CEA’s Commitment to Healthy Existing Buildings (HEB)s

The goal of the CEA HEB Initiative is for CEA to become the institutional bridge between policymakers and the market, pulling together the story, the best practices, and the recommendations to transform the existing building stock into HEBs – healthy buildings that use energy responsibly and support California’s decarbonization and electrification goals. Development of ideas related to healthy buildings have been largely focused on the strategies themselves and the direct impacts on people’s health and wellbeing and have not considered energy and environmental implications.

Initiative Priorities

• Research, Collaboration, and Exploration: HEB will collaborate significantly with the CEM and OBA Working Groups on a number of topics that either intersect or overlap Working Group content areas.  It is intended that CEM and OBCS will be incorporated into the HEB approach.  Surveys and interviews to expand knowledge and gather insights will be conducted.  Work being done in municipalities in California on building performance standards will be reviewed and Title 24 Part 11 (CALGreen), and 189.1 Standard will also be reviewed for insights.

• Energy Best Practices: Explore energy implications of health and wellbeing strategies and develop best practices for energy in HEBs. Quantify non-energy benefits. Demonstrate links between HEBs and productivity, absenteeism, etc.  

• Holistic Strategies: Build a series of end-to-end HEB strategies to promote within California to building owners and municipalities. Illuminate the critical nature of building operation and maintenance and highlight pressing issues and if possible, offer potential solutions. Evaluate typical as well as reach design strategies, connectivity strategies, Commissioning strategies, operations and maintenance protocols, and fault detection and diagnostics.  Energy and cost justification at various steps of these strategies will also be evaluated.

• Materials Creation: A new website is envisioned as a resource for California to guide the rehabilitation and retrofit building market toward HEBs as well as fact sheets, white papers, short videos, pamphlets, and policy recommendations. Develop tools to entice building owners and manufacturers and designers to invest in HEB technologies and practices.

• Policy Recommendations: Develop recommendations for municipalities on the incorporation of HEB principles into their performance standards.  Create pamphlets or short videos to promote HEB system attributes, holistic strategies, and energy best practices to large building owners.

• Workforce Standards:  A continuous issue in the development of healthy buildings is ensuring that new and existing healthy buildings are designed by licensed engineers.  Furthermore, the installation, and maintenance of related healthy building components and systems are completed by skilled, trained, and certified technicians. For a project to achieve design intent, the design and related equipment must be installed and maintained correctly.