Excerpt from: “Innovating Buildings at EPRI” by Ram Narayanamurthy in December's PUF:
“The challenge with existing buildings is that you don't know what is in there before you go in. You're always going to run into challenges that you'll never run into in new buildings.
I remember one of the projects we worked on with retrofitting low-income housing. We had our plans all laid out, saying we're going to reduce their issues by forty percent.
Then we found out that we had to do asbestos mitigation before we could touch anything on the building. The cost of asbestos mitigation was about the same as the cost of all the other measures we had to do.
Those are barriers. The key is doing enough work on existing buildings, so you start developing a database of barriers. Then, it’s trying to figure out what the strategies are to overcome those barriers or work around those barriers.”
