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Summer 2007
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Experts forecast green building in North America
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By Jamie Bowman
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The CEC Secretariat and the Joint Public Advisory Committee (JPAC) sponsored a public symposium and workshop on 1–2 May in Seattle, Washington, as part of public consultation for the Secretariat’s independent study concerning green building in North America. The symposium brought together some 200 architects, planners, policy makers and developers pioneering green building to discuss the opportunities and challenges facing this emerging industry. Public and expert comment on the background papers presented at this event will help inform the study’s policy recommendations to the governments of Canada, Mexico and the United States. Jamie Bowman shared with TRIO some of the highlights and insights from the event.
“It’s like a boat; we all float or we all sink.”
That succinct description of the climate-change crisis, made by CEC Executive Director Adrián Vázquez in opening the Green Building in North America symposium in Seattle 1–2 May, may have evoked Noah’s Ark in its simplicity. But it also captured the underlying current of urgency that permeated virtually all the expert presentations and talk at the event.
With the dire consequences of steadily increasing greenhouse gas emissions and resource depletion acknowledged, various papers and expert presentations laid out an array of opportunities to chart a more sustainable course and set a leadership example in the world.
Their attention was, of course, on buildings—the homes, schools and offices where we live and work and the source of a whopping 36 percent of total carbon dioxide emissions in North America, according to Steven Selkowitz, head of the Building Technologies Department at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California. Selkowitz, one of the expert presenters, put it simply: “The cheapest, fastest way to get savings (in greenhouse gas emissions) is to look at buildings.”
Heating, air conditioning, water heating and lighting are the big gulps of energy taken by both residential and commercial buildings, with lesser amounts consumed to run their appliances and machines. But related services, like sewage treatment, construction waste and water usage, must also be accounted for in the energy diet, the conference heard.
“Wind, solar, geothermal…there are a lot of good options,” said leading architect Bob Berkebile, a US member of the CEC Secretariat’s Green Building Advisory Group. “But we have to be willing to turn the current system on its head.”
With the majority of electricity on the North American grid coming from coal-fired generating plants, about seven percent of the energy is lost in burning and another seven to 15 percent is lost in transmission, he said. By combining efficiencies and sustainable energy generation in buildings, the emission reductions can add up quickly, he added.
Recent months have seen a “sea change” in interest in confronting greenhouse gas emissions and unsustainable resource use, said Jonathan Westeinde, advisory group chair and a partner in the Canadian firm, Windmill Development Group.
“Now, it’s a hot commodity,” he said. “But there has been a lot more talk than action.”
The report now being compiled by CEC Secretariat, reflecting the expert input showcased at the symposium and the guidance of the advisory group, will help bridge that gap, Westeinde predicted.
“Buildings could be one of the most significant means to control climate change,” he said. “This report can have a large influence” at the most senior levels of the three NAFTA partner governments.
Currently, only a tiny fraction of new construction is to truly sustainable standards. But the growing buzz at the gathering was that building carbon-neutral structures, or even carbon-positive buildings (those additionally producing sustainable energy for sale back to the electricity grid), is something that not only really can be done, but at reasonable cost.
That point was hammered home during a lunchtime presentation by Joe Van Belleghem, of Windmill Development Group, the firm behind the Dockside Green project in Victoria, British Columbia. He said the mixed residential, office, retail and industrial development on a long-abandoned, contaminated site is expected to gain the highest-ever score under LEED (the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design rating system developed by the US Green Building Council). The complex has proved wildly popular with buyers and is a showpiece for Green Building advocates.
But while highly efficient buildings are a good step, they are not enough, according to Berkebile. Standards must be developed to ensure that each building, whether new or retrofitted, “purifies more air than it consumes; creates more energy than it uses,” he said.
Even the greenhouse gas reduction targets assumed in the Kyoto Accord are only a minor part of the “real solution,” according to Berkebile. “We will have to go well beyond Kyoto to give future generations a chance,” he said.
