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While the “glass curtain wall” – so-called because it is not load-bearing but rather hangs – is more than a century old, it has become an oft-copied high-rise design feature, as likely to appear on the skyline of Songdo, South Korea, as in Manhattan, Toronto or Vancouver.

Yet buildings dressed all or mostly in glazing tend to be environmental disasters. Glass itself is very high in embodied carbon. Such structures, in turn, are difficult to heat and cool efficiently because the predominantly aluminum frames and brackets that hold typically low “R-value” (a measure of insulation effectiveness) glass panes function like “thermal bridges,” importing cold and exporting heat.

Is it possible to build a more sustainable glass curtain wall? “Glass buildings are inappropriate responses to the climate emergency in which we live,” says Monte Paulsen, a Passive House specialist at RDH Building Science, in Burnaby, B.C. “There is currently no way to construct a glass box that will achieve a high level of thermal performance. Glass boxes are unique in that they perform terribly year-round. These are facts of physics.”

Other experts agree: “Regrettably, there’s not been a lot of improvements in the performance of curtain walls,” says Ted Kesik, a professor of building science at the University of Toronto, adding that the pre-fab window assemblies typically found on condo towers are even worse. “They really suck. It’s sort of the worst of the worst.”

But, Paulsen adds, there’s an enormous amount of climate-focused innovation taking place in the global glazing industry right now, which seems to point toward progress in the carbon performance of new buildings, provided governments in less carbon-progressive jurisdictions like Canada get on board with more demanding building codes.

“Glass buildings are inappropriate responses to the climate emergency. They perform terribly year-round.”

— Monte Paulsen, RDH Building Science

Several leading European window-assembly manufacturers – Raico, Schueco and Wicona – have created high-performance aluminum frames designed to “break” the thermal bridge with plastic separators to prevent the transmission of heat or cold. Photovoltaic glass, an experimental product invented in 2014, is moving toward commercialization.

Other manufacturers, including B.C.’s Cascadia, have tapped into a growing market for triple-pane windows filled with argon gas. Kesik notes that a window’s R-value doubles if the builder opts to go with triple- instead of double-pane glazing.

Paulsen adds that a few very large companies, like Guardian Glass, have developed the next-gen version: vacuum-insulated windows, the fabrication of which requires a completely different manufacturing process and therefore a hefty capital investment. “The technology exists and they know how to do it,” he says.

A small Calgary firm, GlasCurtain, claims to have figured out how to make a more energy-efficient glass curtain wall by using extruded fibreglass for frames instead of aluminum. Managing director Peter Dushenski says that as triple-pane windows became more common and affordable, testing showed that the major source of heat loss came not from the glazing but from the frame. Fibreglass, he says, contains less embodied carbon than aluminum, and also is less susceptible to the expansion–contraction cycle that produces leaks and excessive condensation. “Triple glazing and fibreglass really solve these problems.”

GlasCurtain has designed curtain walls mostly for low- and mid-rise buildings and is now working on a few larger university and corporate projects. “We’re seeing a real market opportunity,” says Dushenski, who adds that GlasCurtain’s fibreglass frames were Passive House–certified in 2019, meaning they can be used in low- or net-zero-energy projects.

He admits, however, that this innovation alone won’t solve problems such as west-facing apartments with floor-to-ceiling windows that turn into ovens on sunny afternoons. Emerging technologies can help ameliorate this “thermal loading” effect – for example, electrochromatic glazing, which automatically adjusts the tint but is expensive. Similarly, there are automated window shades, both interior and exterior, that adjust to light conditions.

Paulsen, however, argues for more architectural solutions. Those include the use of fritted glass, or “brise soleil,” which are vertical fins or other exterior structures that serve to shade or diffuse intense sunlight. (The concept emerges from design in hot climates.)

In Passive House–certified buildings, which feature a lot of insulation and very tightly sealed building envelopes, the proportion of wall space dedicated to glazing can be typically no more than 30 to 40%. Consequently, architects have to be very strategic about including and placing windows, which, Paulsen says, should serve one of three functions: providing daylight, a view or ventilation. “A lot of architects, even good ones, design glass walls because it’s easy.” But using glass curtain walls simply for aesthetics, or to create the illusion of more space in small apartments, is a recipe for energy loss.

A proposed 60-storey Passive House–certified high-rise in Vancouver, by Henson Developments with WKK Architects, demonstrates one way to get an all-glass look without wasting energy.

