And that's really what this is about.

If you really think about true sustainability, you know, it's not just that, you know, we kind of wave a flag and say that we're green.

It also has to make business sense at the end of the day.

And that's what will start changing a market.

Welcome to the Fine Home Building Pro Talk podcast, our regular discussion with industry professionals.

Today I'm joined by engineer Paul Torsolini. He works for the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

You can find the Fine Homebuilding Pro Talk podcast and the regular Fine Homebuilding podcast at

finehomebuilding.com slash podcast. Paul, it is a pleasure to meet you. Thank you very much for being

on the Pro Talk podcast.

Well, thanks for having me today.

Someone told me that I should talk to you, and I usually listen to my listeners because they're pretty smart people.

Can you please tell me what you do at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory?

Sure. So I work in one of our commercial buildings research groups and focus on how to get commercial buildings to be very low energy. A lot of my work has focused around zero energy,

zero carbon and trying to hit that goal for buildings. And actually, you know, kind of see that the meter is moving slower, right?

We can talk about a lot of this stuff, but until meters start moving slower, you know, we really haven't accomplished much.

And so a lot of my research, I'd call it a lot of applied research, is focused on that.

And so was your engineering schooling dedicated to this subject, or is this something you've

moved into during your career? No, I think I'm one of the few people that I know that has

always wanted to study buildings and work with buildings. You know, I kind of fell in love with

it even in junior high school and moving into high school

at the time the high school I went to had, we kind of had just gone through the second oil embargo

and oil was very expensive and oil was used as a heating fuel and they were cutting programs

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