Over the past two years, the Smart Buildings Center (SBC) has been performing a Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI) self-assessment to analyze SBC program reach, participation, and success rates in Washington State to establish baseline metrics and set goals for improvement. This work was born out of a discussion with the SBC Board of Directors about the need for a more critical examination of our work and the role we can and should play in supporting a more equitable community. The following provides an update on the self-assessment, which remains in process, and highlights some initial steps the SBC has taken to leverage opportunities to promote equity. Once the self-assessment is complete, SBC will develop a DEI action plan with annual reporting to the Board of Directors on progress.

As an initial step of the self-assessment, SBC worked with the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) through technical assistance provided by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Better Buildings Workforce Accelerator to develop a replicable and scalable dashboard that analyzes BOC Program participant diversity, and systemic barriers to success amongst specific groups, to provide staff with a baseline on current program participant diversity that can be leveraged to set goals and track improvement over time. PNNL produced two reports detailing the development of the dashboard and the analysis results which are summarized and linked below. The BOC Program, which trains building operators and facility staff in efficient building management, reaches a population that spans forty states. Staff started the self-assessment with the BOC Program because it is our largest program and consequently provided a substantial opportunity for impact. While the program spans forty states, this initial analysis was conducted on the Washington State program; we hope to expand this work more broadly in the future.

The analysis included 1,658 Washington State BOC training and certification candidates over a ten-year period (2010-2020) and utilized self-reported zip codes (home or work) in conjunction with U.S. Census, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and Washington State demographic, socioeconomic, and environmental health data to draw conclusions. Because gender was the only demographic indicator available for some candidates and a work address rather than a home address was only available for other candidates, the results are not 100% accurate, but show important trends and opportunities for improvement. It is also important to note that participant location (home or work) does not necessarily mean participants are members of represented demographic and socioeconomic groups.

Most BOC program participants included in the analysis are from the Seattle-Tacoma area with clusters of participants from other large and mid-sized cities such as Wenatchee, Yakima, Tri-Cities, and Spokane. The majority of BOC certification program participants were male (52%), followed by female (24%) with the remaining 24% not specifying a gender. Fifteen percent of certification program participants identified as military veterans but only one identified as a female veteran. The sectors with the greatest representation were Property Management (23%), City/County Government (17%), Healthcare (13%), Other (9%), College/University (6%), Utility (6%), Hospitality (5%) and State Government (3%). Participants are skewed towards communities with higher than average (state-level) education and lower percentages of residents who are linguistically isolated. Participants are more likely to come from counties that are predominantly White and non-Hispanic and experience lower levels of poverty. Women are also underrepresented in the BOC training program and the disparity increases from BOC Level I, where 11.82% of participants are women, to Level II, where 8.95% of participants are women.

The analysis identified opportunities across a range of areas including:

• Opportunities to expand outreach and participation in rural communities, including agricultural areas in central and southeastern Washington
• Opportunities to expand outreach and participation from underserved census tracts in urban areas or in areas bordering large cities including South Puget Sound, some areas north of Seattle such as Northgate, Everett, and Fairmont, the Spokane Valley, and North Spokane
• A need for additional research to identify strategies and support pathways for expanding opportunities for women in facilities maintenance, operation and management

In addition to examining the SBC’s Building Operator Certification (BOC) program, staff have also examined data from the annual Smart Buildings Exchange conference and will soon conduct a DEI survey to gather and analyze data from SBC staff, the Board of Directors, SBC partners, Northwest Energy Efficiency Council (NEEC) members, BOC instructors, BOC graduates, SBC event speakers, and Tool Lending Library members. While we intend to use this analysis to form an action plan and to establish thoughtful, meaningful objectives and strategies that stem from that analysis, we also saw an immediate opportunity to expand diversity in our partnerships by offering a complimentary Women-Minority-Owned-Business-Enterprise (WMBE) SBC Partnership Level. At this level, partners can promote their businesses with logo placement in all places where partner logos are included and receive a featured blog post to further spread awareness of their products and services.

