustainable building practices throughout New England. Discover how regional Pro Tours showcase cutting-edge facilities, including the new all-electric Burlington High School. Learn about low embodied carbon materials, indoor air quality benefits, commercial kitchen electrification, and innovative clean energy solutions advancing our progress toward Net Zero Energy. Explore how community members, building professionals, and local residents can engage with upcoming educational events and transformative regional sustainability networking opportunities.
transcript
00:00 – Jennifer Green: Hello, Burlington and welcome to Net Zero Energy. I’m Jennifer Green, director of sustainability for the City of Burlington, where our goal is to reduce and eventually eliminate fossil fuel usage. Today, we’re really happy to have Ben Hamilton with us. Ben is visiting us from western Massachusetts as the conference coordinator of the Northeast Sustainable Energy Association. Ben, it’s great to have you.
00:34 – Ben Sachs-Hamilton: Yeah, thanks for having me here.
00:36 – Jennifer Green: So, Ben, maybe we can kick off by just asking you why you’re here. Why are you in Burlington?
00:41 – Ben Sachs-Hamilton: Sure. So I work for the Northeast Sustainable Energy Association, NESEA. And one of the programs that we do is a series of what we call pro tours. Tours of high performance buildings and building sites all over the northeast. And we have a tour tomorrow at the New Burlington High School together with my colleague Davis. We’re going to be running that tour tomorrow.
01:03 – Jennifer Green: We’re really excited about that. We’re really excited to be able to showcase this building, which we think is a critical building, not only for Burlington, of course, but we think New England as well. Do you want to talk a little bit about the tour and then maybe more generally, sort of what NESEA does when you’re not in Burlington?
01:19 – Ben Sachs-Hamilton: Yeah, sure. For our pro tours, like the one tomorrow, we partner with a local host in this case Burlington Electric to open up these sites and allow people to come and learn from members of the building project team. What makes it a special project, what makes it a special building? We have an opening presentation from the project team. And then we usually divide up into groups and tour around, see different parts of the building and learning directly from the people who made it, which is, I think, really what makes this pro tours program unique and special. We run a series of these tours all through the year for all different building types. Recently I’ve been on actually, we had another tour of a school building in Boston, the Josiah Quincy Upper School in Boston, but also residential buildings, commercial buildings. We had a tour recently of the non-profit headquarters building in New Hampshire. The Monadnock Conservancy headquarters were really sort of all over the map for different building types. Whatever people are interested in, we try to give them a chance to learn from these buildings up close and personal.
02:36 – Jennifer Green: Yeah, I love that. And we were talking before about who these tours cater to. So obviously building professionals, building scientists, but also the general public. Is that right?
02:46 – Ben Sachs-Hamilton: Yeah, absolutely. You know, some of the talk can get into the weeds on the technical building science. But, you know, I’m not a building science professional and I always learn a lot from these. And we often do have, you know, homeowners or just people who are interested in learning about sustainability and about high performance building practice, who come along and learn a lot on these tours.
03:09 – Jennifer Green: So BED, of course, is proud. We’re proud of what we could offer to make the building what it is. And of course, we’re so proud to have you all here to tout it amongst sort of the wider New England group of building professionals and others. So thank you so much for that.
03:24 – Ben Sachs-Hamilton: Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, we go through a proposal and review process for the Pro Tour series every year. We got lots of proposed projects, and we have a committee of NESEA members who review and select the ones that are the most promising. And so, you know, this is one that people were excited about when they saw the proposal. And we’re glad to make it a reality.
03:49 – Jennifer Green: So, Ben, we think you have a special connection to Burlington, which maybe made it especially interesting for you to read the proposal.
03:55 – Ben Sachs-Hamilton: I don’t go on all these tours, but as soon as I learned about this one, I made sure to sign up because I actually grew up here and I graduated from Burlington High School. So I’m excited to go and see the new, the new building, the new iteration of that school.
04:09 – Jennifer Green: Yeah, great. We’re so happy to have you come back. I know it’s been a big hit for a lot of alums. My daughter, who is many years out at this point, is very excited to come home and to get a tour as well. So I’m just going to encourage people to go to the website again, that’s Northeast Sustainable Energy Association, although you’re going to miss this tour by the time you hear about the podcast, there are others in the area. Do you want to highlight any that are coming up?
04:33 – Ben Sachs-Hamilton: If you go to the NESEA website, nesea.org, you can see all of our upcoming pro tours, as well as other events, conferences, other programs that we do.
04:44 – Jennifer Green: What are you finding that’s most interesting to possible participants? Of course, in Burlington, we’re excited about the all electric high school and celebrating that. What else are you touting on the Pro Tour series?