Paulsen points to one other approach, for developers that really want an all-glass look: a 60-storey Passive House–certified high-rise in Vancouver, by Henson Developments with WKK Architects. It will include high-end condos, market rental and affordable housing. While the undulating exterior will appear to have a substantial amount of glass (plus balconies), some of the exterior wall will be merely covered with glazed panels, with the wall beneath opaque.

None of these decisions, of course, occur in a vacuum. There’s plenty of evidence to show that jurisdictions with more ambitious energy-efficiency requirements for buildings kickstart local markets for higher-performing building materials. The reason: manufacturers will be prepared to invest in producing and distributing these components when they know that local developers and contractors have to create low-carbon buildings.

Organizations that certify the environmental performance of building projects have a role to play, too. Traditionally, the most widely used North American standard, LEED, assessed the overall energy performance of a building, which meant developers could use an inefficient material, like glass, for the exterior but make up for the poor efficiency with high-end HVAC systems or other green amenities that added points to a project’s overall score.

But Mark Hutchinson, vice-president of green building programs and innovation at the Canada Green Building Council, says certification standards are evolving so that individual elements must pull their weight, for instance with building envelopes now required to meet “thermal energy demand intensity” targets in order to secure a LEED certification.

More stringent building code requirements exist in places like northern Europe and, to some extent, in Toronto and Vancouver, both of which have, in recent years, adopted escalator-type energy standards for new buildings – the Toronto Green Standard and British Columbia’s Energy Step Code – that become steadily more demanding over time, eventually making it impossible to build all- or even mostly glass towers. B.C. plans to make all new construction net-zero by 2032.

Shifting regulations, says Dushenski, will absolutely produce new customers for suppliers like GlasCurtain. But Paulsen argues that the solution lies not in more energy-efficient glazing but rather buildings with less glazing as a proportion of their exterior wall space. As he puts it, “We’ve got to move past glass boxes.”

Toronto journalist John Lorinc writes about cities, sustainability and business.

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About a decade ago, Lynn Mueller, then in his mid-50s, had just retired from a run leading a geothermal firm. As he was casting about for his next act, Mueller noticed that his annual water bill had soared to more than $1,000 – a fact of domestic life he attributed to the presence of two teenagers. “Being a cheapskate,” he recalls with a chuckle, “I wanted to figure out how to get that money back.”

Leaning in, Mueller realized those dollars were literally flowing down the drain, in the form of hot water from showers, meaning, he knew, that the natural-gas-generated energy used to run the water heater was also going to waste.

The Vancouver entrepreneur didn’t invent drain-water heat exchangers. But he has spent the last several years engineering a more efficient version of the technology, which he’s now selling through Sharc Energy Systems, a publicly traded company he founded that designs “wastewater heat recovery systems” that use heat pumps to capture and recycle thermal energy from drains and sewer lines.

The firm began commercializing its technology about five years ago. Sharc has won customers in Washington, D.C., Seattle and Vancouver, which has fostered a thriving green-buildings sector with demanding energy codes and projects such as the False Creek Neighbourhood Energy Utility, a City of Vancouver venture that reuses waste energy from sewer mains to heat about 5.7 million square feet of residential, institutional and commercial space downtown. Sharc developed the waste-water filtration systems that have been used in the facility since 2016.

Mueller says his company has a few high-profile advocates in its corner: former B.C. premier Mike Harcourt sits on the board, while the potential of waste-water energy recovery has been talked up to municipalities by former Toronto mayor David Miller, a prominent green building advocate through the C40 network of megacities committed to climate action.

In his new book, Solved: How the World’s Great Cities are Fixing the Climate Crisis, Miller describes waste-water heat recovery as an emerging technology that is not only relatively simple, but uses heat sources “that have not been traditionally thought of as a resource which exists in all buildings, and are renewable.”

“There’s massive potential with these technologies,” he said in a recent interview.

In the case of New York City – where Sharc has a two-year-old partnership with Highmark, an HVAC and energy-efficiency contractor, and utility giant Consolidated Edison – there are 100,000 buildings, and half of them need energy retrofits.

New York figures in Miller’s book as one example of how big cities can drive energy savings and reduce the carbon used by buildings, estimated to be responsible for about 40% of all greenhouse gas emissions. The city has, since 2009, required certain building owners – mainly large commercial landlords – to benchmark and publicly disclose their energy- and water-efficiency levels.