If you would like to learn more about SBC’s DEI efforts, including our complimentary WMBE SBC Partnership Level, upcoming DEI survey, and expanded outreach efforts, please contact Britton Rife.

BOC Training Program Analysis Report
BOC Certification Program Analysis Report

Increasingly, across the United States and abroad, building owners are implementing comprehensive Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) programs. ESG programs provide a framework for assessing and managing risks stemming from a range of environmental, social and governance factors. This trend is fueled in part by an increasing understanding of the looming danger of climate change across a range of potential outcomes from financial risk to human health and wellbeing. In many jurisdictions, the push for ESG reporting is also coming from the regulations that are being imposed on buildings, largely driven by the urgency around climate mitigation actions. It is widely accepted that climate warming stops when Greenhouse Gas emissions stop. In the US and elsewhere, this is leading policymakers to focus on greenhouse gas mitigation through regulation of emissions. By far, the two largest sources of emissions in the United States are transportation and buildings. If we are to stop or even slow climate change, we need to lower emissions from cars and buildings.

Policies aimed at buildings take two different approaches. The first is to target buildings directly through regulation of building site emissions, such as the forthcoming commercial building performance standard from the City of Seattle. The second approach targets the energy system that provides buildings with electricity, space and water heating. Policies aimed at decarbonizing the energy system ultimately affect the availability and pricing of electricity and other energy fuels, and often come in the form of policies that regulate power sources. In Washington State, the legislature passed the Clean Energy Transformation Act, which seeks to eliminate carbon from electricity requiring electric utilities to shift to carbon free power sources. Given this plan to decarbonize electricity in Washington State, the state energy strategy recommends an overall electrification pathway (for buildings and transportation alike) as the least cost pathway to meeting the state’s greenhouse gas emissions targets. The authors of the strategy point out that such a pathway will increase the electrical load by roughly 92% over the 2020 level. You hear similar estimates from other states and even national calculations. In the climate space, there is widespread agreement that to stop climate change, we need to achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2050 and that “clean electricity” fueling our buildings and transportation is essential to success, but it will require a groundswell of innovation and new technologies to get there.

What does this mean for buildings? What role do smart buildings play in the clean energy transition? Will this all amount to increased costs in building ownership or are there financial benefits and opportunities for building owners who convert to smart technologies to support the transition? At the Smart Buildings Center (SBC), these are questions we have been asking industry leaders and will continue to explore in our programming. We believe smart buildings have an essential role to play in the transition to a carbon free economy and we believe there is great economic potential for building owners who lead this transition with grid-interactive technologies, systems that align with grid needs and clean power production, onsite battery storage, onsite EV charging and innovations around how those technologies are leveraged, and more smart technologies, approaches, and practices that will recruit high tenancy and support the social and economic goals of the community in which they reside.

We plan to continue to push these discussions through the SBC programming, stay tuned for more to come along these lines, and in the meantime, check out the recordings from some of the discussions that have already taken place—and don’t miss this blog post from our partner organization, NEEC.

2020

• Smart Buildings Week – Grid-Enabled Efficient Buildings

2021

• Smart Buildings Exchange 2021 – Opening Plenary Panel – Smarter Buildings and a Changing Utility – a Vision of the New World of Energy
• Smart Buildings Exchange 2021 – Grid-Interactive Efficient Buildings
• Smart Buildings Exchange 2021 – Buildings and Carbon
• Smart Buildings Exchange 2021 – Deriving Value from Smart, Interactive Buildings

2022

• SBC Executive Forum – Electrification & Grid-Interactive Efficient Buildings, part 1
• SBC Executive Forum – Electrification & Grid-Interactive Efficient Buildings, part 2
• Smart Buildings Exchange 2022 – Senior Executives Discuss the Future of Energy Services and the Built Environment
• Smart Buildings Exchange 2022 – Building Performance Reporting – How Smart Technology Can Help
• Smart Buildings Exchange 2022 – Grid-Interactive Efficient Buildings
• Smart Buildings Exchange 2022 – the Role of Smart Buildings in Reducing Carbon Emissions