13 - Beth Eckenrode - AUROS Group
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[00:00:00]

James: Hello and welcome to Marketing Passive House, the podcast where we hear from architects, designers, suppliers, builders, owners, and other experts in the passive house and high performance building space. We'll be talking about what's working and what's needed when it comes to marketing buildings that meet or aspire to the passive house standard. I'm your host, James Turner, and today I'm joined by Beth Eckenrode, co-founder at AUROS Group. Beth, welcome to the show.

Beth: Hey James. Thanks for having me today. I appreciate it.

James: My pleasure. So before we get into it, and for people who are just meeting you for the first time, could you share a little bit about who you are, what you do, and how you started on your passive house journey?

Beth: Sure. So my career was, has been circuitous, I think, and a little bit opportunistic. I started my career in the chemical industry actually. And graduated with an engineering degree from the University of Wisconsin. Went, went into the chemical industry and then migrated my way from the chemical industry into the food [00:01:00] industry.

Beth: Got my MBA at Northwestern when I realized there was a whole big world out there outside of chemicals. And I thought, well, food's kind of important. So I was Chief Strategy Officer for the HJ Hines Company and I probably fell out of love with corporate America. Earlier than most and just found myself in a point where I wanted to think about what I might be able to do on my own and how I might be able to add value by using my skills for something that felt a little more purposeful.

Beth: And so I spent a few years trying to figure out where to go. I looked in all different types of industries 'cause by that time I was comfortable jumping industries.

James: Nice.

Beth: met my business partner, Craig Stevenson. And re we realized we had kind of a bit of a shared passion for solving really gnarly problems.

Beth: And he came at it from a construction perspective and I came at it from a strategic perspective [00:02:00] and we set out, when we built AUROS group, we set out to answer one question, and that is to be able to answer for owners, did you get what you paid for?

James: Hmm.

Beth: And Craig had on, on the construction side, Craig had soured a little earlier in his career around this notion of just checking boxes, hanging a plaque, and calling it a day.

Beth: He had a real desire to try and generate a more data oriented approach to high performing buildings, and I had an interest from a strategic standpoint of bringing innovation and change to an industry. That doesn't like innovation and change the construction industry does not re, does not do well when somebody wants to try something differently.

Beth: So for me that was a really interesting strategic problem to solve. So we built AUROS group and in answering for building owners, did you get what you paid for? We had to go very deep in building science and that's where we [00:03:00] kind of found that unlike prescriptive standards, the passive house. Standard was one that was so performance-based.

Beth: It, resonated with us because it was all about proving, building performance and, taking an approach where you would use very good and clear building science. To make decisions about how to build a high performing building. And so we're certified in everything because, you know, we never wanna be the hammer looking for the nail.

Beth: So we have all the requisite building performance standard certifications inside of AUROS group. And we're a small team. But we have a lot of certifications. We do that just because, you know, we wanna make sure we've, we stay current and we've got the chops on the building science side. But even after we spent four or five years.

Beth: On the building science side, proving that passive house is in fact the best fundamental strategy for building a building. We still couldn't [00:04:00] answer the question for building owners. We couldn't answer, did you get what you paid for? Because of course, passive house doesn't require any proving of performance in operations.

Beth: You have to prove certain elements, but you don't have to holistically prove that the building met a certain level of performance, which is fine. But to answer the question, we had to go as deep on the data science side as we, we went on the building science side, and so AUROS Group sits in the center of building science and data science.

Beth: We bring together these fields. And we can talk more about kind of how we do that, but we bring, bring, we bring these fields together and we've now built a product that brings physics-based modeling and simulation together with operational data so that we start to pull building scientists into the world of data science.

Beth: And we do that because. Without building scientists at the table, data becomes an artificial intelligence machine [00:05:00] learning conversation. It becomes about, you know, does the history of a building properly demonstrate what the future of a building could be from a performance standpoint standpoint, most building scientists will say, no, it doesn't because you're missing the modeling and the simulation of the building's potential.

Beth: And without that piece of context, it's very hard to demonstrate for a building owner what the right path to the future performance of the building is. It becomes a transactional conversation and not a strategic conversation.

James: Interesting. Very interesting. And as, as you were saying that, I wondered if there could be an add-on to the, the passive house standard for like how the building performs over one year, like, like a, a recording to get like an even higher certification or

Beth: my, my guess is we're, we're less than 12 or 24 months away from [00:06:00] being able to stream data to a passive house institute or passive house, institute us stream data to them in operations and completely eliminate all the other steps before that, because. There's a way to think about data that if you can get it into the hands of the standards, people who know more about buildings than you know anybody on the planet, right?

