Building Owners a Driving Force in Green Design, Retrofitting

Posted October 6, 2010, 10:02am EDT

Source: Daily Commercial News, September 23, 2010

While designing to LEED standards with innovative materials and configurations has taken hold in North America, there’s still a long way to go before we reach the levels of sustainable design, construction and operation in jurisdictions like Europe.

Designing and building alone is not enough, say those involved.

The efficiency of a building is a combination of three factors: its design, materials and construction, the people who occupy it and the way it’s managed — each as critical as the other.

That’s where “smart” design comes in, getting the building to adjust operations via control systems and continuing analysis of data pulled from critical monitoring of operations.

There are, of course, some exemplary structures in North America both in terms of new construction and the fast growing trend of retrofitting existing buildings.

And smarter, sustainable design is increasingly being driven by building owners, not just architects and engineers.

Green buildings command premium tenants and premium leases.

They cost less to operate and, over their lifecycle, deliver a better return on investment, says Diana Osler-Zortea, president of the Building Owners and Managers Association of Canada (BOMA) which has its own sustainability standard, BOMA Best, for retrofitted buildings.

In Canada, the ranks of forward-looking buildings is growing.

The Toronto Telus Tower in Toronto (Sweeny Sterling Finlayson & Co Architects; Adamson Associates Architects), which opened last year is going for LEED Gold certification.

Manitoba Hydro Place in Winnipeg (Kuwabara Payne McKenna Blumberg Architects) is among the most efficient buildings of its kind in North America with its solar chimney contributing to an energy consumption just two-thirds that of a similar-sized conventional building.

Calgary’s Bow Tower (Foster and Partners & Zeidler Partnership Architects of Calgary) is being designed to use 30 per cent less energy with a south-southwest orientation to leverage natural light and ventilation and a crescent-shaped profile that reduces wind resistance and with it extra structural support.

With some 2.1 billion square feet of space owned by the 3,000 members of BOMA, retrofits have a critical economic importance, says Nada Sutic, the organization’s manager of environmental initiatives.

In the U.S., New York’s iconic Empire State Building is undergoing a US$500-million retrofit that will cut energy consumption by 38 per cent annually when complete in two years.

The bulk of the work consists of insulating behind radiators and re-glazing with argon-filled glazing.

“When they built it, they didn’t insulate behind the radiators, so all the heat just goes out through the aluminum façade,” says Sutic.

“And they’ve built a glazing shop on one of the floors to cut down their carbon footprint for the job.”

Collecting and analyzing data from energy audits is a critical part of any retrofit plan.

Ongoing energy management at the Empire State Building calls for tenants to plug into the building’s operations system from their desktop computers to see where energy is being consumed and by whom, allowing tenants to manager their own consumption.

While fixing or retrofitting “back of the house stuff” such as heating, ventilating and airconditioning or grey-water treatment systems isn’t as glamorous as installing a new marble lobby, over the lifecycle of the building the mechanical upgrades pay off, says Giselle Gagnon, vice-president, national real estate services, at Bentall LP a real estate services firm with $16 billion in assets under management across Canada.

Data collection and analysis may prove to be the smartest investment going forward, says Gagnon. Without data it’s almost impossible to fine tune building systems.

In some cases it can be automated. Lester B. Pearson International Airport’s Terminal 1, for example, links the flight schedule database with its building management system (BMS) to brings up the lights and adjusts air flow at a gate just before an aircraft docks and passengers deplane.

But retrospective analysis of data and the creation of a long-term database with key performance points of several buildings is needed for intelligent decision making.

And that’s what Bentall is doing, says Gagnon.

In addition to bringing in low-VOC paint and carpet and green cleaning products, she says, the company has created its own tool — the “ecotracker”— to manage energy, water and wastewater and monitor GHG emissions.

It is used to guide the company in how it structures its energy audits and determining paybacks on capital investments.

Part of Bentall’s responsibility is advising clients how best to prepare for green regulatory requirement changes.

It’s not about reinventing the wheel, says Gagnon but a about a passion for making the company’s buildings more efficient from the bottom up, which starts with smart thinking.