Getting to Net Zero Today through a Performance-Based Design/Build Process (text version)

Below is the text version of the Webinar titled "Getting to Net Zero Today through a Performance-Based Design/Build Process," originally presented on March 18, 2010. In addition to this text version of the audio, you can access a PDF of the slides, a resource document, and a recording of the Webinar.

Operator:
Welcome, and thank you for standing by. At this time, I would like to remind parties that your lines are in a listen-only mode. Today's call is being recorded. If you have any objections, you may disconnect at this time. I will now turn the meeting over to Anthoney Perkins. Thank you. You may begin.

Anthoney Perkins:
Thank you, Rose. My name is Anthoney Perkins and I'd like to welcome you to today's Webinar entitled Getting to Net Zero Today through a Performance-Based Design/Build Process. The Webinar is presented by the Building Technologies Program at the U.S. Department of Energy. We're excited to have with us today three speakers who will talk about an exciting new national showcase building, the Research Support Facility Building at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado. But before we start, I have some housekeeping items to cover.

First, as we already mentioned, everybody today is on listen-only mode. We will have a question-and-answer session at the end of the presentation, and you can participate by submitting your question electronically during the Webinar. To submit a question, click on the Q&A link at the top bar of your screen, type the question on the box and click "Ask." Be sure to click "Ask" and not the symbol of the raised hand. Our speakers will address as many questions as time allows after the presentation. Also, I wanted to point out the URL on the screen—www.Building.Energy.gov/Webinars.html. On that page is a link to see today's slides.

Also, today's presentation is being recorded, and a video of the presentation will be posted in the near future. And finally we have a few quick questions to help us understand and learn more about the audience and target future presentations. We'll start with two questions now and then two questions at the end of the presentation before we go into the Q&A session. So please just click on your screen to indicate the appropriate response.

[Next Slide]
The first question should be on your screen now. "At your location, how many people total are participating in today's Webinar?" The question will be on the screen just for another second or so, so if you can go ahead and please submit your answer.

[Next Slide]
And we're going to go ahead and close it, and we'll go on to the next question. We're looking for information about what best describes you, your organization or affiliation. So we'll give you a few moments to answer. About to close, so please go ahead and select your answer now if you haven't done so. Okay—thank you for your participation. And now I'll introduce our first speaker, Jeff Baker. He is the Director of the Office of Laboratory Operations for the U.S. Department of Energy's Golden Field Office and will outline the integrated Design/Build approach that was used in creating the RSF. And with that, I'll turn the presentation over to you, Jeff.

[Next Slide]
Jeff Baker:
Thank you, Anthoney. I appreciate it. Welcome, everybody, on behalf of the U.S. Department of Energy and the Office of Energy Efficiency Renewable Energy here in Golden, Colorado. We're happy to have you today, and we hope that you end up getting a lot from our presentation.

[Next Slide]
One of the things I'd like to do is I'd like to start with where we are as a nation. It's really important I think to put everything in context that we're doing. The nation really faces three major national energy goals: energy security, economic competitiveness and environmental quality. We all know it's critically important to look at all of those goals to see into the future with all of our decision making and all of our energy choices. So let's review a little bit about where we get our energy today.

We all know that we have a fossil-based economy, and while renewables is making a big push, we'll still have a fossil-based economy for years and years to come. We consume a lot of our energy in the sectors shown on the right-hand side, commercial buildings being about 19 percent of all the primary energy that we consume. So really it kind of frames the issue of the Research Support Facility in a national context and allows us then to look at some decisions that we need to make to make the RSF work well.

One of the things that's not on the chart is the fact of energy efficiency. We all need to recognize that energy efficiency really is key to being successful in any of our commercial building projects, and, in fact, zero net energy is really not possible unless we design super high energy efficiency buildings. In fact, you're going to find that the baseline we need to achieve is about 50 percent better energy efficiency in our buildings to really make zero net energy possible.