Beth: If you can stream them data on performance, they can very quickly tell whether or not that building meets performance requirements depending on what data you send them. But if, if we start to kind of pull apart the pieces of building performance, is there a way we could. Get to a point where you just stream them data and they give you certification.

Beth: That, that I think is a question for people who are really schooled in this space in both building science and data science. And I know there are some, us included trying to figure out what the best pathway to doing that is. I,

James: Yeah, that's very [00:07:00] interesting. Like in a world where you don't need a resume, you just need proof that you can do the thing

Beth: that's right.

James: you're supposed to do.

Beth: And that that is part of, I think, the problem Passive house, the challenge to the subject you even asked me to come here and talk to you about, that's the challenge, right? For

James: Hmm.

Beth: Scaling Passive house is can owners feel confident that they achieve their results? And this question of did I get what I paid for is, is an important one.

Beth: And not because passive house costs anymore, we are some of the practitioners. Out there today that having enough experience that we say passive house doesn't cost you a dollar more,

James: Yeah.

Beth: it, it, it's nonsense to think, I mean, if you just rationally walk through it, it's nonsense to think it should cost a dollar more.

James: Right.

Beth: so for us, the, the things you pay more for and the things you save money on when you build a passive house building, especially when you start to push the limits of size and go out to like where, you know, the [00:08:00] largest. Existing building renovation that we've done to a passive house standard is a G-S-A building in Washington, DC that's 1.5 million square feet.

Beth: And so it achieving passive house levels of performance gets easier the bigger the building. And so that this idea that somehow it just automatically should cost more. It's just a function of experience. We say all the time to people, and I hope other people pick up this line. Passive house isn't a premium, it's a learning curve.

James: Right.

Beth: And so I, you know, I hope people get enough confidence that they feel comfortable telling developers and building owners. AVAs isn't a, a premium, it's a learning curve because that, that has started to resonate with a lot of folks for us.

James: Yeah, I bet so, and I, I, I thought about that context of the, the, you get, the more more sense it makes. But do you, do you think now I'm, I'm not trying to, know. I won't hold you to this necessarily, but do you think that that's true even at the smallest [00:09:00] scale, that it shouldn't cost a dollar more, or do you think that there is some kind of point where,

Beth: Yeah. I think it depends on what you're comparing to. If you're comparing passive house to the worst building, somebody's legally allowed to build, and that happens a lot in the world of affordable housing.

James: yeah.

Beth: If you're comparing to the worst building, you're legally allowed to build in areas that don't have progressive codes or don't have current codes.

Beth: Yeah, you might start when you get to a smaller building, it might start to be a premium. We don't do a lot of single family homes. But I do think that there's this comparator question. Yes. As codes increase and and advance in driving performance, as codes start to require air barriers, as codes start to require blower door testing, as codes start to require things that are demonstrative of a higher performing building, then I think the step to a passive house from that is [00:10:00] inconsequential.

Beth: Financially, it's an inconsequential, but it could be very meaningful from a building performance standpoint because as as passive house practitioners know, when you pursue passive house, you're not only getting really great energy performance, you're also getting indoor air quality, thermal comfort, acoustical performance.

Beth: And why would you ever leave those things on the table? Simply 'cause code doesn't require.

James: Yeah.

Beth: Those are things that for me are easy to explain to people Why you, you'd go the extra mile and you actually get certification.

James: Yeah. Yeah, it makes me think of like, you can buy. Really, really cheap shoes, but they'll be uncomfortable and you'll need a new pair in, you know, two months. And how many pairs of really cheap shoes will you buy in the time that you could have just bought one nice

Beth: It's exact, it's exactly right. It's a great analogy.

James: Yeah. Thinking about the selling of the passive house though we, we've talked before this

Beth: Yeah,

James: about the fact that really. The best way to sell it is to not talk [00:11:00] about it.

Beth: yeah

Beth: yeah. We've come to, we've, we've come to understand that some owners and developers over time have. Equated passive house to this idea of I can't afford it.

James: Hmm.

Beth: And so sometimes the whole idea of passive house is thrown out before you ever even get the chance to have the conversation about whether or not it should be a premium because of preconceived notions.

James: Right,

Beth: So we kind of have taken the approach on all of our projects of we just embed passive house as a, as a strategy. For every building that we'll tackle, whether somebody's planning to certify or not. And then as we get into the conversation, we start to sprinkle in the idea of a standard that, you know, there is a standard that governs and guides this type of performance, and we sprinkle it in.

