Senator MORGAN. I think I mentioned yesterday one of my good friends, originally from North Carolina, is in this area and apparently has a good product. It just seems to me it is impossible for him to get it off the ground as long as he has to go on the dollar basis.

Mr. MEISEN. I think probably, even if produced, there will be better models developed. It is just like the military. Every time they produce an airplane, by the time the airplane is in operation, there is a better one in production somewhere else. But you have to buy planes sooner or later or you just don't have an air force. So you generally recognize the development is going to continue.

Senator MORGAN. I have asked many questions that the staff prepared. Let me make sure I get all of the answers.

We have talked about performance guidelines and efforts to work with other agencies. Would you comment on the proposal that these guidelines be mandated by legislation?

Mr. MEISEN. I think if all agencies could agree on some reasonable guidelines which all agencies would follow at a minimum, it would be very worthwhile. I think that such guidelines could be developed. I think the technical cooperation among agencies is such today that there is no doubt that as long as there are reasonably flexible guidelines, but yet very useful guidelines, that all agencies could pretty much go with them.

Senator MORGAN. I think the word flexible is important. On the Banking and Housing Committee, I opposed a bill that would have mandated guidelines, energy guidelines with regard to all federally assisted homes and so forth on the ground that they were making it almost impossible for the small home builder to build a home now. think maybe I would still do the same thing, but it does look like in the Government, if we made them flexible enough, we might be able to accomplish something.

I

Mr. MEISEN. I think they have to be performance oriented. One of the things in the prescriptive guidelines, especially in Government, is that they change so rarely, they become long obsolete before they are modified or updated.

Even if the agencies are lax, the performance orientation allows any innovations to automatically come in. It doesn't require that you spell out how many inches of insulation is needed in a house. Someone comes out with a new insulation where you can use much less, by the time the Government changes, it is 6 years later.

If

you just say what the use factor should be, not even say that, but what the total energy use is going to be, you can see the technology is encouraged rather than inhibited.

Senator MORGAN. What you are saying is that mandatory guidelines that are too stringent could defeat it?

Mr. MEISEN. Exactly, in the long run.

Senator MORGAN. The chairman's bill, S. 2045, takes site configuration into consideration, and also proximity to mass transportation among other things. How would these affect GSA's policies?

Mr. MEISEN. We already take those factors into consideration. The site configuration, we have found is one of the major factors in achieving energy efficiency. You can do all you want to design the building, but if you just orient it incorrectly, you won't be able to achieve good energy efficiency.

The orientation to mass transit, of course, has a much less direct impact on energy use as far as the building is concerned which certainly in the long run has an impact on total energy use in the United States, primarily, of course, in the transportation area.

Senator MORGAN. We talked about the Manchester building. Are there others across the country that GSA has set up as demonstration projects which we can point to and say, "Here is a GSA project that took into consideration energy conservation methods and practices?" Mr. MEISEN. Yes; but as you know, the Manchester one is the furthest along with the total concept. When we designed Manchester, we quickly saw that many of the things that we were coming up with were applicable to all Federal buildings. We more or less retrofitted them into other buildings that were in design or construction.

Task-oriented lighting, for example. Rather than putting as many lights in the building as we did, we put lights over the desks rather than over everything. As such, we have been able to get lighting down to as low as 1 watt per square foot where formerly we were talking between 4 and even sometimes 5 watts per square foot on buildings.

The Social Security Administration buildings that we built in Chicago, Philadelphia, and Richmond, Calif., are each lower than the average buildings. They are somewhat between 80,000 and 100,000 Btu's per square foot per year; but clearly, in the lighting area, they are well below. We used the life-cycle analysis in the award of those buildings, which weighed heavily on energy efficiency.

So there are a number of buildings underway and there are many private buildings throughout the country that are starting to also take the same initiative. I have to be perfectly frank. More than half of what we learn, we learn from what others have done.

We are not that imaginative that we know all the answers. We have borrowed wherever we could and the majority has come from that kind of borrowing. We are just trying to assemble it because we have a large number of buildings to utilize that information in.

Senator MORGAN. My thought is that, where these projects have been outfitted or retrofitted, as much attention as possible should be called to them.

Mr. MEISEN. Certainly.