04:58 – Ben Sachs-Hamilton: Because there are so many different building types, it really is all over the map, but I think some things that I have seen really be popular and raise a lot of interest recently are certainly electrification and creating, you know, Net Zero or Net Zero ready buildings with incorporation of rooftop PV or other renewable sources. Also the use of bio based materials and the increasing consideration of embodied carbon as well as operational carbon continues to be a hot topic in the community. And then also, especially for buildings like schools, there’s having it be a healthy indoor environment and a conducive environment for students and faculty and staff, indoor air quality and lighting and all of the pieces that go into making it a healthy building.
06:02 – Jennifer Green: Anything in particular about the high school, Ben, that’s noteworthy to folks?
06:05 – Ben Sachs-Hamilton: Yeah, I mean, for a building of this scale to be all electric is still pretty cutting edge and really a model for other large scale sort of institutional building projects to show that it can be done.
06:23 – Jennifer Green: Yeah. Agreed. And we’re especially happy here at BED because it’s helping the city advance its Net Zero Energy strategy, which is essentially reducing and eventually eliminating fossil fuels in buildings. It’s also a testament to our building electrification and carbon impact pollution fee ordinance, which is quite a mouthful. But essentially that says if you’re building a building, any new building, you can go electric. This building is a testament to the power of the building electrification ordinance as well. So we’re really excited about that here in the city more generally.
06:57 – Ben Sachs-Hamilton: Another thing that I’m interested in seeing and learning about in the tour tomorrow that I don’t know much about, but I’ve just read about is the all electric kitchen at the school. As someone who doesn’t know a lot about how these things work, that seems like a big undertaking to have a fully electric industrial institutional kitchen. And I’m interested in learning more about how they put that together.
07:21 – Jennifer Green: I think what’s also pretty phenomenal is that we have kitchen electrification experts, nationally recognized experts that happen to live here in Burlington, who are sort of part of that whole design process. And then again, with rebates and incentives, we’re able from BED, we’re able to help bring it to fruition. And just to come full circle, you mentioned you talked about indoor air quality. And of course, not having burning gas in a kitchen is huge. So yeah, really excited that the tour will focus on that.
07:50 – Ben Sachs-Hamilton: Yeah. I mean, all of these things support each other, right? The health components, the embodied carbon components and the operational energy efficiency and energy use reductions. They all reinforce each other as part of what makes these projects so exciting.
08:06 – Jennifer Green: Yeah, exactly. So on that note, what are you excited about that’s coming up? And for folks that want to know more about NESEA and maybe join you on tours in the future.
08:15 – Ben Sachs-Hamilton: Yeah, absolutely. So we have several more pro tours coming up through the fall and into the early winter. The next couple, we have one on October second in the New York Capital Region tour of an under-construction passive house multifamily housing development. And then on October thirtieth, we have a tour in Connecticut of a low embodied, carbon straw panel based farmhouse. So two very different building styles from the school, something for everyone. My role at NESEA is primarily actually working on our conferences, which are our flagship events. And so I would be remiss if I didn’t talk up our Building Energy NYC conference, which is happening on October fifteenth in New York. It’s a full day conference and trade show with accredited sessions and presentations from sponsors and opportunities for people from all across all the different fields of architecture and engineering and policy and finance and building and developing to really learn from each other about what are the cutting edge developments that are happening across all of those fields.
09:33 – Jennifer Green: Great. Well, thank you so much, Ben. We really appreciate hearing about some of the pro tours that are coming up, your conference that of course, anyone can register for. Thank you so much for making that happen and sharing our successes with the wider community.
09:46 – Ben Sachs-Hamilton: Yeah, absolutely. And you know, if anyone wants to learn more about NESEA and our various programs and events, we have lots of things going on. Definitely check out our website. We also are a membership organization at heart, and so if anyone is interested in joining as a member, either as an individual or as a business, that comes with benefits for reduced pricing for our events and programs, but also access to our whole network. We have a jobs board, we have a business directory and there’s lots of ways to plug into this regional community of practitioners and we hope you’ll check it out.
10:30 – Jennifer Green: Great. Thank you so much, Ben. We really appreciate having you.
10:33 – Ben Sachs-Hamilton: Thank you.
10:37 – Jennifer Green: Thank you again for listening to Net Zero Energy from Burlington Electric Department. If you have any questions about this show or what BED offers regarding rebates or technical support, look for us at burlingtonelectric.com or call us at 802-865-7300. We’re here to help you on our mutual path to Net Zero Energy.