Beth: In the beginning we talk more about zero [00:12:00] energy. Or zero energy ready or decarbonization depending on where people live. Those, those approaches are well understood and very much appreciated. When you layer it with passive house, it seems to take, have a connotation of. Either my, my teams don't know how to do that.

Beth: They don't have the experience of delivering a passive house certification or it's cost prohibitive. And so it gets kind of just summarily ruled out and versus other national standards that some funders accept. Passive house is a, a better standard, but if you can't get them having the conversation with you, if you can't get them to open their minds to.

Beth: The actual results,

James: Right.

Beth: you lose them. You lose the argument before you get even get into it. So we spend more time talking about goals. Every project [00:13:00] we take on starts with an owner's project requirements, and that owner's project requirements is a like a nine and like a nine and a half, or maybe 11 by 14 sheet of paper that covers all different areas of building performance.

Beth: And it's only at the very end do we start to even. Contemplate a conversation around standards. We really talk more about what performance do you want from your building? How are you gonna view success of your building when it's running? And then once they start talking about energy, once they talk about reducing the amount of renewable energy that they need in order to get to zero, once they start talking about indoor air quality

James: Mm-hmm.

Beth: and.

Beth: Thermal comfort. There are a lot of our clients that have at-risk populations where acoustics are very important. Sometimes acoustics jumps to the top of the list of, of performance requirements. Once we've teased [00:14:00] all those out, it's so much easier to have a conversation that educates people on the benefits and the virtues of a passive house standard.

James: Right.

Beth: So we very rarely, if ever, lead with it unless somebody comes to us and says, I need this for funding purposes. I need the certification, or pre-certification for funding purposes. Otherwise we don't, we don't typically lead with the passive house conversation,

James: Right. That makes sense.

Beth: but there's not a project that we do. James not a one where passive house underpins everything from a building science standpoint.

Beth: With us. It's embedded. The other, the other standard that we embed along with passive house is the RESET air standard. And we do that because indoor air quality, particularly in areas that are trying to keep outdoor air quality outside of their buildings where you've got fires or any, any type of air, air quality issues.

Beth: We also, we marry and we [00:15:00] pair. The passive house performance with RESET air performance because it's set up, it's a performance standard, just like RESET air or just like passive house is RESET, doesn't want to know what your design intentions are. They wanna know how your building actually performs. And that's what gets you certification.

Beth: But all of the strategies, strategies around delivering indoor air quality at the RESET air level of performance are the same strategies

James: Nice.

Beth: Low energy performance through passive house. So we marry those two up all the time.

James: That's great. I'd never heard of that standard before.

Beth: Yep. It's, it started outta China.

James: Well,

Beth: and it has, has, has some pretty hefty practitioners here in the United States, but it started in China.

Beth: It was, the standard was built in China because I, I guess if a little bit like New York, if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere. If you can build a, a, a really healthy indoor quality building in China, you can build one anywhere. So [00:16:00] it's, it's we, we find it to be a very nice partner standard with, with with passive house.

James: Nice. Yeah, that's great. I like when it's like a stack, a stack

Beth: Yeah.

James: of standards that, that work well together and

Beth: A stack of standards all predicated on the same building science, which is really elegant.

James: Mm-hmm.

Beth: building science is the same to deliver both.

James: Right going back to the. What you're really selling isn't passive house. It's, you know, the thermal comfort and quiet and so on. Something that's kind of intrigued me and that I found when we talked prior to this about that the larger scale buildings that I find, I, I think it's interesting to tease out what the salient points, the, the pain points addressed or the desires of people who are building these giant buildings with loads of, units, be they commercial or residential versus the, the homeowner who you, you're just selling them their home. They're gonna live in it. Do you have [00:17:00] any have you noticed a sort of like cascade of, of what's important to whom?

Beth: Yeah. And it, it, it, it runs the gamut, right? I would say, you know, some people lead with this idea of getting to zero in the most cost effective way, which, which again, the minute somebody says, we don't wanna overpay for renewables, we're like, okay. They understand the basics, the, the basic tenants of passive house, even though they might not be able to articulate it that way,

James: Right.

Beth: but they, they understand that that.

Beth: The idea that you can take a building that's performing at, let's just call it a hundred e UI, and incrementally improve its energy consumption by reducing it to a 80 EUI or a 75 ui. They have to pay to get to zero. They have to pay the balance in renewables in a renewable strategy of some sort, which is massive.