So with that, we recognize then that every decision we make on a commercial building is critically important since we really don't replace these buildings too often—maybe 40 or 50 years. So every building that we do has to be as good as we can make it. Let me introduce a little bit of the Research Support Facility. Anthoney gave you a little bit of a background on the particular project, but let me put it in context. We're here at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, which is the nation's premier laboratory for research and development of energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies. We have lived in leased space for our corporate functions for over 30 years.

That has been a real challenge for us operationally. We are putting a lot of money into leases versus research and development. We needed to take a shot at trying to turn that around from a business standpoint, and we actually successfully convinced our colleagues in Congress and the department that we needed to build a headquarters out here at NREL. They agreed to do that, and we have now the opportunity and the obligation to do it right. We're looking at this project as really being a leadership project for the nation.

[Next Slide]
And we're really hopeful that what we find with this project is that everybody can learn and identify the successes and the mistakes that we've made in our particular project. One note: our project right now is about 220,000 square foot from—everyone should know that we're actually going to expand this building by adding another wing on from the American Reinvestment Recovery Act funds. So actually, this project when it finally gets done is going to be in the neighborhood of 350,000 square feet.

So really then our overarching project goal on this is simply that we really want to demonstrate that this type of super-efficient building and the potential net zero is really available today with today's material if we apply very sophisticated design techniques.

[Next Slide]
To that end, I'd like to discuss a little bit about what's shaped our strategy and then the key components of our performance-based strategy. Really, and I can't overemphasize this enough—and you'll hear this with Phil and Bill who will talk after me—that the manic—and I use that word on purpose—but a manic focus on energy performance. You'll find that that really drove the design and was really the critical factor for us and critical realization in our strategy. We can't start off by saying, "We'll have a nice architecture, and then we're going to think about energy later."

You have to start off with energy in mind, and as we thought through the problem it's not only the design of the building that drives energy performance, but it's also the culture of the people in the building that drive—that will, in fact, make the design work. Phil is going to talk quite a bit about the design and how the design works to achieve the energy efficiency goals that we needed. And Bill is going to talk in great length about the culture necessary to make that design work.

A couple of other observations that we made upfront really was that you, in effect, cannot design a building component by component. It has to be a whole building design approach to integrate the solutions. And when use the word "solutions," I use it very specifically, because really what we're looking for is solutions to problems presented versus trying to design the best 200,000 square foot building. Point being is that solutions are really what drives the performance-based nature of this particular project, and we'll talk about that a great deal as we go forward.

A couple of other observations, too, which is really teaming is critical. You'll find that on this particular project between Haselden, RNL, Department of Energy and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, it was critically important that we have a very trusting and very informed team. And I can't overemphasize the importance of this team. We don't, in effect, just design a building and then hand it over to the owners.

But everybody's involved not only from the standpoint of beginning the design process, but also through the operation and the monitoring and validation phase. And you have to have that team working for you through that entire project. The other thing that was critically important was reducing risk really required us to have a superior project definition. What we needed to do is really provide the subcontractor, the design team and the construction team with as much confidence in what we were talking about and as much clarity in what we were talking about so that they could appropriately cost things to make sure everything worked out well.

And then finally, we realized that simply the traditional Design/Bid/Build approach—this is where we make specifications on a building; for example, we'd say it's 200,000 square foot and needs to look like this or that, be made out of this or that—that wasn't going to work. Our opportunity really was to work through the team and with the creativity of the team to, in effect, find solutions to the challenges that we had. And we'll talk about the challenges in the next slide.

So I'd like to outline the four major elements of our performance-based strategy and talk a little bit about how they contributed to our success. Those are, of course, performance-based Request for Proposals, the competition that we conducted and the Design/Build strategy itself, and then our power purchase agreement to actually get it to net zero.