Subsequent changes to the policy have widened the net of buildings required to comply and added a standardized scoring system. Technologies like Sharc and other upgrades to mechanical systems, like high-efficiency HVAC, play a large role for property managers who have to hit those targets. Mayor Bill de Blasio last year pushed through an even more aggressive timetable for building owners to slash emissions.

“The case for benchmarking is quite simple,” Miller says. “Requiring building owners to publicly state the energy efficiency of their buildings will cause the market to change its behaviour. Once prospective tenants, who are responsible for paying the cost of heating and cooling, know how inefficient the building is, the owners [will] adapt in order to accommodate the desires of the tenants.”

The former Ontario Liberal government introduced mandatory benchmarking for large buildings in 2017, and a somewhat watered-down version remains in effect. The City of Edmonton three years ago introduced voluntary benchmarking, with incentives for owners to comply, according to Abhishek Chakraborti, senior environmental project manager. The number of participating buildings has risen from 99 to 278. Chakraborti says that the city is looking at making the program mandatory.

You need to mandate energy efficiency. It’s such an obvious thing, because  it pays for itself.”

– David Miller

Miller says that required benchmarking and disclosure is the only way to confront the dilemma of “split incentives” – that is, that for the developers and owners of buildings, there’s often no financial upside to energy-efficiency improvements because it’s the tenants or condo investors who bear the cost.

“There is a structural market failure, [so] you need to mandate energy efficiency. And it’s such an obvious thing, because it pays for itself. It’s the right thing to do. It creates jobs, and you end up with a better building, better air quality, and probably better conditions for people to work in.”

In Solved, Miller discusses an even more ambitious city-focused green building program: Tokyo’s cap-and-trade system, which has been in effect since 2010 and applies to every building. The municipality proscribes emission reductions but also offers “a solution for buildings that are so difficult to improve that they cannot meet the targets: trading carbon credits.” Those owners that can’t boost efficiency must buy credits from buildings that have exceeded theirs. According to Miller, Tokyo buildings subject to the cap-and-trade program have cut their emissions by 27% compared to 2009 levels.

Overall, Miller adds, enforceable building-related energy-efficiency goals – in the form of building codes, benchmarks or other mechanisms – are driving investment in sustainable building materials, components and technologies. Indeed, B.C., with its increasingly stringent building codes, has become a magnet for sustainability entrepreneurs like Lynn Mueller, who can not only see the writing on – and in – the walls, but understand how to profit from it.

As he says of waste-water heat recovery, “The billions of dollars that goes down the drain around the world is worth recovering. It’s not rocket science.”

The post Pipe dreams and other climate visions appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Siegel’s expertise is in healthy buildings, and he is cross-appointed to U of T’s public health faculty. He points out that ventilation systems, which consume a lot of energy, tend to be neglected, particularly in institutional buildings, like schools.

But the COVID-19 pandemic has flipped this story on its head, especially when children, teens and teachers began venturing back into schools in the fall. Suddenly, robust ventilation systems that bring fresh air into schools are regarded as a critical defence – along with masks and social distancing – against the airborne transmission of the coronavirus.

The question, of course, is how to improve those systems. In most public boards, the portfolio of schools is extremely diverse, in size, shape, upkeep, age, traffic levels and so on. Some are newer and well designed, and others are old and neglected. For many institutions, air quality was low on the list of capital priorities pre-COVID. What’s more, adequate ventilation depends on many factors, from whether the windows open to the custodian’s skills in maintaining the mechanical systems. “The right answer,” says Siegel, “is ventilating better, not ventilating more.”

The most straightforward way to heed that advice is to change some basic operational practices. At Canada’s largest public board, for example, facilities officials have come up with a series of practical moves to boost the circulation of fresh air: starting exhaust fans two hours before school and running them for longer after the kids leave, as well as cleaning and replacing filters and air-supply grates more frequently. “If mechanical ventilation is not available,” says Toronto District School Board spokesperson Ryan Bird, “[we will] open windows to provide outdoor air.”

Tye Farrow, a Toronto architect who specializes in healthy buildings, has recommended a more aggressive set of fixes to his school clients, which tend to be independent academies. Several of the changes are based on the measures hospitals use to contain airborne disease transmission. These include installing ultraviolet-C lighting, a disinfectant, and MERV-13 filters; accelerating the circulation of fresh air; and employing what Farrow describes as the “submarine” approach to indoor space – that is, segmenting buildings into “bubbles” to limit the spread of the virus.