Beth: If you take that same building and you explain to them that they could get from a hundred EUI to a 20.

James: Right.

Beth: all of a sudden, the amount that they have to spend on renewables to offset to [00:18:00] zero is, is, you know, significantly less.

James: Mm.

Beth: And I would say that is the element of zero carbon and zero energy that many big portfolio holders are starting to understand

James: Right,

Beth: that you don't wanna simply use a renewable strategy.

Beth: It's the, it's that natural order of sustainability, right? You gotta tackle your, your, your passive systems, your envelope first. Then you have to tackle your active systems, and that then buys you the right to have a really great right sized renewable strategy. But a lot of, a lot of people start with the renewable strategy.

Beth: Like, well, let's just throw up a whole bunch of PV

James: Mm-hmm.

Beth: and we'll offset as much as we can with pv, and then we'll start to see what we can do by, by taking a building to heat pumps and we'll incrementally improve. How much, how much energy we can save by moving over to heat pumps. But what they've done effectively is they've now inoculated their building for [00:19:00] 30 years till they're ever gonna make another big decision to renovate that building without getting to, it's what we call its optimum performance potential.

James: Mm-hmm.

Beth: And the beautiful thing about passive house practitioners is whether they call themselves , passive house practitioners or not, they are experts. Getting to a building's optimum performance potential because that's what the building science drives you to reach,

James: Right.

Beth: and that's what PHI and PHIUS have done such a great job.

Beth: Demonstrating is what's possible for an existing building, what's possible for a new building. And so practitioners of these standards, more so than practitioners of any other standards, they understand how to reach a building's optimum performance potential.

James: Right, and I guess that would speak to the portfolio holders who are steeped in sort of the ideas of opportunity cost and what to do with my money to best invest it and that sort of thing. Right. They're,

Beth: That's right. That's right. [00:20:00] And while we've seen a change in political pressure to do some of this at the federal level, local governments, local jurisdictions don't seem so quick. To wanna throw in the towel on getting to zero energy, especially as they've been so educated on this idea of triggers. Like when you're going to go touch a building, that's the time to figure out what's what.

Beth: Its optimum performance potential is. If you miss that, you lock yourself up. And so I think a lot of portfolio holders of large buildings are starting to say, we have to get smarter.

James: Mm,

Beth: how, how good our building can be, how good our building could get in terms of energy efficiency

James: right?

Beth: they move forward on any tactical renovations or tactical ECMs.

James: Yeah. And so, I mean, ultimately it's the money. At that high level, right? Like, not,

Beth: Yeah, I mean, [00:21:00] we did.

James: cynical about, you know, the comfort and the air quality, but they're not gonna be in the building. So their, their prime motivator is.

Beth: Absolutely. I mean, here's, here's a, here's an interesting case for you. We, we were brought in to do to help, right, build a decarbonization plan for a four or 500,000 square foot building in Boston. And their, their, their going in question was, how do we avoid BERDO fines? And so we walked them through, we did modeling and simulation.

Beth: We walked them through the process and showed them how to reach their building's, optimum decarbonization potential, and what the steps would look like in the order of how they felt they would invest in a building based on natural triggers. And they, what they started out trying to do was avoid a million and a half dollars or two and a half million dollars worth of fines.

Beth: They ended up finding is over 25 years, if they got their building to the optimum performance potential, [00:22:00] they would save $90 million over 25 years.

James: Wow.

Beth: So,

James: And

Beth: and, and, and avoid the fines. But then, but the fines ended up being, you know, the, the tail that wag the dog kind of thing. Right, right. Like, like you're going after the tail, but you're missing the whole dog.

Beth: And the, and the, the point was that. Passive house requires you to think holistically and drive what a building's capable of achieving from a building science standpoint. Once you do that, this, this idea of the envelope never pays. You know how people always say the envelope never pays? When you're driving to a 70 or 80% reduction in energy consumption, the envelope absolutely pays,

James: Yeah.

Beth: but you have to change your, the pr, the way you look through the prism of energy.

Beth: Consumption and energy savings, right? You have to, you have to stop this idea of incremental improvement and you have to go to what's possible.

James: Mm-hmm.

Beth: That's the piece that we haven't yet [00:23:00] gotten, even all of the passive house practitioners talking about the same way.

James: Right.

Beth: so, you know, there's a, an education and I will, I'll give big.

