Related Blog Posts - Buildings

Authored by Stephanie Boyd, Director of the Zilkha Center for Environmental Initiatives at Williams College. Re-posted with permission from the Sustainability at Williams blog. 

For the second year in the college’s experiment, we closed our doors on December 24th, shuttered up buildings, turned down the heat, turned off computers, refrigerators, photocopiers, and all sorts of other electrical equipment in an effort to save energy, minimize spending on utilities, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions during a relatively slow period in the academic calendar. When the doors to the campus opened again on January 4th, the college had succeeded in saving $100,000 in avoided utility costs; 430,000 kilowatt hours of electricity; and 4,840 million British Thermal Units of heating energy. To give an understanding of scale, about 2600 houses would use this amount of electricity in a 10 day period.

This avoided energy use represents 528 metric tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions (GHG), a 26% increase in emissions savings compared to last year, and 2.7% of FY09 total annual emissions of 19,600 tonnes.

by Robert Cormia, Faculty, Informatics and Nanotechnology, and Brenda Davis Visas, Director of Facilities, Foothill College

Foothill College’s ten-point climate action plan addresses both energy and GHG emissions by focusing on a key figure of merit, Building Energy Intensity (BEI), which helps inform data-driven decisions for building retrofits and onsite PV (solar) energy infrastructure, and helps us plan future energy budgets and manage our GHG emissions. Building energy, expressed in annual BTU/sq-ft, is the established reporting mechanism for California Community Colleges and provides both a baseline and benchmarking mechanism for evaluating the effectiveness of energy projects, as well as a means of comparison to similar colleges in similar regions.

by Jeffrey M. Baker, Director, Office of Laboratory Operations, Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, U.S. Department of Energy

Commercial buildings account for 19% of the nation’s energy consumption, according to the Energy Information Administration, so when the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) decided to build a new office building to house its staff, energy performance was naturally a top priority. The new Research Support Facilities (RSF), currently in construction on the campus of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), is utilizing a wide variety of energy efficiency measures to reduce energy consumption by 50% over standard commercial buildings. But the goal to achieve a LEED Platinum rating didn’t override a focus on cost. The RSF’s construction costs are competitive with today’s less energy efficient commercial buildings, proof that energy efficiency doesn’t have to come at a premium.

by Amy Seif Hattan, Director of Strategic Initiatives, Second Nature and Gina Coplon-Newfield, Communications Director, Second Nature