“After 450,000 years of tracking, there has been an enormous spike in the carbon we’ve released. We know this will change everything we are familiar with on this planet. The moment of greatest danger is the moment of greatest opportunity. That’s where we find ourselves now.”
Award-winning Mexican architect Jose Picciotto has been making inroads against the status quo in Mexico, where he has been using design innovations such as vertical gardens, ventilating stairwells and optimum use of shade. “Part of the adventure is selling them (investors) on the idea” of green buildings, he said.
But in his presentation he noted that a lack of planning has left major urban centers, such as Mexico City, with few trees and most buildings of four storeys or fewer. “It’s as if the city had been shaved with a razor,” he said.
While designing better buildings is “a first step,” he urged political leadership to do more with planning. For Mexico, he suggested moving from a transportation focus on vehicle traffic to installing safe bicycle paths and improving public transportation. “We must think of new ways of designing our central cities,” he said.
Green construction practices should be promoted by both incentive and effective regulation, because builders and developers will simply try to circumvent such restrictive rules alone, said Picciotto, a Mexican member of the GB Advisory Group.
Following a few pilot projects of greener social housing in Mexico, millions more such units can be expected in coming years, he said. Successful planning and design will be critical to reducing their energy demand, he added.
While Canada uses more energy for space heating, Mexico’s challenge is cooling. Most current development is in the central part of the country, where the climate is not moderate, said Picciotto.
The proliferation of air conditioning in recent years has meant the lion’s share of energy consumption in the republic is no longer from industry during peak hours, but from air-cooling appliances, he said. With 82 percent of Mexico’s energy coming from generators fired by fossil fuels, air quality is suffering and greenhouse gas emissions are increasing.
Meanwhile, air conditioning will be demanded by the roughly three million baby boomers from the United States and Canada expected to purchase vacation homes in Mexico over the next 30 years, he said. “They are going to consume high levels of energy,” he said. “This is an impact that is really going to be felt.”
The information presented by Picciotto and others at the conference provided a “clear idea” of what can be done, said Alejandro Sosa Reyes, executive director of Iniciativa Gemi, a Mexican industry organization dedicated to environmental initiatives.
“You have made us think differently, that we can do things differently,” he said.
“Even if there have been interesting advances in our country, it is certain that we must do much more,” said Sosa later. “I consider that the conference in Seattle had great value and I hope to see advances in this area very soon.”
Jason Cantley, of Ecos Consulting in Puget Sound, found it “really frustrating” that there were no representatives from energy companies attending the conference.
He suggested incentives or regulations should be developed to get landlords to wean their buildings away from high energy consumption. “The problem is that the person who pays the power bill (for an apartment) is not the same as the rich person who owns the building,” he said.
The conference was valuable “not only in the information presented, but also for the networking that took place during the breaks, in elevators and reception rooms,” said John-David Hutchison, a project management professional with the Chelsea Foundation, in Chelsea, Quebec.
“It was an amazing event with a perfect mixture of social awareness and the necessary business sensibilities needed to move forward with environmental awareness and eventual full integration of green building practices,” he said.
Martin Tampier, a Quebec-based environmental-intelligence consultant, said he arrived home from the symposium convinced that green building should become mainstream in Canada. “The style they are building where I come from is definitely a bad example,” he said.
The report to be presented to the Secretariat will also serve as recommendations to the building industry, said Roger Peters of the Pembina Institute, based in Canada.
The CEC Secretariat is “definitely” on the right track with the study, he said. “It’s an ideal time to do this, particularly for Canada. I’m not sure about the other countries, but here the various provincial energy ministers, and the federal minister of energy, are developing a national energy-efficiency action plan that is going to have the same kind of objectives and visions and targets as we talked about in Seattle. So, to have this report to come out in the fall will be very valuable here.”
Presentations and summaries of the papers discussed in Seattle, as well as information from the February 2007 workshop in Mexico City and about the initiative in general, are available from:
www.cec.org/greenbuilding
| Valuing green buildings |
In the world of construction finance, quality counts but the best price is always better.