Beth: Big credit to what I see from passive house practitioners and passive house organizations, whether they're PHI oriented or PHIUS oriented, or they're affinity groups on a local level or building innovation groups, the BIG groups, all of the people who are part of these groups are so generous and so gracious with their expertise that.

Beth: I think that bodes really well for, for the future. But the challenge I put to those very same people is you're thinking too small. Go after these buildings, take the same, the same things, you know, to be true on what you've done in smaller buildings, and don't be shy about pushing forward and having [00:24:00] the same conversations about an airport.

Beth: Or a hospital

James: Right.

Beth: or a university building because like, like we said in the very, very beginning as we started talking, it's not more difficult to achieve passive levels of performance. It's actually easier.

James: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah, that's resounding. Going back to that example, it made me, as you were saying about the, the Berdo Berdos, is it B-B-E-R-D-O-S? That's the

Beth: AlBERDOo, B-E-R-D-O, that's the Boston energy ordinance.

James: So I, I, I thought, oh, you know, that's an interesting case of the, you know, if the legislation wasn't there, they wouldn't have had that conversation about trying to avoid the fines.

Beth: Correct.

James: and. Whatnot is important, but at the same time, the the giant, the dog was actually sitting there the whole time and whether the fines were there, whether the legislation was there or not, that was the would be

Beth: That's, that's the win. And the [00:25:00] problem is if we keep doing things the way we've always done them, right, it's the, it's the, you know, it's the definition of insanity is expecting a different result, but you don't do anything differently. In our, in the case of, in our industry, what we have to be doing differently is.

Beth: When an owner comes up and says, Hey, I got a boiler getting ready to blow and I gotta replace my boiler, if that owner isn't told. Stop right there. This trigger is so big. We need to run this analysis for you and we need to show you what we, what your building's capable achieving, and then we need to build a plan on how to get you to that level of performance over time.

Beth: And we need to start to marry ECMs up in a way. Make most the best use of every dollar spent. That's how we talk about it to our clients, is you have to think about where am I spending my next dollar, and how do I get the biggest return from my next dollar?

James: Mm.

Beth: That requires looking at things holistically, where what happens right now is because owners don't know any better.

Beth: They call their, you know, local MEP, and they [00:26:00] say, you know, Hey, I, I've got this, this piece of equipment getting ready to blow. I gotta replace it. And the IEP starts saying, well, you know, you wanna electrify anyways. Let's go ahead and take you to heat pumps. And so that work is done to make a swap and they'll get more, they'll get better energy results.

Beth: But it's incremental.

James: Yeah. Yeah.

Beth: It's not, it's not everything that they could get if they look holistically. And that's something that we definitely need to do a better job of.

James: Right, right. I, do you find that, I'm struck by the, it's a more logical appeal, right? Like, but, but when you're working with business businesses at that scale, it is a logical thing rather than an emotional thing. I mean, there may be the emotion of being the person that. Got this win, or you know, like I'm sure that there's an emotional component as there always is, but it's much more proving with numbers.

Beth: For sure.

James: is a really good idea as opposed [00:27:00] to on the smaller scale where you're usually saying like, imagine if your house felt wonderful all the

Beth: Yeah,

James: you could sit by the window in the winter and be perfectly comfortable and that sort of thing.

Beth: yeah,

James: Yeah.

Beth: yeah. That, that is one of the reasons why we are. Strong advocates of a basic level, a minimum viable measurement and verification in every building we touch. Because if owners don't start to grasp data and start to understand how to use data, not only to get a building to a Pacif house level of performance, but to keep it there over time,

James: Right.

Beth: you have to have a basic level of measurement and verification.

Beth: And for us that's, you know. Utility meters, maybe a couple of indoor quality sensors. A way to aggregate the data and a way to display the data doesn't cost a lot of money to do it at a minimum viable product level.

James: Right.

Beth: And [00:28:00] we advocate for that because we have to start imposing on owners this idea of. You need to know now how your building's performing, but it's much easier and much less expensive to have the data available that helps you keep that building performing over time.

Beth: Much easier to do it now, much cheaper to do it now. If you try to do it later, it's gonna cost you a whole lot more money.

James: Mm.

Beth: And there, there, like I said, there's a minimum viable product around the data science side,

James: Yeah.

Beth: That, that is pretty easy to achieve on any building affordable, multifamily. It's easy to achieve.

Beth: We're talking less than $10,000 a building,

James: Hmm.