[Next Slide]
So developing a performance-based request for proposal was actually quite a challenge for us. We had never done that before here. And we knew again if we were going to achieve the energy efficiency and the innovation that we needed, what we needed to do was really challenge the private sector to, in effect, come up with the best solutions possible for us. First of all, let me point out, unlike many projects, where projects can run over, in terms of cost, we could not. We had a $64 million project cost limit, and it was as simple as that.

And so one of the challenges that our design team had was working to that $64 million limit. One of the things I want to emphasize is that upfront planning really drives your success. Unlike a traditional Design/Bid/Build approach where, in effect, you're incrementally defining design, what you need to do is upfront really invest your time not only with the design team but as the owner to make sure that the design definition and the project definition is as good as possible. Things that we did to make things work for us was design charettes.

We worked with the Design/Build Institute of America, which was a wonderful experience for us. They really came in and helped us understand the nuances of what we're trying to do and gave us lots and lots of good information on how to make things successful. And the use of third party owners' representatives as kind of the artificial—not artificial—but an independent referee to help us through some of the design challenges that we had, and answer some of the questions, and make sure that we basically were being very honest about our assessment.

So the way things worked when we did our design charettes and worked with DBIA and the owners' reps was we defined really three tiers of performance objectives for a performance-based RFP. And I'm not going to talk in detail about those tiers. Phil will talk about that as he goes through his. But please just be aware that those three tiers really are kind of cascading where it says we have mission-critical goals—things that we just must do—things that are highly desirable, things that would be great if it could happen, and if-possible goals that if everything goes right these are the things that we'd like.

We did not tell the design teams that we had to have all of these things. We left it up to them to find solutions to do tradeoffs in the category of all those performance goals to get to their design solution. So in the end, we ended up with a suite of performance goals and, most importantly, the substantiation criteria.

[Next Slide]
If you have a performance-based statement of work, then it's critically important that you have substantiation criteria to make sure that you know you've gotten exactly what you thought you were going to get. So the next component really was national design competition. And one of the keys things that we've learned is we don't have all the answers here, even at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. What we needed to do was really to unleash the creativity of the private sector.

To do that, we started off with a very broad national request for qualifications. We narrowed the field of qualified applicants down to three. And we provided those three a draft RFP, and what we asked the three participants to do is to improve the draft to help us help them do the best design process. And what we did then was conduct a lot of information workshops with the teams. We shared information, and we did lots and lots of tradeoff discussions about, "Hey, what is DOE really talking about in terms of what's most important?"

Through this process, we actually developed a lot of confidence and trust with those teams and made our RFP that much better. A few things that we decided to do after the input from the teams was go to a progressive Design/Build strategy where we actually can do construction and design together, so it allows us to get going on, for example, site preparation while we're still finalizing design packages. We, in effect, really put a fine point and ________the performance goals and substantiation criteria.

We actually instituted a two-step design effort with off-ramps afforded the design teams. We'll talk about it a little bit more in the next slide, but we're looking for a firm fixed price contract on this to, in effect, help manage the project to the cost open schedule baseline. And it was really critical to provide that two-step process for the design team to make sure that they, in effect, have the ability to control their risks to give us the best price possible since the design was ___________.

And the other thing that worked out very well for us was the $200,000.00 stipend for the folks that, in effect, did not—for the teams that did not win, but we actually ended up owning the information and the innovations developed by those teams. But the stipend actually helped those teams defray the cost of conceptual design. At the end of the design competition, we actually had a full-fledged conceptual design—three of them—and what we ended up doing then is to go ahead and choose the team that had the best strength and the best solutions.

[Next Slide]
The Design/Build strategy, again, as we said, differs dramatically from traditional Design/Bid/Build in that it's, in effect, looking for solutions versus trying to, in effect, work off of specifications. As we pointed out, really requires a strong design/build team relationship, and, moreover, it's the progressive approach that we talked about before and is really a way for us, in effect, to go head in hand and to isolate risk and control risk. And this is risk actually for all teams.