He also has urged school clients to invest in so-called bipolar ionization systems, which are magnetic devices installed in the HVAC system. They add a small charge to air passing through the ducts. The charge, he explains, causes microscopic particles to bind to larger airborne particles that will, in turn, be trapped by the MERV-13 filters. “We’ve advised all our clients to put it in their systems,” he says, adding that many began planning mitigation measures in the spring.

Many other building owners have taken similar steps. Property management firms for months have been making significant investments in heavy-duty air filters and the ionization systems for clients that range from office building landlords to movie theatre operators, according to a July report from Bloomberg, which noted that HVAC giants like Honeywell and Carrier have seen a surge in demand.

Yet Siegel is skeptical about some manufacturers’ claims about the virus-catching and -killing properties of these devices. “[Bipolar ionization] has been available for decades,” he says. “Why are there no independent high-quality journal articles on them? A reasonable guess is that the manufacturers don’t want to pay for this research because they already know the answer – they don’t really work.”

Farrow, however, adds another layer: when he’s checked in with school clients that have taken steps to improve ventilation, they tell him the students and staff seem relaxed and happy to be back, amidst the more general sense of unease in the public system. While private schools clearly have more resources to invest in altering the indoor environment, Farrow points out that mental-health and stress-related disorders, now increasingly common, are actually part of the pandemic, not just a byproduct of it. Indeed, besides the changes in air quality, he observes that school settings generally can either stoke or mitigate all that ambient anxiety.

There is, in fact, a body of emerging research about the relationship between design, health, mental health and even academic performance. Anyone who’s had to labour through a long afternoon meeting or a dull lecture in a dreary and airless breakout room or classroom understands the connection.

In the other direction, a Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory literature review noted that increased ventilation was linked to reduced prevalence of respiratory disease and student absenteeism, for example. And a 2014 University of New South Wales study found improved test scores in a Texas school district that had made investments to improve indoor air quality.

Others have focused on the educational and psychological benefits to students in classrooms of natural light, fresh air, non-linear shapes and natural materials, especially wood. Patrick Chouinard, CEO of Element5, an Ontario-based engineered wood manufacturer, points to the growing number of schools in Europe and the U.K. that make extensive use of cross-laminated timber and glulam (an abbreviation of “glued laminated timber”) wooden beams. He’s not a disinterested observer, of course, but few would argue that drywall or concrete block walls are preferable. “The advantage of wood is the natural human connection to the material,” he says. “Why are we not building our schools in Canada that way?” (Farrow’s educational clients are making such design choices, but they tend to be situated in independent or private schools.)

For Jeffrey Siegel, who has advocated for improved regulations and standards on indoor air quality, the pandemic presents an important opportunity to build healthier and better school buildings. As he puts it, “This is definitely a moment.”

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A critically important part of the solution lies in the so-called building envelope – the assemblage of brickwork, siding, windows, and balcony slabs that comprise what architects describe as the “skin” of a structure. Find a way to plug all the leaks – all the little nooks and crannies where draughts lead to over-use of heating or air-conditioning systems – and the fossil fuel reductions will follow.

One such retrofit is now underway at a 53-year-old Hamilton apartment building owned by the city’s affordable housing company. The 18-storey Ken Sobel Tower is being completely re-clad, with a projected 94% reduction in emissions. The project is considered to be the first Passive House retrofit of an existing residential tower in North America.

According to project architects, Ya’el Santopinto and Graeme Stewart of ERA Architects, the building is getting a double layer of insulation – about 10 cm on the interior walls and another 15 cm on the exterior, all of it made from Rockwool, a recycled mineral residue with significant insulating properties.

The insulation is only one part of this cladding system. On the exterior wall, the design team covered the crumbling old brick with a cement-like coating instead of the traditional blue or green vapour barrier sheets used in most construction projects. This coating halts the movement of moisture and also adhered more effectively to the rough brick surface, says Santopinto. “You just trowel it on.”

The new exterior cladding will be stucco panels, but the design called for the use of plastic fasteners instead of traditional metal clips, so as to minimize what’s known as “thermal bridging” – the transmission of heat out and cold in. (The concrete slabs that form the floor of apartment balconies tend to be the worst offenders when it comes to energy loss due to thermal bridging.)