Beth: it just gives you, now the, it flips the lights on and gives you the ability to answer the question, did I get what I paid for

James: Right,

Beth: My, my view, James, is that at some point in time, anybody giving money for a building to achieve any standard is going to require data flowed back to them on building performance.

Beth: Maybe not on all [00:29:00] elements of building performance, but. At least for energy and indoor equality, they're going to require that because it gives them more confidence when they go to underwrite projects. It gives them more confidence when they go to, you know, offer a team

James: Mm-hmm.

Beth: the incentives that they put forward for different types of standards.

Beth: And I, again, I think it's one to two years out. I, I think NYSERDA might be the first one to get there.

James: Mm-hmm.

Beth: I don't even think NYSERDA is the, to the full, to the full place that I think they could be based on what they have and the influence they have. They should be getting stream data for every single one of their buildings.

Beth: And again, it's not, it's, there's no confidentiality issue. This is data at a whole building level,

James: Mm-hmm.

Beth: not data on an indi individual unit basis. It's just data on a whole building performance. And it should, it should be required.

James: yeah. That immediately made me wonder when the first firm offering a guarantee. A performance guarantee

Beth: Yeah,

James: would would come along,

Beth: that's a tough one because [00:30:00] performance guarantees, unless you control all the ECMs, like ESCOs do, ESCOs offer performance guarantees, but they also control all the work. So they're only going to do the things that they know they can return on. The light bulbs, the heat heat pumps that you, they're gonna do the things that they have more control over, which I would too if I were them.

Beth: If I'm giving somebody my money,

James: Mm-hmm.

Beth: You know, I'm gonna wanna control the risk. And the, the other problem with straight up guarantees is a lot of the results is a function of the education of tenants. And the choices tenants make. And that is the one thing that we can't control the way we might, the way we might want to is, is tenant behavior.

James: Right, right. And if you're guaranteeing it to the building owner, not if it was a, a single family, you could say, you know, don't do this. Do this.

Beth: Good point.

James: of this range, the guarantee's off

Beth: Yeah. Very [00:31:00] good point.

James: like a, if you, you know, try to unscrew your iPhone or whatever, then they're like, okay, we're, we're not gonna back that up anymore.

Beth: Yeah, yeah.

James: Wonderful. Well, this has been great. Before we go where it would be a good place for people to find out more about you online and also maybe you could mention your book.

Beth: Oh, sure, sure. So we wrote a book a couple years ago. It won an award. For environmental Book of the year. It's called The Power of Existing Buildings and. Essentially what we did was we took an approach to educate building owners. It's, it's written in a way that building owners would understand in terms of how building science and data science are both equally important in, in thinking about how to get an existing building to zero energy or healthy and indoor air quality.

Beth: And so you can, it's the, you can just kind of Google power of existing buildings and it'll come up on.

James: Nice.

Beth: you can find it at Amazon or on at Island Press, which was the publisher. Our company website [00:32:00] is AUROS Group A-U-R-O-S group.com. And then what we've recently come out with is a, is a, our first product, our first software product called AUROS Insights.

James: Hmm.

Beth: It's the product. I kind of talked a little bit about in the very beginning where we're trying to bring building expert, building science experts into the data science world and give them a way to drop in physics-based modeling and simulation into an operational technology data environment where they can do decarbonization planning.

Beth: It automates scope one and scope two. Carbon emissions. You have a separate context for fault detection and diagnostics that shows how a building's capable of performing. It changes the whole idea around how commissioning is done and allows you to do more interrogation based commissioning, using simulation to, you know, simulate various scenarios.

James: Mm.

Beth: So there's a lot of, value to, and I think stickiness for building science experts to be long term at the [00:33:00] table of their clients when it comes to future choices and, and future decisions.

James: Nice. Yes. I think that's great. This, the, the long term at the table is a, a great way of looking at it.

Beth: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Building scientists should be making these decisions, not not being told what to do by data scientists. I mean, that, that's a little nutty from our standpoint. You know, the, these, these are building science decisions and choices and, and they should be led by building science, by folks with building science expertise.

James: Makes perfect sense. Thanks so much for joining me today.

Beth: Thanks to you. It was fantastic, easy, and I can't believe how much time went by and so, so quickly.

James: Yes. Often the way

Beth: no, that's

James: again in a couple years and see where your predictions landed.

Beth: fantastic. I would love that.

James: sooner if,

Beth: Yeah.

James: come to fruition sooner.

Beth: Yeah.

James: Wonderful. Thanks, Beth. You've been listening to Marketing Passive House. I'm James Turner and I hope you'll join [00:34:00] me again next time.