A symposium on Net Zero buildings was held on 6 and 7 March in Gainesville Florida. The event was organized by Dr. Charles Kibert, who heads the Powell Center for Construction and Environment at the University of Florida. Professor Kibert was supported in the organization by Dr. Robert Ries, Director of the Rinker School of Construction Management at the university, and was given much organizational support by Lantz Holtzhower, who is completing his Ph.D.at the university.
The last series of national and regional SB Conferences has recently concluded with sixteen SB13 events. The World SB14 Barcelona Conference, www.wsb14barcelona.org will take place on 28 to 30 October 2014 and promises to achieve an even higher profile.
Canada Wood Korea, in collaboration with the Korean Society of Wood Science Technology, held a full day workshop on February 22, 2014 in Seoul to examine progress in technologies and policies towards net zero energy housing in Korea. Among the invited speakers from Canada and Korea was iiSBE Canada member Ken Klassen.
The Canadian iiSBE team consists of about 20 experienced professional engineers, architects and researchers from across Canada. The team has submitted projects to all of the global SB conferences since 1998 and has six projects lined up for the WSB 2014 Barcelona conference.
Previous SB Challenges have relied on national or individual teams to present projects with predicted performance data generated during the design phase. This year, the SB Challenge process is focusing on a comparison of predicted performance with actual performance, as recorded after at least two years of occupancy. We anticipate that this approach will be more relevant to the industry and the research community.
The four international co-promoters of the SBE conference series have agreed to relax a requirement related to the timing of the proposed SBE17 global conference. Instead of limiting the dates of the event to Q3 or Q4 of 2017, proposals for Q2 are now also welcomed.
Nils Larsson, series coordinator
.jpg)