So in the end, what we ended up doing again is this two-step process. We end up with a firm, fixed price, a contract designed and linked directly to the performance objectives and substantiation criteria, and that really allows the project partners to allocate and share risk. In the end, we'll end up with a better project. We'll end up with the ability to do cost and performance tradeoffs, which is critical in the project, and accelerate project delivery. And we'll actually end up having this project delivered much quicker than we could do otherwise.

[Next Slide]
And finally, the last component is, okay, when you, in fact, achieve your superior energy efficient design, how do you then get it to net zero energy. And one of the ways that we're doing this is really through third party power purchase agreements. We're actually purchasing power from a company that is using their money to install photovoltaic panels on top of the building and on the structure that surrounds the Research Support Facility. All of these things are already arranged and ready to go and actually integrated with the design process. We're very, very happy with all the parties, but this again highlights the way that all the parties can work together to achieve net zero energy.

[Next Slide]
So finally, in summary, how did we do with this process? If you look at the box on the left, it says what we wanted, and I just listed a few of the goals: 800 employees, LEED certified, 50 percent better than ASHRAE 90.1-2007 and net zero energy. If you look on the right-hand side, that's what we got. We got 825 employees, LEED Platinum— that's actually—we got every LEED point that we possibly could—50 percent better, and not only that, but we were in the position of net zero energy.

And moreover, we got this at a competitive cost that otherwise we felt that we couldn't do. So in the end, really when you look at what we achieved here is we believe that we've come up with a process that can help everybody transform their own projects into potential net zero energy projects if the process is followed. And one of the things we want to offer to you is we didn't have all the answers on cost and _________ right now in terms of the benefits and values and stuff that we're derived.

But we're just in the process actually of doing that, and we'll end up over the next year sharing a number of those learnings with you such that people can duplicate everything that we have done and understand from our mistakes and actually learn from what we've done. So finally, just again like to leave you with a statement from the president again is, "We know a country that harnesses the power of clean, renewable energy will lead the 21st century."

We truly believe that. The Department of Energy is in the process, I think, of providing the leadership to make the commercial building sector much more energy efficient and potential of net zero energy. We're happy and privileged to serve you in that way, and we will be talking with you in the next year on that very topic.

[Next Slide]
And now I'd like to introduce our second presenter, Mr. Phil Macey. Phil is a licensed architect with more than 23 years of experience in the design of laboratory and biotechnology facilities. He leads the energy and architecture delivery process at Haselden Construction and the Design/Build team for NREL in the Research Support Facility building. Phil has been a great partner in this project and will describe the design elements and significant energy saving features of the RSF. Thank you.

[Next Slide]
Phil Macey:
Thank you, Jeff. So as Jeff described, this was a competitive procurement. Haselden Construction is teamed with R&L Design, local architectural interior and landscape architecture firm. And we also have some great partners in Stantec Consulting, our phenomenal mechanical and energy consultants for the project.

[Next Slide]
I'm going to cover a few topics here today. We're going to talk about integrating energy and architecture, and that's essentially— that's a real paradigm shift in the way that you look at putting buildings together, and in parallel, allowing daylight design to really drive the form. We're going to look at how the envelope performance changes the way buildings work and effectively turns the building into a self-conditioning kind of a machine and using the building also to store energy. And lastly, we'll touch on how we used PV, and how that—as Jeff introduced—how that got us to a zero energy position.

[Next Slide]
So Jeff showed you the list of project objectives, and when this came to us in a competitive procurement, we pretty quickly realized as a team this—as Jeff hinted at, this list was probably not so much a which ones will you do and which ones won't you do. It was if you don't do all of them, don't you think somebody in your competition will try to do every single thing on this list. So we decided as a team we'd better go after all of them, and probably the biggest move for us was this one right here: net zero energy.

As we began to think about it, we realized that if we went after net zero energy—this really low design energy goal—25 kBTU per square foot per year—would probably be possible. Getting to 50 percent better than ASHRAE 90.1 would be possible. LEED Platinum would be possible. Said another way, as soon as we committed to just completely changing our minds about how we'd approach the project and looking at it as a zero energy project from day one, we'd probably get everything on this list to happen. And in fact, that's what we committed to do as a team and is the way, we've now come to find out, one of the major reasons why our team was selected.

