Not just for tree-huggers
Interest grows in economic benefits of 'green' building

by Jessica Sabbath
Virginia Business
July 2006

At Arlington County’s Langston-Brown School & Community Center, preschoolers, teens and senior citizens gather in a facility where daylight shines into the interior through large windows and air quality is constantly monitored and adjusted with carbon dioxide sensors. The 23 percent savings on the utility bill isn’t a bad feature, either.

Environment-friendly buildings with features similar to Langston’s have been around for years, but recently the trend toward building “green” has gained a solid footing in the United States. An average of 25 architects, engineers and general contractors each day become accredited under the Washington-based U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design rating system, or LEED, a benchmark for eco-friendly building design. Almost 23,000 U.S. professionals are accredited through the program.

With today’s rising energy costs, alternative building is an easier sell. “For years we’ve been pushing the environmental benefits, but I think now we’re starting to focus on the economic benefits, and that’s what’s getting people’s attention,” says Taryn Holowka, communications manager for the USGBC.

The council estimates green building can reduce utility bills 10 to 50 percent compared with traditional building techniques. A study by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency found tenants can decrease energy costs by 50 cents per square foot through green building techniques that cut energy usage by 30 percent, which translates to a $50,000 savings for a five-year lease on a 20,000-square-foot office space.

“ We’re easily hitting targets of 20 percent reductions in utility bills,” says Kirk Teske, senior vice president of Dallas-based HKS Inc., which has designed green corporate buildings for clients including RadioShack Corp., Citigroup and SABRE Holdings. “That’s just kind of an average. Some are 10 percent, some of them are 40.”

With energy and construction costs escalating, interest in green building is likely to grow. As Virginia faces the end of capped electric rates in 2010, Annette Osso, executive director of the Virginia Sustainable Building Network, believes potentially higher future electric rates would translate into increased interest in green building. “You’ve got these really high natural gas rates that are hitting the industry sector, and we haven’t seen the big increase in electric rates yet,” says Ossso. “I believe we’ll see more [green building] growth in the next 10 years.”

The USGBC also touts the “soft” cost benefits of green design: well-lit, comfortable and toxin-free buildings. Although difficult to measure, some studies show green building leads to increased worker productivity, lower absenteeism and better retention rates. “You’ve got happier, healthier employees who want to be in a healthy building, and they’ll stick around,” says Holowka.

The USGBC awards LEED certification to buildings based on sustainable site planning, low water usage, energy efficiency, materials conservation and indoor air quality. Projects can receive four different levels of recognition: certified, silver, gold and platinum.

More than 500 projects are LEED certified in the United States and more than 3,800 are currently registered for LEED certification with the USGBC, the first step toward certification. Virginia has been slow to incorporate green building design, but that seems to be quickly changing. Currently 10 building projects in Virginia have been LEED-certified; however, more than 100 projects have been registered for the program.

Richmond-based Moseley Architects encourages all its clients to consider sustainable building design. Moseley, which constructed Old Dominion University’s LEED-certified Engineering and Computational Sciences Building and is working on 11 green building projects in Virginia, finds most of its clients receptive to the idea. “Most people are really excited about this stuff,” says Bryna Dunn, director of Moseley’s Department of Environmental Planning and Research. “I haven’t heard anyone say, ‘No, I don’t want to save on energy costs.’”

In addition, clients are increasingly demanding sustainable design. The University of Richmond’s Board of Trustees requires all new buildings on campus to score as high on the LEED scale as possible. The university’s Weinstein Hall received LEED certification in 2004, and the university’s dining hall expansion and new fitness center and residential hall are being designed for certification as well. “It’s on the table from the very beginning. When we interview the architects and engineers for the project we ask them about what they know about this stuff,” says University architect Andrew McBride. “We take their knowledge into account when we make our selection.”

Around the country, corporate clients such as PNC Bank, Target and The Gap have hooked onto green building. In fact, for-profit corporations make up 25 percent of all LEED-certified buildings in the country, the largest share above nonprofits, universities and the public sector. “By designing buildings that have a real focus on being comfortable, corporations believe your employees are going to be more productive,” says Teske of HKS.
Virginia corporations are picking up on the trend. While none of the state’s 10 certified projects are corporate buildings, 38 of the 100 projects registered with plans to apply for LEED certification are for-profit corporations.