Senator MORGAN. Again I am digressing, but does the Manchester building have a lot of windows?

Mr. MEISEN. Actually, the average part of the building has only about 10 percent windows, which compares to 60 to 90 percent in other buildings. However, we are not necessarily down on windows if you use them prudently.

The top floor is almost all windows because there we are trying to measure whether by using daylight and using electric lights it comes out more cost effective, energy effective, even though we need a little more energy to heat the buildings. There are many checks and balances.

So the top floor of that building, for example, and the second floor which is deeply recessed to put it in shadow, again is being tested to see if you use a lot of glass, but now substitute daylight in lieu of artificial light, it becomes energy effective.

We don't think it will quite prove out, but we thought we would try it, because we think there is no pat answer.

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Senator MORGAN. Has there been a trend, in the last 2 or 3 years, away from these all-glass buildings?

Mr. MEISEN. Very definitely.

Senator MORGAN. I saw an all-glass building in Boston, or rather they tried to make it all glass, but the glass wouldn't stay in it.

Mr. MEISEN. It is completed now. It is all glass. I think there are balances that can be achieved. We can go totally energy efficiency, but I don't think anyone wants to go in the cave either. I think we do want to see the outside. I think we do want glass in the buildings; but how we handle glass and shape, it is becoming more and more important. Senator MORGAN. There are just a couple more questions. I have been using this term life-cycle costing, but exactly what is it?

Mr. MEISEN. Life-cycle cost compares, if you use the analogy of an automobile, it says how much it is going to cost you to own that car over the life of the car. In other words, it says that if the car is going-let us assume the car is going to last 10 years.

It takes the first cost plus all of the costs that you are going to have to put into that maintenance, operation, gas, oil, tires-adds them all up and divides it by 10 years, and tells you how much it is going to cost you per year to own that car. If you do that for different cars that you are thinking of buying, you can figure out which one it will cost you the least to own.

It might indicate that a Cadillac will cost you more as the initial cost, but if in fact it costs less for gas and parts, less maintenance, it could show that that car, although it costs more initially, would cost you less in the long run. Perhaps the choice of Cadillac might have been the wrong car, but it doesn't matter what kind it is.

You analyze a building the same way, how much you spend for it initially, how much it is going to cost you in energy, cleaning, and maintenance throughout its life cycle.

I think it is interesting that all of these buildings give special emphasis to life-cycle costs. Our findings are such that you design for energy efficiency, almost invariably comes out cheaper than the first cost, except when you come to the area of solar energy.

Senator MORGAN. What do you mean by "Almost invariably comes out cheaper?"

Mr. MEISEN. Cheaper in first cost; in other words, retrofitting is a different picture. But any new building that you design from the start to save energy, will almost invariably come out with a lower first cost than it would have if you didn't design it for energy efficiency. So lifecycle costing does not become critical in most energy saving concepts. When we talk about solar energy, it is completely the opposite. As a matter of fact, at the cost of solar energy today, it isn't even cost effective when you consider life-cycle costing because of the cost of collectors today. We think it will quickly become cost effective over the lifecycle as the cost of collectors goes down through mass production and other techniques. We don't feel it is that critical.

We also feel-and that is what one of the people was trying to say yesterday that life-cycle cost which is in something that is going to last 40 years, obviously places a major emphasis on the cost of, let us say, electricity.

If I have the right to try to predict over the next 40 years what the electricity is going to cost, I can make that answer come out to anything I want. So we feel that the lifecycle efficiency without putting a dollar

value on it can be more helpful in analyzing the system used. It doesn't justify using higher costs, but as I say, in most cases, that is not necessary at any rate.

Senator MORGAN. In predicting a life-cycle cost, aren't there many variables that can be made to come out any way you want them to? Mr. MEISEN. Yes.

Senator MORGAN. I understand this theory is not really new, but isn't it relatively new in importance?

Mr. MEISEN. Yes. I think with the inflationary trends and rapidly rising energy costs, it becomes much more critical. I think most prudent businessmen in the private sector did automatically-they may not call it life-cycle costing, but they did it.

Senator MORGAN. We probably did it in our head, in building homes. We probably wondered, is electricity going to be cheaper, or oil, but nobody really got down to working it out scientifically.