As for the glazing, the refurbishment calls for the replacement of the old windows with new triple-pane models that have a high R-value. What’s more, the replacement glazing is actually inserted into the new layer of external insulation, where it is secured in place with fibre-glass clips and layers of silicon that further block both draughts and energy loss transmitted through building materials. Stewart points out that new cladding and windows should be thought of as an integrated system, and the most effective way of slashing building emissions.

The project, supported by funding from the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp., got something of an unexpected assist when the architects found mold in the walls – a discovery that meant the tenants had to move out for the duration of the project, allowing a more thorough retrofit of the unit interiors.

Before construction began, Santopinto says her team conducted a complete “building air tightness test” to show how frequently the interior air was completely expelled and replaced. The rate was about five times per hour (for contemporary condos, that figure drops to about two). According to ERA’s calculations, the turnover rate will drop to just 0.6 once the project is complete.

The dividend is not only less energy consumption for heating and air-conditioning. In individual units, some of the ambient heating will actually come from the energy given off by appliances. Santopinto adds that the airtight envelope means that individual apartments will remain habitable in the winter for four days after a power outage.

For Ken Sobel residents, the new envelope means apartments that are much more comfortable to live in; no more temperature spikes and dips, or cold spots near the windows. For Hamilton’s affordable housing agency, meanwhile, the retrofit will slash operating costs, maintenance outlays and carbon emissions.

This kind of building envelope replacement is standard in countries like Germany, but remains relatively uncommon here, although more and more property owners are commissioning such retrofits.

Santopinto and Stewart add that as the number of such projects grows, each new one becomes more straightforward to complete. There are more skilled trades people who have mastered the techniques. The market for specialized components grows, so unit costs fall. And what once felt like an involved design solution to a technically complex engineering problem becomes a set of well-understood set of processes that can be readily replicated in building after building.

“In a way,” reflects Stewart, “this is dead simple, but getting there took a long time.”

The post Sealing the deal: The case for cladding leaky old highrises appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Instead of slow on-site assembly, components like wall panels can be pre-fabricated in climate-controlled plants, then shipped and assembled quickly to prevent water damage and reduce the risk of thermal gaps.

So perhaps it’s not surprising that Nexii Building Solutions, a Vancouver-based pre-fab materials firm that recently raised $10 million in venture capital and brought on Vancouver’s high-profile former mayor, Gregor Robertson, originates with a pair of inventors in chilly Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan.

Last year, brothers Ben and Michael Dombowsky filed a patent for a pre-fabricated building panel they’d invented and developed over the past decade. Nexiite is made of sealed layers of cement and insulating material. They’re engineered so that the panels – ranging from walls to ceilings, doors and windows –can be fabricated in a plant and then assembled on site so as to minimize the sort of leakages (“thermal bridging”) that bedevil many new buildings.

To date, Nexii has used its light weight panels in six projects in Moose Jaw. But the firm, now armed with a war chest and patents, is expanding to Squamish, B.C., which has ambitious carbon reduction plans.

“This is a substantial leap forward in building technology,” says Stephen Sidwell, a long-time U.S. food industry executive with dual citizenship who came out of retirement to lead the expansion of Nexii.

While Sidwell won’t reveal what goes into the panels, he claims they’re significantly less carbon intensive than conventional exterior and interior materials, and avoid almost all the “worst-in-class” chemicals on an international roster known as The Red List. Because the panels are made in a plant, pre-packed and then shipped to job sites, construction times can be significantly reduced. That also reduces the use of cement trucks, which means cleaner and quieter construction sites, as well as reduced emissions.

To provide further assurance to green developers looking to use certified low-carbon materials, Nexii is testing the panels in locations across North America, and is in the early stages of carrying out a life-cycle analysis on the panels. “It’s not an easy process,” he says.

The Nexiite panels and assembly system can be used on their own to construct buildings up to six storeys, but Sidewell adds that they can also be incorporated as a component in projects of any height, and are well suited to affordable housing projects, where cost is a crucial consideration.

Robertson will be helping Nexii drum up business globally.

“We need zero emission buildings that are affordable to build and operate, and we need to retrofit existing buildings that are the number one cause of climate change,” said the former mayor in a statement. Nexii’s faster construction process will also help address the housing crunch in growing cities, Robertson continued.

