Scott Simpson
Sun
Murray Rankin (left) is the project construction manager and Goran Ostojic is the project engineer. ‘We manage to collect all of that water, filter it and use it,’ Ostojic reports. Photograph by: Bill Keay, Vancouver Sun
You don’t need cutting-edge technology to create a gold-standard eco-friendly building.
Compared with a decade ago, a green building proponent has so many competitive, off-the-shelf choices for technology that the biggest challenge is deciding which solution works best for a given project.
Proponents of a $47-million commercial building nearing completion at Discovery Place in Burnaby got to pick and choose, and they’ve come up with a “flagship” design that will attract scrutiny from across North America.
Indicative of the green design options out there in the marketplace, they’ve chosen a Japanese climate control system and energy saving overhead lights developed in Ontario and are taking advantage of coastal B.C.’s predisposition for rainfall to reduce water use as cornerstone aspects of their five-storey, 150,000-square-foot project.
Relative to conventional building design, they’ll cut their reliance on the region’s water system 95 per cent, overall water consumption 72 per cent and electricity costs 45 per cent.
Pending a final inspection, the ”Discovery Green” project will qualify for gold status under the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certification system which is the international benchmark for green buildings.
LEED measures carbon dioxide emissions associated with construction for the building, interior air quality and temperature control, window glazing and a host of other measures, and awards certificates including bronze, silver, gold and platinum.
Discovery Green is the final building at Discovery Place, a 32-hectare business park which was created in the 1979 by the provincial government as a venue for high-tech research and development.
The entire venture now operates as Discovery Parks Trust. It has expanded to the campuses of University of B.C., Simon Fraser University and University of Victoria, and has so far generated $12 million in research funds for those institutions.
“Discovery Green was the last property for Discovery Place,” Tom Douglas, director of development and leasing for Discovery Parks, said in an interview this week.
“It was what we considered our trophy site and therefore it became our trophy property if you like, in terms of development,” Douglas said.
“We certainly think that the building will be a model for sustainable building design,” Douglas said. “It’s important to note that the building has a lot of features that are unique, but we are not pioneering with any of those features.
“It’s simply drawing together all of the best proven technology, and putting in a lot of it, not everything. We don’t have solar panels, we don’t have [ground source] geoexchange, we don’t have wind power.
“There are a number of technologies that will get incorporated more and more in buildings in the future but we didn’t do that there because we still have to bear in mind the cost of the building.”
Discovery Green will be the fourth-largest LEED gold building in B.C., and the largest single building in Canada to be built to LEED gold standards from the ground up as a commercial enterprise.
It won a 2008 BC Hydro Power Smart award for innovative and sustainable building design.
It will also be the first large-scale introduction in North America of an indoor air quality system that uses “VRF” technology in lieu of conventional water-based heating and cooling systems.
VRF is not without controversy, at least in the climate control industry.
It has been widely adopted in Japan and Europe, but Trane, North America‘s leading installer of building control systems, has opted to stay with mainstream technology that relies on piped water, rather than VRF’s piped refrigerant, to circulate heat and cooling around a building.
Trane Western Canada regional manager Peter Hoemberg, who is not involved with the project, believes VRF works better in theory than practice.
But he notes that whether you use VRF or a modern chiller, you will save enough energy to qualify for LEED.
Both systems rely on electricity-driven heat pumps rather than gas-fired boilers, so the only carbon dioxide emissions will be the ones generated when the occupants of the building exhale.
Discovery Parks is undertaking the project on behalf of Morguard Investments Ltd., which is in turn leasing the entire facility to HSBC’s information technology branch.
Morguard owns and manages properties on behalf of institutional investors and pension funds.
Morguard’s Greg Jones said every new project developed by the company attains at least LEED silver certification — but it must also prove cost-effective.
“When we look at a building, we always ask, ‘Does it make economic sense to us? Is it an attractive product?’
“To us, it was a great building and the fact that it was green made it a better building. That just solidified our interest in it,” Jones said.
Everything Morguard develops now is minimum LEED silver, and Jones said lower energy costs represent a benefit to his company and the building’s tenant.
Construction manager Murray Rankin of Applecross Projects concurred that energy efficiency is a priority for both tenants and developers.
“I think most commercial developers these days are thinking along these same lines,” Rankin said. “I think most tenants are saying to developers, ‘This is what I’m looking for. I want an energy efficient building.’ We are just on the very forefront of it.”
One of the most notable features is a storm-water collection system that will capture all of the rain falling onto the building and its landscaped perimeter.
They expect to capture and use more than a million litres a year for both irrigation and Discovery Green’s toilets.
“We make a full cycle with the water,” project engineer Goran Ostojic of Colbalt Engineering said. “The rain comes in. Generally it is just dumped to the city. But in this scenario, we manage to collect all of that water, filter it and use it.
“That’s one of the measures. The building will also have waterless urinals, so there is no water consumption. The toilets are low-flush toilets.
“We will have managed to reduced water consumption in this building 72 per cent compared to any other building. That’s a significant reduction.”
As well there are ”low-emissivity” windows on the sun-facing south and west sides of the building which will reduce by more than 60 per cent the amount of heat coming in, and ”high-induction diffusers” that will mix the air in the building to achieve better overall air quality and even temperature.
“My general impression is that most of the technology is off the shelf now. It’s all about integrated design, putting it together,” observed John Robinson, a professor in the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability at UBC.
“There are all these options, and you’ve got to pick the package solution that works the best for the site, the occupancy, and the size, and all that stuff.”
© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun
