Where do we want to start when it comes to the “Green Wave”? Of course I am referring to the popular push to create energy efficient buildings on both the commercial and residential sides of the industry.
Green initiatives have two significant factors; first they lower building emissions which helps the environment but most importantly to many people they can save building owners LOTS of money!
When you hear about green initiatives you were hear lots of different view points and rankings. Two of the most popular are ENERGY STAR ratings and LEED Designations.
Energy Star: This federal program has been around since 1992 and focuses on energy saving products and more recently houses and commercial buildings.According to the ENERGY STAR web site: Energy prices have become a hot news topic and a major concern for consumers. ENERGY STAR provides solutions. ENERGY STAR provides a trustworthy label on over 60 product categories (and thousands of models) for the home and office. These products deliver the same or better performance as comparable models while using less energy and saving money. ENERGY STAR also provides easy-to-use home and building assessment tools so that homeowners and building managers can start down the path to greater efficiency and cost savings.
II Centre Square has recieved the Energy Star Rating
Recently, II Centre Square, a 91,000sft office building in downtown Knoxville that is managed by Commercial & Investment Properties (CIP) received its ENERGY STAR rating. It’s only the second privately owned building in downtown to received the ranking. CIP implemented a variety of energy-saving features to improve the building’s efficiency.
Some of these improvements include:
- Replacing magnetic ballasts and T-12 lamps with efficient T-8 lamps.
- Replacing original cooling tower with a highly-efficient 215-ton replacement.
- Installing compact fluorescent lamps in place of incandescent floods lights.
- Installing motion sensors in common areas to control lighting.
- Installing variable frequency drives (VFD) on the HVAC equipment.
- Replacing the pneumatic thermostats & controls with programmable controls.
- Providing set backs for heating and cooling with push-button override for after hour occupancy.
CIP’s Director of Development, Ryan Cazana, says while these improvements save money in the long run they just make good environmental sense. “Energy use in commercial buildings and manufacturing plants accounts for nearly half of all energy consumption in the U.S. Plus these facilities are also responsible for nearly half of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions which contribute to global warming.”
These capital improvements will save tenants in the building over the long run, while lowering the building’s carbon emissions at the same time. The payback for these improvements is less than three years thanks to lower operating expenses.
LEED: Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design
LEED is the internationally recognized green building certification system developed by the U.S. Green Building Council. LEED provides third-party verification that a building was designed and built using strategies aimed at improving performance across all the metrics: energy savings, water efficiency, CO2 emissions reduction, improved indoor environmental quality, stewardship of natural resources and sensitivity to their impacts.
LEED certified buildings reduce energy use on average by 28% as compared to conventional buildings. Since the launch of LEED in 2000, more than 4,500 buildings have achieved LEED certification.
Not everyone is pushing to receive LEED certification. In fact, many buildings are built to LEED guidelines but don’t go after the plaque. The cost to have an outside firm come in and document your building & design process can be cost prohibitive.
Nissan HQ-Leed designed
For example, Nissan’s 240,000sft corporate headquarters outside of Nashville is designed to meet Gold standards for LEED but does not have the designation. Nissan says the cost of getting the designation would have exceeded two million dollars, instead they decided to take that money and put it into the building to even further improve the buildings efficiency.
The good news is the cost of to certify a building is becoming less and less of a factor as more firms become capable of providing the certification needed.
Even retail & hospitality centers are getting involved. The article below is from Tuesday’s Knoxville News Sentinel and talks about a new green theater in Chattanooga: This week, theater owners across the country gather in Las Vegas for a major industry convention, and among the topics on the agenda is the greening of the movie business. The industry’s poster child sits just down the road from Knoxville – a Carmike cinema that recently opened on Broad Street in downtown Chattanooga. The theater, which began showing films in October, expects to receive LEED certification any day, according to Dale Hurst, director of marketing for Georgia-based Carmike. “We’re the first LEED stand-alone theater,” Hurst said. “We’re right in the middle of the running to be gold certified.” The theater features sustainable building practices, including use of local and recycled construction materials, rainwater and condensation collection systems, environmentally friendly cleaning and maintenance products, energy efficient air conditioning and lighting technologies and close proximity to public transport. And while, from a customer standpoint, the movie experience isn’t so different from other cineplexes, the building does feature bathroom lights that turn off when unoccupied, a lobby full of natural light from banks of windows at the theater’s entrance and plenty of recycling containers.
Click here to read the complete article: http://www.knoxnews.com/news/2010/mar/16/carmike-greens-its-screens/
Many tenants are also looking for green buildings. In the past few years most all tenants being represented by national brokers ask about the designations when they are touring the building or during a Request for Proposal. We have yet to have a tenant demand a LEED desgination but they do want to know about it.
There is no doubt that green initiatives will continue to be popular and you will see more and more new buildings follow these guidelines as it gets less expensive to implement and the rewards grow even more.