[Next Slide]
Okay—so what's a zero-energy building?

[Next Slide]
Well, it's a whole different kind of machine, I can tell you that. If you're not familiar with the NREL campus, and I imagine with folks all over the nation and maybe even abroad in our audience listening, I thought it might be helpful to give you a quick snapshot of the campus as it looked about a year ago. You've got the Fuel Test Laboratory Building, the Solar Energy Research Facility and the Science and Technology Facility—the nation's first Platinum laboratory building—that currently occupied the campus at the time of the project, and you're going to see a plan that used—that has a bit of bent access in it here in just another slide.

And I thought I'd give you some sense of why that occurred; it's really about land use. So we've got an access that follows the Denver street grid, and another one that follows the toe of the mesa— essentially the access that the existing buildings create—and then that RSF project site where we're going to be talking in a little more detail here.

[Next Slide]
So here's one of the primary ideas behind getting to zero energy, and that is what—with the idea—the overarching idea that there isn't an owner in the world that wants to pay a whole lot more for a green building than they would for a conventional building. So you can see that the stack of costs for the green building and the stack of costs for the conventional building are essentially the same height. And what we're trying to illustrate here is that we're going to move things from the mechanical system costs into the architectural system costs into the envelope of the building, primarily, and in a similar way we're going to move costs from the electrical system that's primarily the daylight—the lighting system, and change that into a daylighting system.

So in those moves, the building becomes an active, permanent participant in its own energy savings through heating and cooling itself and through daylighting of the building. And, of course, all of that's got to be be cost balanced.

[Next Slide]
How do we make those tradeoffs then and not create an expensive building?  Well, what you've got to be do, as Jeff indicated, is a very deep level of design early in the project. And we did a lot of modeling. My responsibility was to manage essentially what was a five-sided problem solving where we needed to get energy modeling, daylight modeling, natural ventilation modeling and thermal mass modeling to all balance against our cost model. And of course, any time you pushed on one of those things, you'd probably domino through and have to tweak all those other components that you see listed there.

So by the time we proposed, I think we were probably somewhere north of a gig of digital information just at the time of proposal so that we could confidently say, "Not only can we hit those very aggressive energy goals and requirements for daylighting and everything else in the world, but we could also make sure that we wouldn't in any fashion ever pop through that $64 million number."  That is a firm, fixed price. That means that all change orders, everything related to the project has to be assured at the time or proposal.

[Next Slide]
And essentially what that cooks down to is two big ideas. The slide can look a little complex on first view, but think of the left-hand side as everything we did to reduce energy demand, and the three on the right are the ways that you offset that demand with renewable energy. And that's in a nutshell the zero energy strategy. Get the energy demand as low as you can, offset it with renewable energy. Biofuel is a reference to the campus' use of a woodchip boiler. And in fact, in Colorado that's using what is essentially forestry scrap trees that are unfortunately perishing due to some beetle infestation throughout the state.

Solar electric is a reference to the full rooftop PV array that accompanies the design. And the wind symbol there is indicating that the campus overall—the NREL campus purchases wind-created energy as a campus decision.

[Next Slide]
So this model—these are essentially one of the first digital models that were created by our partners at Stantec Consulting. And what the guys at Stantec did was take the challenge—they took that very low energy goal. They took what we thought would probably be the gross size of the building, plugged it into the climate, and that energy—what you see here is a very early pass at the form of the building to hit the energy model. And that's a big move. For my colleagues that are in architecture or construction, this is a whole different idea.

This is allowing the energy demand for the building to form the building. That's using the free energy of the climate to drive the shape of the building, and that was our best and smartest first move. From that point, this told us it was probably going to be two long, slim wings, three floors or so. That stair-step shape at the top didn't actually end up being the way we shaped it. But you're going to see in the next slide that in fact the final floor plan reflects this very idea.

