HomeMy WebLinkAbout5/21/2024 Item 7b, Schmidt
Richard Schmidt <
To:E-mail Council Website
Subject:Agenda comment -- Residential Retrofit proposal
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Re Residential Energy Retrofit Program May 19, 2024
Dear Council,
This proposal is not ready for adoption.
It will do more harm than good. It will result in greater carbon emissions than in most instances doing nothing.
It is in fact further evidence of the point I made in my other letter for this meeting, that those “leading” the city simply don’t
understand energy/carbon cycles, life cycles of stuff, or embodied carbon. Nor do they understand how buildings work.
I don’t have time to comment on the whole thing, but looking at the energy efficiency measures of Table I shows how
crazy the program is. R-49 Attic Insulation is worth 2 points! R-49 – are you kidding me? That quantity of insulation in our
mild climate is over the top nuts. It’s stuff being manufactured and installed that’s ridiculous and 100% unnecessary and
counterproductive. We don’t need R-49 insulation in SLO! Furthermore, why focus exclusively on something like
excessive attic insulation when there are many other effective mechanisms to cut heat gain through the roof, like cool roof
materials that cost no more than hot roof materials, or things that insulate and cool the roof like a green roof? None of this
is rocket science, but apparently none of it’s on the city’s radar.
Then there’s the R-30 Floor Insulation which is given 10 points! Again, this shows total ignorance of energy and heat flows
and how buildings work. Heat rises. Relatively little is lost through the floor in our mild climate. So how in the world is
profligately over-insulating a floor worth five times as many points as profligately over-insulating a ceiling where heat is
actually trying to escape? This is nuts. R-30 floor insulation should never be used in a normal house in SLO.
So, you might ask, what – aside from monetary cost to the homeowner – is the problem with over-insulating? Isn’t more
insulation always good? Unfortunately not. Insulation is stuff that’s manufactured and has its own carbon footprint. The
thing that’s killing the earth is our lust for more stuff, and excessive insulation being mandated by a well-intentioned but
poorly-informed city is a great example of how good intentions help pave the road to climate hell.
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I’m not making this up about excessive insulation producing a higher carbon footprint than a smaller amount of
insulation. One of the favorites of some green designers is a protocol called Passive House in North America, or
Passivhaus in its native Germany. The pretext is basically you design and build a very tight super insulated house that
can basically be heated in a cold climate by a light bulb (slight exaggeration, but you get the point). This is not to be
confused with a passive solar house; when people have tried to meld Passive House and passive solar they often end up
with dwellings too hot to inhabit.
Well, some Passive House adherents became concerned about the huge amount of extra stuff it takes to build such a
house, and like all stuff this stuff has a carbon footprint, so to test their concerns they modeled the life cycle carbon inputs
into such a house (that is both the embodied carbon of all the stuff plus operational energy for the building’s anticipated
life), and guess what they discovered? In many climates, building to the full Passive House standard resulted in a larger
carbon footprint than building to a lower standard that was slightly less energy efficient, but plenty good enough!! Why?
Because of the extra embodied carbon of the extra materials required to achieve the Passive House standard. And these
were hard-core Passive House fans who discovered this and proposed, in the interest of climate science, backing off from
so much insulation.
So yes, too much is a bad thing.
As a licensed architect who’s worked decades with energy responsive building design, and also as the “most radical
environmentalist in the world” according to a prestigious design publication (thank you Metropolis for the honorific, if only I
deserved that!) I find the city’s direction on this most discouraging.
I’m urging you therefore NOT TO APPROVE THIS SET OF RULES because it’s an incoherent mess that will do harm in
the name of doing good. Everything that purports to be green is not good for the climate.
Richard Schmidt, Architect
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