A little-known fact, however, is that green buildings don’t just lower energy and resource use; they also cost significantly less than conventional buildings—over the long run.
Developers usually expect their return as soon as they hand over the keys to buyers. Therefore, a major challenge facing green building advocates is to get major investors to recognize that initial outlay of higher design and construction costs of green buildings is more than offset by lower, long-term operating costs of green buildings.
That long-term return-on-investment advantage was a recurring theme at the recent Green Building in North America symposium, held 1–2 May in Seattle, and organized by the Secretariat of the Commission for Environmental Cooperation.
Under close scrutiny was the real estate development model where developers typically erect buildings at the lowest possible cost, without considering what the structure will cost the owner over the long run. In addition, building-valuation surveyors often fail to include green efficiencies, and their long-term value, when assessing buildings for potential buyers.
The challenge, reiterated by several speakers at the forum, is to marry the two bottom lines: construction cost and long-term operating cost.
That thinking has recently been used to advantage by a few building owner/developers in British Columbia, who have been able to achieve reductions to one-eighth of conventional sewage discharges by using sustainable on-site treatment, said Chris Corps of Asset Strategics in Victoria, BC, and a presenter on the topic of Valuing Sustainability.
“If you take that to its logical extension, developers and pension funds will make profits and return a high yield to their shareholders by doing that. The problem is that we don’t have the case studies to show that. We need more business cases published.”
A 2007 Vancouver Valuations Accord is designed to help bridge that gap, he said. “If you can show the value incentive, then you’ll accelerate investment from pension funds and other large institutional investors.”
Even so, the standards used to survey building value, and the accounting practices that go with them, are in real need of review in order to ensure proper credit is accorded any green functions within a building being assessed for potential investors, he said.
Pension-fund and real-estate managers tend to be “very conservative,” said Leanne Tobias, a presenter and the founder of Malachite LLC in the United States, which specializes in green building properties. “They are typically very reluctant to be the first to undertake a new initiative. On the other hand, once they see money going in a certain direction, there tends to be, if anything, a flood.”
“Designers and planners are ahead of the financial markets on this,” said American architect Bob Berkebile, a presenter and member of the CEC’s Green Building Advisory Group. “We need to make them more knowledgeable about green building and demand that they reconsider.”
While certification, valuation methods and recognition of green building systems are beginning to take root in the United States and Canada, in Mexico there is no widely-held system of certification, verification or follow-up, said Luis Antonio García Díaz, a partner at Sinergia Capital in Mexico City, and one of the background paper presenters.
As a result, Mexico must “shorten the learning curve” in getting such systems in place, promote communication between building and ownership investors, and build on the findings of a green-mortgage evaluation pilot project, he said.
“If green buildings can be shown to be more profitable, everyone is going to want to do them,” said Corps. “We simply have to illustrate how.”
Corps, who helped the BC government save over $7 billion in costs by making seniors-care buildings more sustainable, also noted that while building green shows significant savings to the building operator and the environment, it does not include anticipated reductions in health-care costs as people live and work in healthier buildings.
Like other presenters, he recommended that investors, designers and builders follow the “triple bottom-line” principle, accounting not only for profit, but also for people and the planet.
While choosing a green building to own is a better moral choice for people and planet, the decision could also help avoid red ink in the future for the owner, should an anticipated carbon tax become a reality, he said.
Once the building marketplace becomes educated and begins utilizing such full-cost valuations, investors will begin to make environmentally sensible buying decisions because they also make sense financially, Corps predicts.
Including the financing aspect in the symposium was “really valuable,” said Roger Peters of the Pembina Institute. “To scale-up green buildings to become the norm is going to require a lot of investment, so attracting investment is going to be one of the keys,” he said.
The papers presented at the symposium were preliminary summaries of recommendations to be presented to the three NAFTA governments, as well as the building industry.
“Regulation can only do so much,” he cautioned. “So you need to have a critical mass of capital going into green buildings before you can regulate that level.”
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