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Building sustainability: How buildings can power our future | May 27, 2009
By Jim Harris Quick, what part of your workday generates the most pollution? The commute, right? Sitting alone in your car, you pump out carbon twice a day.
While cars are undoubtedly a problem, the truth is that personal vehicles account for only 21 per cent of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions in Toronto, according to the Toronto City Summit Alliance. Buildings account for 54 per cent.
And the damage extends beyond greenhouse gas. The U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) calculates that American buildings are responsible for 38 per cent of all CO2 emissions. Add in the embedded energy of building materials and that figure rises to half. In addition buildings consume:
- 72 per cent of all electricity
- 39 per cent of all energy
- 14 per cent of all water
Designing energy efficiency into buildings at the architectural stage is important. The Bank of America Tower in Manhattan, due for completion in 2009, is the first skyscraper to attain Platinum certification under the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) system. Platinum is the highest standard awarded by the U.S. Green Building Council. The tower will use 50 per cent less energy than a conventional skyscraper, generate a staggering 70 per cent of its energy needs on-site and reduce water use by almost 10 million gallons a year.
Buildings of this type are becoming popular as the benefits become more widely understood. A 2008 USGBC study shows that constructing a green building costs an average of 2.5 per cent more upfront but generates more than 10 times that amount in savings over the building’s life. Benefits include:
- significantly reduced operating expenses—25 to 30 per cent less energy used
- up to 3.8 per cent higher building occupancy
- up to a 30 per cent premium in dollars per square foot revenue
- up to a 7.5 per cent increase in building value (a function of the prior two)
- easier access to investment capital (a function of the prior three)
- insurance discounts due to lower risk of indoor air quality problems, reduced energy use costs, smoother operations and greater tenant satisfaction
- lower water consumption and treatment costs
But new buildings only represent one to two per cent of building stock, so no amount of innovative construction practices will significantly impact society’s short-term energy use. That means retrofitting existing buildings is vastly more beneficial for the environment. The retrofitting process can involve installing new windows, cladding old buildings with new materials to increase the thermal barrier, installing solar photovoltaics and increasing the efficiency of the heating, venting and air conditioning systems.
The financial benefits for investing in energy efficiency are significant. Investors planning on sinking money into the stock market or real estate should take note of a 2008 McKinsey & Company report called The Case for Investing in Energy Productivity. It documents that annual spending of US$170 billion a year for 13 years on North American energy efficiency initiatives will create an average internal rate of return (IRR) of 17 per cent. By contrast, the average historical stock IRR over the long term is 10 per cent and the average IRR for commercial real estate over 30 years is 16 per cent.
Energy retrofits of buildings generate guaranteed, secure returns that will escalate over time as energy prices inevitably rise, and after the initial cost is repaid these investments continue to generate bottom-line benefit.
For this reason, the Clinton Climate Initiative, in conjunction with the C40 Cities Initiative, was able to convince five banks (ABN AMRO, Citi, Deutsche Bank, JPMorgan, UBS) to each lend US$1 billion to a capital pool for retrofitting municipal buildings. These banks aren’t acting on philanthropy, they’re doing it because these deals offer guaranteed returns.
Green operations
And there are huge savings that can be gained by simply changing the way we operate buildings. For instance, based on 2006 U.S. figures derived from the Energy Efficiency Act, 100 billion people per year use escalators in North America, which in turn consume almost three billion kilowatt hours of electricity–at a cost of roughly US$300 million. Many elevators are on 24 hours a day. Facing bankruptcy, GM announced in October 2008 it would turn escalators off on weekends and evenings between 7:00 pm and 6:00 am at its corporate headquarters. The company also told employees to turn lights off in buildings after hours and on weekends. Why did GM have to wait till they were on the verge of bankruptcy before implementing common sense? Energy used by escalators can be reduced significantly by shutting them off on weekends and evenings or by slowing them to a crawl when not in use.
Buildings as generators
One Toronto company, Morgan Solar, is working on a window that will act as a “virtual awning,” reducing the energy that streams into buildings as sunlight. The glass will have tiny black horizontal lines in it, like those that comprise the defroster in a car’s rear window. Think of horizontal blinds that are perpendicular to the window, so you can see out and light can come in, but light from above is blocked. This is where the term “virtual awning” comes in. The horizontal solar collectors trap the sun’s energy, so installing these windows on the southern face of a skyscraper would turn the building into a solar-powered generator.
Morgan Solar’s windows generate 150 watts per square metre. Installed on the southern face of a building that is 15 metres wide by 130 metres tall and covered 70 per cent by windows, this system would generate more than 300,000 watts at peak, and more than 1,000,000 watts per day with three to four hours of sunlight. That’s enough to power up to 500 homes in a day.
Beyond generating electricity, having a window that’s a virtual awning has a second benefit: it significantly reduces the building’s air conditioning needs, thereby saving energy.
There is also thin-film solar technology that can clad the entire southern side of a building, not just the windows. This may allow buildings to generate all their own power, or even contribute energy to the grid.
Amory Lovins, the world’s leading energy efficiency expert at the Rocky Mountain Institute, has shown that using existing technology can reduce energy usage in North America by 75 to 90 per cent. Amory coined the phrase “negawatt,” which refers to the reduction of power used through efficiency. As buildings are the largest users of energy in North America, they have the largest potential to become “negawatt” generators.
The Ontario government plans to build new nuclear power plants to the tune of $40 billion. Instead, why not retrofit existing buildings to become efficient? This would eliminate entirely the need for more nuclear.
With the cost of solar photo voltaics falling by 50 per cent every few years, buildings have the potential in the future to become net generators of power to the grid, or even the power stations of the future.
SIDEBAR
Building economic stimulus Governments are spending trillions of dollars in economic stimulus globally, and creating green collar jobs has been a rallying cry for politicians worldwide (except in Canada). President Obama won the U.S. presidential election promising to create five million green collar jobs; U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown, in March 2009, launched the Low Carbon Industrial Strategy, claiming it will create 400,000 jobs over the next eight years.
Energy efficiency retrofits for buildings are an integral part of these green-collar job initiatives. Politicians like this strategy as it creates employment in every community. And every dollar spent on energy efficiency creates five times more jobs than a dollar spent on nuclear power, and that same dollar reduces greenhouse gas emissions by seven times more than a dollar spent on nuclear.
Jim Harris is the author of Blindsided, a number one international bestseller published in 80 countries. Jim is sought after as a speaker at conferences and seminars around the world. E-mail him at jimh@jimharris.com.
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