Green designs help buildings stay in the pink-Energy-efficient trend at work

When Continuum Partners moved into its new office space downtown this year, the Denver developer put its environmentally conscious approach to the test.

By Mark P. Couch
Denver Post Business Writer

The company reused light fixtures from the recently demolished Villa Italia mall, where it plans to build new stores, offices and residences.

The walls of the office are made of recycled newsprint. Some cabinets are made from boards of pressed sawdust. The entry is made of cork harvested from tree bark – a renewable resource.

Even the air that workers breathe meets the company’s eco-friendly standard.

Continuum is also testing a ventilation system that pumps cool air from the floorboards instead of from the ceiling as in most office buildings.

"We’re in the business of developing spaces for people," said David Conger, partner with Continuum Partners. "We’re our own guinea pigs in this case. We wanted to live with it, work in it before we included it in our buildings."

Developers of office buildings, stores and other commercial spaces look for the green in most of their projects. But where the primary color once derived from cash, energy-efficient features now offer a new shade of green.

A growing number of Denver-area architects, contractors and building owners are including so-called "green" design in their projects. Colorado ranks third on the Environmental Protection Agency’s list of states with buildings that have earned its "Energy Star" designation for reducing energy use.

Some green changes are minor tweaks, such as buying carpet and wall coverings made of recycled material or covering the rooftop with white, reflective material instead of black tar.

But some are huge adjustments and turn popular design practices on their heads.

The preferred giant facades of windows have been replaced by smaller, shaded panes of glass. Overhead ventilation systems have been shoved under the floorboards.

"This is not a fad," said David White, senior vice president of Swinerton Builders, contractor for Continuum’s downtown space.

"This is something that is growing and gaining acceptance," White said. "We need to embrace moving beyond the facade of what being green is and move toward buildings having less impact on the environment."

The trend of going green is still emerging and is not the dominant national practice in commercial real estate.

Only 6 percent of the nation’s commercial and institutional buildings currently under design are trying to earn a special energy-efficient designation recently established by the U.S. Green Building Council, said Bill Browning, senior consultant with the Rocky Mountain Institute, a nonprofit research and consulting firm in Snowmass.

That’s a very small portion of planned construction activity, but the council’s designation system was only recently introduced. The council is a nonprofit group of architects, engineers, building owners and others interested in commercial construction.

"That’s still fairly small, but it’s not bad for a program that began two years ago," said Browning, who runs the institute’s Green Development Services.

Browning, with the Rocky Mountain Institute staff, is a consultant to Forest City Stapleton, which has proposed constructing office buildings at the former airport. Other clients include Disney, Wal-Mart, the National Park Service and Aspen Skiing Co.

The nation’s biggest landowners want the lower energy bills that come with more efficient buildings – trading a short-term cost for a long-term savings. But many believe that the upfront costs are too high.

Still, some landowners are beginning to change their ways.

The California Public Employees Retirement System, a huge pension fund that owns scores of office buildings, including the Wells Fargo Tower downtown, requires its partners to construct energy-efficient buildings.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the nation’s largest retailer, includes skylights in all of its new stores. During the California energy crisis last year, the company said, 600 of its stores had skylight systems that reduced their combined energy consumption by 250 million kilowatts annually – enough to power 23,000 homes.

All new and most renovated Wal-Mart stores include the skylights, said spokesman Tom Williams.

Even governments are getting into the act. The city and county of Denver required that energy-efficient features be included in the nearly completed $132 million Wellington E. Webb Municipal Office Building.

"One of your biggest expenses is the cost of keeping a building cool, even in the winter," said Michael Sullivan, executive vice president of Denver-based Mile High Development, which has nearly completed the city’s building.

That’s because the people, the lights, the computers and the sun provide so much heat that most building owners pump cool air into the space year-round. Cranking up the fans to run the air-conditioning systems burns even more electricity.

"You can install all the efficient fans and all the efficient systems, but you want to get the problem as small as you possibly can from the start," Sullivan said.

For the city’s new office building, architect David Owen Tryba went directly to the source: the sun.

Before designing the building, Tryba stood on the site at noon on Dec. 21 – the winter solstice. He watched the sun rolling across the sky and then used a computer to plot the sun’s path through the rest of the year.

Those measurements inspired Tryba and architects at RNL Design of Denver to create a building that minimizes the amount of sun that shines directly into the building, heating up the space.

The building includes sun shades outside that extend about 20 inches from the windows. Those shades bounce light into the building and block some rays from penetrating the windows.

"It’s like wearing a baseball cap," Tryba said.

Browning estimates that building owners can cut their energy bills in half by using such green designs.

He added that the bill for installing the more efficient equipment, light deflectors and other features add to the overall construction cost.

"It comes down to how a building owner treats it," Browning said. "If it serves as a Band-Aid on the initial design, it will add to the costs. If it’s incorporated at the beginning, it can be neutral."

When builders plan in advance, they can control the costs of the overall project by reducing the size of water chillers and other equipment, Browning said. Those lower costs compensate for some of the higher costs of the under-floor ductwork and other efficiency features.

Sullivan said it was difficult to measure the extra costs of adding energy-efficient features to the city’s new office building.

He said he ran at least 14 number-crunching studies to figure the costs of installing equipment, compared to the estimated savings. In those cases, the extra costs paid off during the city’s 25-year lease. The city will then take over ownership of the property.

Such owners can figure the total savings from reduced energy cost over a longer horizon.

"Having a long-term property owner really helps," said Bill Mosher, president of Mile High Development.

Developers who construct speculative office buildings usually trim costs to keep proposed rents low. They worry less about operating costs and more about attracting tenants with low rents, Mosher said. Those owners typically construct a building, fill it and sell it.

And making energy-efficiency improvements can add to the costs.

The U.S. Green Building Council found that building owners spend as much as 11 percent more in construction costs to achieve an energy-efficient designation from the nonprofit group.

The cost of ignoring energy efficiency is much higher, Browning said.

Consumers spend more in sunlit stores, students learn better in brighter schools and workers produce more in sun-drenched offices, according to studies cited by Browning.

"How many fires have we had this summer?" Browning said. "What’s the level of our rivers? We’re looking at some of the long-term effects right now. Climate change is staring us in the face."

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