Photo courtesy of The Green Engineer Inc.
Chris Schaffner
Founder and CEO, The Green Engineer Inc.
Age: 63
Industry experience: 38 years
When developers want straight talk about how to comply with an increasingly bewildering thicket of green building regulations, many turn to Chris Schaffner. In 2005, Schaffner founded his Concord-based consulting firm, The Green Engineer, to put his mechanical engineering background to work as a consultant in the building sector. Since then, The Green Engineer has represented a who’s-who of major developers on notable projects, from The Hub on Causeway to Bulfinch Crossing. In the past year, Schaffner’s firm has been advising hundreds of property owners in Boston on whether they’ll face fines for not meeting the city’s building emissions standards, also known as BERDO.
Q: What was the impetus for you to found your own consulting firm?
A: We’ve been around for 21 years as of May, working in the Greater Boston area with all kinds of clients over that time period. I wish I could say we were doing a lot of development work right now. Those projects just don’t seem to exist at the moment. It’s interesting to see, with the Boston permitting. Once upon a time, getting anybody’s attention at City Hall was difficult, and these days the Boston planning people are having office hours because they’ve got seemingly very little to do sometimes.
I’m a mechanical engineer by training, and I worked with several firms including Arup in Boston. I realized there was an opportunity to specialize in that with a smaller firm. We’re now about 20 people, so it’s been a good run. Our client portfolio has changed a little bit. In 2005, we had a lot of institutional work, colleges and universities who had set climate action plans. These days, most of our work is on the multifamily side, but not a lot is on the boards at the moment.
What we do see now is a lot more interest in existing building-fit-out-type projects: people moving into a new building. We still see a lot of corporate clients who want to bring sustainability and building health, especially. It’s not just climate, but also healthy building materials.
Q: What are tenants considering in their fit-outs?
A: They’re thinking about materials and human health and air quality, especially. They really focus on finished materials and furniture. Tenants are still looking at some kind of green building certification. With InterSystems at One Congress, we did LEED for building interiors. Other times we’re working with the WELL rating system, which looks more at health and well-being and the human experience: everything from ventilation to water quality. There’s a big focus on biophilia, so you’re bringing nature or natural patterns into buildings.
Q: How are the new MEPA regulations on greenhouse gas analysis and alternatives affecting projects?
A: Massachusetts has really pushed the envelope on climate. Especially in a city like Boston or any urban area, a huge part of the greenhouse gas footprint has to do with how buildings use energy. If a project is big enough to target the MEPA Act, they have to do a greenhouse gas analysis.
One piece is looking at the transportation impacts. The other is the building itself: how is the building going to use energy? It requires the proponent to do an early analysis of that, and commit to specific strategies, and ultimately require that owner to certify that the building has done that. So we help with that. We run computer simulations of the proposed buildings to estimate the energy consumption and therefore the greenhouse gas emissions.
The other hurdle we have with the state are the new energy codes. We’re upped our energy codes the last few years, and we have three tiers now in Massachusetts. Cities and towns that have adopted the top tier, the specialized code or the opt-in code, are requiring you to be all-electric in your new building, or to put accommodations in place to allow future electrification. So most building types just go all-electric to begin with. Some of them, like a hospital or a laboratory building that’s got a lot of air going through it, will still do a hybrid approach where they’ll do some electric and some fossil-fuel heat, for the very low temperature situations.
The third piece is various cities and towns are incorporating sustainability into zoning in some way. And then the other piece that lays on top of that is the BERDO or BEUDO requirements in Boston and Cambridge. Boston’s go into effect this year. So, buildings now are reporting their 2025 emissions in 2026, and if they’re over the limit, they’re going to owe money.
Q: Are power-hungry building types like hospitals and labs having trouble complying with BERDO in Boston?
A: What we’re seen is in this first go-round, the limits are pretty high. So, we’re not seeing buildings hitting those limits, except for some very rare cases. We’re doing third-party verifications for people for their reporting this year. We’ve done approximately 130 verifications, and I don’t have any clients that are expecting to owe anything this year. They’re all looking at 2030 and 2035 as the time when they’re going to start to see a penalty. For developers with multi-tenants, they’re trying to figure out approaches. We’ve got one client who is looking at potentially not renewing a restaurant and instead trying to bring in a retail tenant because the restaurant has so much higher consumption.
Q: What do clients say concerns them the most in terms of budget-busters on projects?
A: Folks who are doing life sciences are still trying to figure out how to be all-electric. The lab market has dropped off a lot from where it was, but Boston and Cambridge are still a leading area of the world for labs, and there are still developers interested in building out labs. Geothermal is definitely an option for projects. I appreciate we have very strong codes and overall that’s been a good thing. But we’ve actually made our codes the strongest in the places where we need to build the most. In the opt-in code communities, the only option for building multifamily is to do Passive House. It strikes me as good if we’re trying to get residential buildings built, we should make those pathways a little bit easier.
Schaffner’s Five Favorite Boston-Area Green Buildings:
- MIT Baker House Dormitory
- The Artists for Humanity Epicenter
- The Hub on Causeway
- Maria Hastings School, Lexington
- Boston University Duan Family Center for Computing and Data Sciences