We may have some technical questions to submit in writing. I know I have on Senator Hart's bill.

Mr. MEISEN. If I might make one comment, I think one of the gentlemen yesterday was trying to explain what he meant by the economic estimate or the energy use estimate as opposed to the energy utilization study.

What we are saying is at the time of the prospectus, a full energy analysis is not possible. What is possible is an estimate of the relative efficiency of that building which would be met. That could clearly be furnished at the time the prospectus is submitted.

It was our goal for the energy utilization in that building, the actual analysis looking at all different systems that would go into meeting that goal after the prospectus is approved.

Senator MORGAN. I think I follow you on that. If not, we will take it up later.

Going now to Senator Hart's bill, to what extent has GSA's effort in this respect been coordinated with ERDA's research and development program, and, also FEA?

Mr. MEISEN. We have a very close working relationship with both ERDA and FEA. FEA, of course, is more involved in the current status of how we use energy naturally and its involvement in Project Independence while ERDA is more responsible for the research and development for new techniques as for energy conservation as well as furnishing energy.

We think that both have clearly mandated roles in the total energy policies of the United States. We feel that in GSA, we have the inventory of buildings and so does DOD, as a matter of fact, have an inventory with which to actually apply some of the research and development. In fact, we would be anxious to apply some of the techniques even before they are proven over a period of years on the understanding that some will not prove to be as effective as we might have hoped.

Senator MORGAN. What do you think of the proposal that we would have to take into consideration the energy that went into products produced? Do you follow what I am talking about?

Mr. MEISEN. There were two aspects. One had to do with the energy use of materials in construction. I don't think that there is enough information available at the present time to do that. I don't think

that is practical to do at this point. I think we will come out to be very close on raw materials in their actual usage at any rate.

The fact that we look at procurement-I am assuming this means fans, motors of all types, anything we buy over 10,000-I think it is good in the sense that it will make manufacturers more conscious of the types of energy use and how relatively energy efficient their equipment is. I don't think you can determine the most energy efficient piece of equipment unless you know what system it is going to be used

in.

Senator MORGAN. Wouldn't that be reflected in the price?

Mr. MEISEN. In some sense, when you boil it down to a motor, to make a motor that uses less energy, clearly you have to spend a little more money for that motor. Yes. When you start incorporating that motor into the total system, it becomes a different analysis.

However, you don't know where to break it down. A certain piece of equipment may be energy efficient by itself, but if it is capable of using waste heat by the way it is designed, it could, in fact, in its application be very energy efficient. So it is awfully difficult to break it down without looking at the total system in which it is used.

Senator MORGAN. S. 2095 provides that there would be an automatic authorization, over and above any otherwise established ceiling, for solar energy or other similar systems that might be installed. Can you comment on this? Do you have any idea as to how it might work? Would it be an open door?

Mr. MEISEN. I would say that if some reasonable standards were established on the kinds of systems that would be applicable to thatin other words, if you had some overview that you just couldn't put in a rubber hose on the roof and say I have a solar collector up there if there were some reasonable standards and it could be done, I think it probably would be one of the most beneficial things in inducing solar energy use as opposed to solar energy study.

I have some concerns-unless it includes both the authorization and the appropriation and the actual dollars-I have some concern it might not be as effective as it should be unless it includes both the authorization and the appropriation.

Senator MORGAN. After we have reviewed the testimony given so far, we will probably have more questions for GSA to answer.

Is there anything else you would like to add now on either of the three bills we have discussed?

Mr. MEISEN. A number of them have requirement for energy analysis of all existing buildings. I would feel that doing an energy analysis on those buildings which are least energy efficient would be more appropriate than doing it on all existing buildings.

In other words, I would set a bottom line of saying you should only do energy analysis of existing buildings that are using more than 100,000 Btu's per square foot per year. If you have a building that is using less, it probably doesn't pay. It costs about $30,000 to do such an analysis.

I would reserve it for those buildings which are less energy efficient. I would certainly want to make such that when we look at the equipment, it is looked at in the total system concept. Other than that, I think I would have no comments on the others at this time.

Senator MORGAN. Thank you, very much.

Mr. MEISEN. Thank you, sir.

[Mr. Meisen's prepared statement follows:]