That list includes CarMax Inc., which opened its environment-friendly corporate headquarters in Goochland County in October and has applied to receive the basic LEED certification. At the outset of building design, retiring CEO Austin Ligon envisioned a glass building tucked inside a 135-acre forest. But it was not his intent to design a green building until project manager Ben Cummings convinced him that it made economic sense. “Ben asked me early in the process, ‘How would you feel about building a green building?’” Ligon recalls. “My first response was ‘Huh?’ My second response was ‘What would it cost me?’ ”

After careful planning, the answer was a 2 to 3 percent increase in initial construction cost, which should quickly be recouped by a predicted 20 to 25 percent energy savings in the building. The facility sits north-south to use natural light effectively. Floor-to-ceiling windows include argon gas and lighting panels designed to spread natural light throughout the workspace. Employees rave about working in a comfortable environment, says Ligon, and they can take advantage of two miles of walking trails in the nearby woods. “I would describe myself as a fairly typical, skeptical businessman,” he says. “So doing an energy efficient building was done because it made sense. For little or no incremental costs, why wouldn’t you do it?”

In the past few years, the public sector has led the way in green building incentives in Virginia. Arlington County requires developers to incorporate some sustainable design in their plans. Developers not seeking LEED certification must contribute 3 cents per square foot of their project to the county’s Green Building Fund, used to promote sustainable design. In exchange for building green, developers can ask for additional density on their project.

“ Arlington is experiencing great development pressure,” says Joan Kelsch, an environmental planner with Arlington. “If we didn’t look at trying to mitigate some of the impact, 10 years down the line, we may have some serious problems from an environmental standpoint with air pollution and water pollution. It helps protect our infrastructure in the long run as well.”

Industry professionals say building green doesn’t necessarily bring higher initial construction costs. “You can build a certified or silver building for not a penny more,” says Holowka. A study for California's Sustainable Building Task Force found an upfront investment of 2 percent results in life cycle savings of 20 percent of the total construction costs. “You may have some upfront costs, but we’re trying to get people to focus on the long-term lifecycle of the building,” Holowka says.

Yet ensuring the optimum performance of maintenance systems requires contact with a knowledgeable owner and operator of the system from early planning, says Kevin Chisholm, energy manager for Arlington County Public Schools. Arlington’s Langston-Brown center now operates slightly better than predicted, but it took a meticulous reassessment, repairs to the system and coordination with building operators to make the system run efficiently. In its first year, the system actually used more energy than required by standard building code. After adjustments, it now uses 23 percent less energy than the minimum ASHRAE standard, the industry standard for building energy-efficient buildings. “A knowledgeable representative of the owners should be involved in discussions from the very beginning,” says Chisholm.

Businesses don’t have to build an entirely new building to be environmentally sensitive. The USGBC also developed certification guidelines for existing buildings, commercial interiors, shell and core structures, homes and neighborhoods. HKS Inc. is renovating a 17,000-square-foot office on the ground floor of a historic building in Richmond’s Shockoe Bottom and plans to receive LEED Silver certification for commercial interiors. “There’s a lot of commercial tenant work and interior work that’s done everywhere,” says Jason Maloney, office design director for HKS’ Richmond office. “People don’t have to start with a brand new building to be green. Obviously one of the most sustainable things we can do is not to build a whole new building.”

While green construction may be growing rapidly in the United States, the country still lags far behind Europe, where many countries have had strict environment-friendly building requirements for years. With hopes to spread interest in green building, the Virginia Center for Architecture in Richmond is featuring an exhibit, “Ten Shades of Green,” which will be on display through September. It examines green features in 10 facilities around the world, showing that buildings can be green and aesthetic at the same time.

“ American business and American culture has some catching up to do,” says Vernon L. Mays, the center’s curator of architecture and design.

“That’s why we have this here, to promote interest sustainable building design.”

LEED construction now makes up about 5 percent of new commercial construction. Holowka says the USGBC is proud of the dent green building has made so far, hoping that one day it will become the mainstream. “We think it’s just a matter of education and transforming the market,” she says. “Maybe one day all buildings will be green.”