[Next Slide]
So what we've got here is two long, slim wings connected by all of the conference rooms or the primary larger conference and public spaces of the building on the other axis. That allowed us to create a building that naturally daylit itself, could comply with natural ventilation requirements and a whole host of other things on that project objectives list that were so critical for the project. And for anybody who wonders, you know, you can't solve a problem this complex in plan, you're right.

[Next Slide]
Essentially, this problem was solved primarily by this one drawing—the section of the building—this section describes 85-90 percent of the building and was the primary way we knew from a very early point in time we were going to hit the energy goal. So I'm going to spend a little time on this because it's so crucial to a number of the slides you're going to see that follows. I'll kind of start in the middle. The primary workspaces are very, very open. You can see there's no interstitial columns, no interceding columns. It's essentially a wide-open floor plan that is created.

We have a perimeter set of columns that carry a 4-foot deep, 60-foot clear span truss; crosses the whole building; allows us complete flexibility, although the plan that you saw just a second ago was pretty regular. If at some point in time the folks at NREL wanted to reorganize things, there's really nothing standing in the way. All the outside ventilation air comes in through that under-floor air distribution system that you see here. So that's a 12-inch raised floor. Radiant heating and cooling—that's talking about arguably the most energy efficient way to heat and cool a building.

We use the thermal mass of the floors. We either run hot or cold water through those floors. That enhanced warmed air then travels to the cooler things in the room—people—and the whole space achieves essentially a radiant temperature. Very comfortable. We don't have to move a lot of air to do that work, so it's very, very efficient. We use a very thick exterior wall. I'll show you a detail of that on the next slide. But that also allows us to trap energy in the wall and then radiate it into the space. Exterior of the building is a transpired solar collector—a way to get free warm air from the climate.

And we have operable windows that allow the building to cool itself when it might overheat otherwise from that thermal mass or for occupants of the building—they'll get a cue from the building, and it's a point in time when they can actually open windows. And one of the primary energy savers is the ability to bring daylight in from either the south or the north side, and with just a 60-foot cross-section, we've got the ability to get daylight all the way into the center of the building.

And up on top is this PV array. The roof's set at a ten-degree angle that optimizes energy output, but doesn't create an overabundance of exterior envelope to condition.

[Next Slide]
Here's a little zoom-in then on the detail of that exterior skin, which is where we moved some of those dollars that I talked about in that early slide. We've got a fairly thick precast wall that's about 11 inches thick—combination of concrete with a core of polyose crinate insulation—gives us just the right thermal performance. This is the—then you can see outboard of that is the transpired collector, which is a very elegant answer to how to get the free energy of the climate to work for you. Essentially, that allows us to create free warm air. We use just a very small amount of fan energy to pull that down into the labyrinth, which I'll talk about in just a second.

[Next Slide]
Daylighting is one of our primary energy savers. We can bring daylight in from either the south or the north side, completely crosses the entire floor plan, saves us quite a bit of energy; I'll show you how much in a second.

[Next Slide]
Maybe most important to anybody who works in that space—a very daylit space—you're never further than 30 feet from a window. This particular view is looking from the third or fourth floor—south wing's three floors; the north wing's four floors—looking easterly towards downtown Denver, and you can get a real sense of a very open and integrated kind of workspace.

[Next Slide]
Bill will talk a little bit more about that. One quick touch on reduction in energy: this is the ASHRAE baseline building from our LEED model. For those of you who might not be able to quite read this, that's 15.8 kilo-BTUs per square foot per year. That comes all the way down to 5.8 kBTU, a dramatic reduction in space heating. And in parallel, there is the energy—9.2 kBTU comes down to 3.8 kBTU.