The Nexii team is currently looking for partners to set up 100,000 sq.-ft manufacturing facilities with annual capacity to build about 5 million sq-ft of panels in high-growth urban markets. Nexii will provide what it calls “a turnkey plant” equipped to make the panels, and, of course, access to the secret sauce through licensing agreements.

The success of Nexii’s expansion strategy remains to be seen, of course. But Sidwell’s gamble is compelling evidence that investors are now willing to place bets on commercializing a cleaner, faster, and greener way of building buildings.

The post Out-of-the-box thinking spawns low-carbon construction revolution appeared first on Corporate Knights.

1. Chop down embedded carbon in new builds

The latest generation of energy-efficiency regulations laid out in provincial building codes is aimed at decarbonizing the long-term operations of a building – heating systems, insulation and other measures to cut energy consumption. But given the critical importance of stabilizing global temperatures by 2030, Drew Adams, an associate at LGA Architectural Partners, says developers and regulators need to refocus their efforts on reducing the carbon embedded in building materials. Concrete, steel and plastic foam insulation together can account for 50 to 75% of a building’s total emissions in its first decade.

To get there, provincial building codes and municipal planning departments should require developers to produce life-cycle analyses as part of the permitting process, with the goal of using regulations and incentives to promote the use of low-carbon concrete, mass timber or mineral-based insulation, like Rockwool. California and Washington State are both experimenting with “buy clean” laws that require construction firms building public projects to use carbon-reduced construction materials.

While energy-efficiency measures such as solar panels and triple pane windows can be added to existing buildings to reduce emissions, a structure made out of concrete and steel will never reverse recoup the carbon used to make those materials. As Adams points out, it’s better to embed less carbon at the front end.

2. Get creative about retrofits

With ambitious new building codes in jurisdictions like British Columbia, the City of Vancouver and the City of Toronto, most new buildings will soon achieve or approach net-zero emissions. And climate-oriented reforms to the national building code, including new resilience standards to protect buildings from flooding, for example, are now in development.

The more intractable problem, says Scott Kennedy, a partner at Cornerstone Architecture in Vancouver, involves unlocking the financial incentive for homeowners and landlords to invest in energy retrofits.

The next generation of incentive programs, he says, should always begin with straightforward “building envelope” improvements: triple-pane windows, insulation, ventilation. But to go deeper, we’ll need to find ways to encourage Canadians to invest in more cutting-edge technologies. For example, to get homeowners to reduce natural gas consumption, there are now relatively affordable electric heat pumps, including one from a firm called Sanden. With a highly efficient compressor, it concentrates external ground heat and uses a carbon-dioxide-based refrigerant to rapidly transfer that energy to a hot water tank. “These are important products coming into the market place,” says Kennedy.

He also points to emerging approaches to commercial efficiency retrofits, such as “portfolio energy optimization.” The idea is to develop a business model around energy retrofits by aggregating savings across a larger portfolio of commercial buildings. Landlords get better-performing buildings, while the aggregator pockets energy savings created by the improved systems.

3. More modular or prefab construction

While buildings shoot up in high-growth cities like Toronto, the construction industry still uses many traditional approaches, some of which contribute to unnecessarily high emissions caused by leaks or insulation gaps. Some green-building advocates want developers to rely more on prefabricated components, such as wall or window panels that are preassembled in a factory with better quality controls that ensure any gains from higher-performing materials aren’t squandered due to hasty installation.

A recent market study by Frost & Sullivan projected 6.3% annual growth in the global modular construction sector, with that expansion driven by reduced costs as well as an increased emphasis on sustainable building techniques. As the report noted, “Prefabricated buildings are increasingly being perceived as sustainable solutions for construction projects due to a growing usage of materials, such as timber and aluminum composites, that are more energy efficient than concrete.”

4. Give mass timber a boost

According to architect Richard Witt, a principal at Quadrangle and designer of one of Toronto’s first tall-timber projects, the city has more such projects in the approvals pipeline than any other place in North America. The problem, however, is material supply, which is more than a little ironic in a country with as much wood as Canada. There are only a few manufacturing facilities for tall-timber components –cross-laminated beams, for example – and they can’t produce nearly enough supply to sate all that demand. “There’s a lot of chatter” about investment in large-scale engineered-wood plants, he says, but so far nothing more.

