Buildings and Beyond - Steven Winter Associates, Inc‪.‬ Steven Winter Associates

The International Energy Conservation Code (IECC) or "model code" establishes the minimum requirements for building energy efficiency. The code is updated every three years, and for 2024, a new consensus-driven development process brought together diverse stakeholders to determine those requirements.

However, the International Code Council's Board of Directors recently voted to go against consensus and remove mandatory provisions relating to building decarbonization from the 2024 draft.

In this episode, host Robb Aldrich interviews Gayathri Vijayakumar, Principal Mechanical Engineer at Steven Winter Associates and a voting member of the 2024 IECC Residential Consensus Committee, to find out… what happened?

Episode Guest

Gayathri Vijayakumar

Gayathri is a Principal Mechanical Engineer at Steven Winter Associates. For over 18 years, she has specialized in evaluating residential and multifamily buildings with an emphasis on high-performance construction and renewable energy systems.

Early in her career, Gayathri provided technical assistance to sustainability projects by performing energy modeling and conducting cost-benefit analyses of energy efficient measures in both new and existing residential construction. She leveraged that experience for her current role: providing consulting to federal, state, and local agencies, codes, and programs to develop emerging standards and procedures that involve energy efficiency and indoor air quality requirements. This includes the EPA’s ENERGY STAR® Multifamily New Construction Programs, where she has provided technical support since 2008, and more recently, their Indoor airPLUS program.

Gayathri is also an active contributor to various technical committees that share a goal of improving codes and standards. She currently is a voting member of the 2024 IECC Residential Consensus Committee and Chair of RESNET’s Standards Development Committee, SDC300.

When is it the right call to improve the energy efficiency of existing building systems, or upgrade and electrify them?

Though electrification is important to reduce carbon emissions, electrifying buildings is not straightforward. Factors like cost, existing infrastructure, compliance needs (and we’ll say it again: cost!) can keep building owners from going all-electric.

In this episode, Buildings + Beyond co-host Robb Aldrich catches up with Ryan Merkin, Vice President of Business Development at BlocPower (and a SWA alum). They discuss the eight areas Ryan considers when deciding to focus on efficiency vs. electrification:



* Building height

* Planned capital expenditures (CapEx)

* Current system condition and remaining useful life

* Heating energy source: oil and electrical resistance

* Existing systems: Individual/unitized vs. central

* Packaged terminal ACs (PTACs) and through-wall sleeve ACs

* Regulatory drivers (LL97, ESG, etc.) and incentives

* Metering: who pays what now; who would pay in the future





Note: This episode was recorded in December 2023. Mentions of “next year” are referring to the year 2024.

Episode Guest



Ryan Merkin

Ryan Merkin is Vice President of Business Development with BlocPower. He is an experienced leader with over 20 years in the building science and energy consulting industry. Ryan has a demonstrated history developing decarbonization projects for new builds and retrofits. He is skilled in the delivery of consulting services for low energy building design, electrification, engineering and retrofit studies, energy code adoption and compliance, DER strategies, solar design, smart building system integration, utility and incentive programs, and professional training.

Prior to joining BlocPower, Ryan was a Vice President and Director of Multifamily Energy Services for 13 years with Steven Winter Associates. Ryan is active in the New York metropolitan area engineering community as board member and former President of Association of Energy Engineers New York City Chapter.

Ryan received a bachelor’s degree in Mathematics from University at Albany, State University of New York and Master of Science in Geosystems from MIT.

Episode Information & Resources

BlocPower projects:



* Clean Heating for a Beloved Preservation Organization

* Multifamily, Low-Rise Home With Heating System at the End of its Cycle

* A Solar & HVAC Retrofit for a Multifamily Building



We Want to Hear From You!

Send your feedback and questions to podcast@swinter.com.

About Buildings and Beyond

Buildings and Beyond is the podcast that explores how we can create a more sustainable built environment by focusing on efficiency, accessibility, and health.

Buildings and Beyond is a production of Steven Winter Associates. We provide energy, green building, and accessibility consulting services to improve the built environment. For more information, visit swinter.com.

Hosts: Robb Aldrich | Kelly Westby

Production Team: Heather Breslin...

Buildings are complicated. There’s a bigger learning curve than ever for the people who construct, operate, and manage high-performance buildings—and there’s more demand than ever for skilled workers across the sustainable building industry.

In this episode, Ellen Honigstock, Senior Director of Education at Urban Green Council, sits down with Kelly Westby, Managing Director of the Building Operations, Decarbonization, and Efficiency (BODE) team at Steven Winter Associates. They chat about what it takes to effectively educate the workforce to ensure occupant comfort, energy and carbon reductions, sustainability, and the overall performance of a building.

This is a crossover episode! Go to the Building Tomorrow: Conversations with Climate Solvers podcast feed to hear Ellen interview Kelly about all-things building commissioning.

At the baseline, “healthy” materials should not have a negative impact on people living or working inside of a building. Beyond that, there are materials that have a low impact on people and the planet throughout their entire lifespan—and then there are materials that can have a net-positive impact, such as those that absorb carbon from our atmosphere.

Jonsara Ruth, co-founder and Design Director of the Healthy Materials Lab at Parsons School of Design, joins this episode of the Buildings + Beyond podcast to discuss the spectrum of materials and resources available. Jonsara chats with guest host Sarah Nugent about how to phase out toxic ingredients and select materials that are healthy and affordable.

Over the lifespan of a building, operations and maintenance staff arguably have the biggest impact on system performance and energy efficiency. With the right training, staff can keep a building running as it was designed to run and "create the change" to reduce energy usage, reduce repairs, and upgrade vs. replace equipment.

So how do project teams create O&M training programs that achieve all this?

In this episode, producer and guest host Dylan Martello chats with Luis Aragon and Heather Nolen—two O&M training experts at SWA—about balancing in-person and digital education, accounting for every learning style, breaking down language barriers, sustaining the training for the long term, and much more.

What happens when you put four sustainable building experts involved in energy code development in a room and ask them to bring their favorite—and sometimes, most controversial—topics for discussion? You end up with more questions than answers!

In this roundtable episode hosted by Robb Aldrich, our guests ask each other these tough questions related to our nation's energy codes:

Performance Metrics: How can energy codes be simplied? Is energy utilization intensity (EUI) a viable alternate metric?

Gas Bans: If jurisdictions cannot ban gas, how can we put electrification in the energy code?

Embodied Carbon: How should embodied carbon accounting be incorporated into energy codes?

Robb's Bonus Question #1: How are buiding inspectors dealing with complicated energy codes?

Robb's Bonus Question #2: Should there be electric vehicle (EV) charging requirements in energy codes?

Episode Guests

Gayathri Vijayakumar, Principal Mechanical Engineer on SWA's Residential Building Services Team

Karla Butterfield, Sustainability Director on SWA's Residential Building Services Team

William Zoeller, Director of Building Enclosure Services at SWA

Dylan Martello, Senior Building Systems Consultant on SWA's Passive House Team

Host: Robb Aldrich, Principal Mechanical Engineer on SWA's Residential Building Services Team