(F10) Decarbonizing Multi-family Housing Development: Actionable Pathways to GHG Emission and Building Cost Reduction with Industrialized Construction

With a shortage of over 5M homes in the U.S, a widening gap between supply and demand is causing surging home prices, putting homeownership out of reach for countless Americans. The obvious answer is to build more housing at a lower cost per door, but with construction costs rising faster than incomes, without fundamental market reform, housing will generate increasingly negative economic, social, and environmental impacts.

Despite the need for more housing, there is the uncomfortable reality that the building sector contributes to 40% of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and 50% of landfill waste. Net Zero Energy (NZE) has served as a tangible preliminary target for high-performance buildings in certification programs and building codes. But as new buildings become more energy-efficient, the GHG emissions from the construction process often have a larger environmental impact. There has been limited research into the trade-offs between site-built and industrialized construction buildings in reducing the incremental costs of NZE strategies and embodied operational GHG emissions. In response, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) published its 2022 report, Decarbonization During Predevelopment of Modular Building Solutions. 

With Vertically Integrated Modular housing developer Blokable’s standardized housing unit as the basis of its research, NREL’s report details actionable pathways for homebuilders to reduce NZE incremental costs and significantly reduce GHG emissions by 2030 with advanced building construction. The peer-reviewed research found Blokable capable of eliminating 60% of GHG emissions and 91% of material waste from new multi-family housing creation through a three-phase development framework for financially viable high-performance projects.

In this session, NREL Senior Energy Efficiency Research Engineer Shanti Pless and Blokable Co-CEO Aaron Holm will share how productized modular builders can utilize this new development framework to benefit from the learning effects of industrialized construction and achieve scalable and sustainable NZE multi-family housing creation.