Witt argues that Ottawa and the provinces should create economic development incentives for investors to build such facilities. The government, he notes, invests in other industries (automobiles, fossil fuels), so why not tall timber? To contain the risk to investors, the federal government could kick in R&D grants, while municipalities could tweak building-permit fees and development charges to favour projects that use engineered wood components. Municipal planners could also fast-track tall-timber building projects, which can be constructed more rapidly than conventional structures, as a means of priming the pump.

5. Look for renewable energy in unexpected places 

Environmentally conscious architects and renovators now install heat-recovery devices that can capture and recycle energy lost when hot water goes down the drain. But a Toronto start-up, Noventa Energy Partners, is looking to double down on this idea by using the temperature of sanitary sewer water to help heat and cool larger buildings. Noventa holds the North American licences for a technology developed and commercialized in Germany about 15 years ago and marketed by Huber Technology.

According to 2017 UN statistics,  300 billion litres of waste water are dumped into sewers in Europe and North America each day. Based on average waste-water temperatures of 20 degrees Celsius, that’s the equivalent of 150 billion kWh of energy – almost twice the annual daily demand in the U.S.

The fact that waste water is approximately room temperature makes it an attractive source of heating and cooling. Huber’s technology extracts the thermal energy from the waste water and uses it to replace natural-gas-fired industrial chillers, for air conditioning. “There are a lot of buildings that become attractive for heat recovery,” Fotinos says, citing hospitals and hotels.

Noventa is working on a handful of pilot projects in Toronto approved last summer. Using Huber’s business model, the company supplies and maintains the equipment, pays a portion of the energy savings to the building owner and the city, and keeps the balance to finance capital and generate a return for its investors.

What’s clear is that cleantech, green building technology and the right combination of incentives can cut the carbon in our built form without significant economic or industrial upheaval. It behooves policy-makers to rapidly find ways to spur all the pent-up innovation and investment in this space.

The post Five planet-saving building ideas we need to nail down in 2020 appeared first on Corporate Knights.

What distinguishes this brownfield project isn’t just the size (which happens to be roughly the same as Edmonton’s current downtown). When it’s completed, it will be one of the largest purpose-built sustainable communities in the world, according to municipal officials.

The City of Edmonton, acting as the developer, is rolling out an ambitious low-carbon development strategy that will produce a denser, greener, bike- and pedestrian-friendly community that will feature its own district energy utility, two LRT stops and dwellings built to demanding green-building-code standards. And in a city prone to flooding, the replacement of acres of tarmac with new permeable green spaces (including an 80-acre park) will provide additional benefit. Once complete, Blatchford is expected to be home to 30,000 people (with “homes for all stages of life,” including affordable housing), as well as offices and retail shops in a walkable town centre.

Christian Felske, the city official in charge of Blatchford’s renewable energy portfolio, says the district is designed to be completely carbon neutral. Its energy will be entirely renewable, produced by a combination of solar, sewer heat recovery and geothermal heat, all of it built atop a smart grid. A typical Blatchford townhouse – the largest available dwelling unit – will use about a third of the energy consumed by comparably sized homes elsewhere in Edmonton.

The district energy utility, which will be owned by the city, will distribute heating and cooling to structures connected to a geothermal pipe network. It will become not only the largest such installation in Canada but a way of showcasing the local geothermal sector.

The design has previously attracted controversy as some geothermal experts criticized the techniques employed by the contractor installing the system. But Felske says they’ve taken a “very staged and prudent approach in terms of delivering the site.”

In later phases, Blatchford will also include systems that recover waste heat from sewers. Adds Felske, “As the land development grows, the utility will grow.”

Toronto journalist John Lorinc writes about cities, sustainability and business.

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If these shifts mark the state of art as Canada slowly wakes up to the implications of the climate crisis, consider a recently opened 200,000 sq.-ft office building project by Snøhetta in Trondheim, Norway, a remote northern city at the same latitude as Yellowknife. The Powerhouse Brattørkaia isn’t merely a net zero building; this structure actually produces surplus clean energy (all of it solar) that is pressed into service in a micro-grid serving the surrounding community.

As Snohetta founder Kjetil Trædal Thorsen said of the project, “Energy-positive buildings are the buildings of the future. The mantra of the design industry should not be ‘form follows function’ but ‘form follows environment.’”

The sleek, wedge-shaped building overlooks Trondheim’s harbour and features a distinctively angled pentagon-shaped roof plane interrupted by a circular opening. According to senior architect Andreas Joyce Nygaard, the angle of the roof is optimized to harvest solar energy, which is tricky in northern Norway, where the sun can be very low on the horizon in the winter and very high in the summer. The 21,500 sq.-ft roof produces 25% of the building’s energy needs, with the balance provided by more PV panels on the walls and a deep-water heating/cooling system.

But Nygaard points out that the Powerhouse was designed with a holistic view of energy that incorporates not only the building’s current consumption but also the embedded energy in the materials as well as their capacity to be re-used at the end of a 60-year life cycle. The glazing, for example, varies depending on the orientation of the windows to the sun so they provide the maximum amount of daylight to replace or augment artificial sources. The windows facing the sun (south and west) are smaller because, as he says, cooling the building takes a lot more energy than heating does, thanks to the extensive insulation used in the design.

The exterior cladding is a very thin, dark aluminum sourced from a supplier that uses recycled aluminum in its production, thereby minimizing embedded energy and carbon. The aluminum closely resembles the wall-mounted solar panels. “It has to have an aesthetic,” says Nygaard.

© Synlig.no

The building’s energy system includes “liquid light” – an interior lighting system programmed to adjust to the amount of available daylight – and a computer-operated network of windows and shades that open and close automatically as a means of maintaining fresh airflow instead of forced air.

Nygaard acknowledges that the Powerhouse’s performance depends on both its orientation and the absence of shadows from nearby buildings. He also says Powerhouse tends to generate surplus energy during the summer months, when energy is cheap and plentiful, but still draws on local power sources in the winter. “It’s not like we’re independent. We need to be connected to the grid.”

The next challenge for Snohetta’s powerhouse concept is figuring out how to store the surplus energy produced during the summer months, potentially in on-site energy storage devices like batteries. “At this point, there’s no solution for that,” Nygaard says. “If we have one, maybe we could be off the grid.”

Toronto journalist John Lorinc writes about cities, sustainability and business.

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“People comment about the air,” says James McKellar, a professor of real estate and infrastructure who serves as associate dean and oversaw the development of the $50 million project, known as the Rob and Cheryl McEwen Graduate Study and Research Building. “In a normal building, the air is constantly being re-circulated. In our building, the air is very fresh and people notice.”

Visitors also observe that the windows open (a rare feature in some newer institutional or commercial buildings), and attribute the fresh air to this seemingly cosmetic feature. In fact, the explanation for the McEwen building’s air quality tells the story of a much more involved and – for Canada, unprecedented – “bioclimatic” design concept that introduces some salient ideas about dramatically improving energy efficiency in built form. McKellar, an architect by training, says the McEwen building will use 74% less energy than a comparable campus structure.

Designed by Toronto-based Baird Sampson Neuert Architects, the project draws heavily on German technology, as well as age-old insights about the way buildings can naturally absorb and expel excess heat and cold. The focal point is a so-called solar chimney – a five-storey-high concrete slab surrounded by glazing and oriented, like the rest of the building, to maximize solar exposure. In the winter, it absorbs the sun’s heat and draws in fresh air. In the summer, the chimney functions as a convection oven, drawing hot air up and out of the building, thus expelling air-borne chemicals that cause indoor air to become stale and oppressive.

Instead of forced-air based heating and air conditioning systems, the McEwen building uses an extensive network of water-filled tubes that regulate temperature using thermal exchange systems linked to air moving through the chimney. This radiant system, in turn, is linked to a network of 150 computer-operated windows and shades that are automatically adjusted according to ambient temperature and weather – a design developed by Transsolar, a German environmental engineering firm.

Shorn of the technical elements, McKellar notes that the core design principles trace back to historic architectural techniques that recognize how to use materials, shade, and orientation to mitigate the impact of hot and cold weather.

Looking ahead to a warming future and the imperative to reduce energy consumption, McKellar says Schulich sought to adopt a radical approach instead of more conventional techniques, such as LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certification more common to office buildings, out of a recognition that the climate crisis demands game-changing solutions, not incremental alterations.

“We have to be prepared to make that quantum shift,” he says, noting that the cost-per-square foot didn’t exceed the capital costs for comparable campus structures but will generate energy savings in the order of $80,000 to $100,000 annually. However, the project did require expertise that’s not (yet) available here.   There has been one other important financial learning: the innovative project galvanized Schulich’s donors, including the federal government, which provided a $15 million grant. “It had a huge impact on our ability to raise money.”

Toronto journalist John Lorinc writes about cities, sustainability and business.

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