[Next Slide]
So that's—those are the big moves that really put a dent in your energy demand. The building can also heat and cool itself through natural ventilation. A third of the windows on each side are controlled by the building, and the other two-thirds can be opened and closed by building occupants. So we can actually walk to a window, open the window on a nice day. The building gives you a heads-up as to when that's appropriate.

[Next Slide]
The building control system will tell you that. Thermal mass—essentially what happens is—you can see those floors and walls turn red. That's picking up the heat of that exterior space, and we're then going to store it down in the crawlspace. And that's the "labyrinth," we've chosen to call it.

[Next Slide]
And essentially that's a way for us to have the building do a lot of its heating and cooling. Here's the—the next slide is that transpired collector warming up in the day.

[Next Slide]
And eventually all that energy comes to rest down below the building, and this was a way for us to solve a couple problems at once. The soil in Colorado is typically expansive clay. You've got to be do over-excavation and re-compact, and the carbon footprint on that idea is just horrific. So the building has—we've chosen to use the building as a thermal battery. And then what you're seeing here is this way that energy can be moved through the labyrinth and stored once it gets collected by the transpired collector. Or in the case of a cool summer night, we can bring in cool air at night, pre-cool the labyrinth and use it to pre-cool air in the morning.

[Next Slide]
So the building is going to do some of its own heating and cooling all day long. Up on the roof, the photo-voltaic system offsets all the demand that's left. We couldn't honestly get that to happen within the building footprint. We do have to use an adjacent visitor parking lot to get almost all the way there. And there'll be a smattering that happens on an adjacent parking garage in the future.

[Next Slide]
Add that all together, and you get to do a building that looks like this and is an amazing opportunity to change the way we think about buildings and the way they respond to climate.

[Next Slide]
I'd now like to pass things forward to my colleague, Bill Glover. Bill is our last speaker. He's the Deputy Director and Chief Operating Officer at NREL. Since coming to NREL in 2006, Bill established the first comprehensive vision for NREL's campus and revamped NREL's construction and management capabilities. His presentation will explain about how the design features of this building introduce a new type of work environment for employees: the office place of the future. Bill—

[Next Slide]
Bill Glover:
Thank you, Phil. Before I go into what our new office environment's going to be like, I'd like to share some information about the building—some of which you've heard, but I'd like to reemphasize it. When it's completed, the RSF will be the nation's largest net zero energy building, and we'll achieve that through a combination of energy efficiency and onsite power generation.

[Next Slide]
It's going to house approximately 800 staff, 220,000 square feet. It'll be a cutting-edge workplace, a very open work environment, and you'll see some of that here in just a second. Lots of natural daylighting—and what that really means is that the lights will be off most of the time. Staff resident in the building will be—almost all staff will be less than 30 feet from an operating window.

[Next Slide]
Okay—you can see here what the views from the facility will look like. We have beautiful views of the Front Range to the west, and we've got very scenic views of downtown Denver to the south. The building will be a living laboratory. One of the things that I was talking to Phil about earlier is that tuning this building will probably be our biggest challenge as we go forward.

[Next Slide]
One of the things that we find really exciting is as we bring this building online, it's already a national benchmark for affordable, large-scale, sustainable commercial building design. You've heard that it's designed to use 50 percent less energy than a standard office building, and that money that we save will go right back into the research and development that's performed here at the laboratory. It'll be LEED Platinum. We're using recycled materials extensively throughout the building.

For those of you familiar with Colorado, I think that you recognize that we've had a tremendous number of pine trees that have been killed by beetles. We're going to use that wood to decorate the building. And you can see here an artist's rendering of what the entrance to the building will look like with beetle-killed pine as paneling.

We've got some additional sustainable practices. About 70 percent of the RSF construction waste is being diverted from landfills. The aggregate in the RSF foundation and slabs has come from the decommissioning of Stapleton Airport. The next thing is my favorite statistic about the building in that basically it will increase our campus square footage by 60 percent, but will increase campus energy use by only 6 percent. And that 6 percent, as you've heard, will be offset by power generation and the PV arrays.

[Next Slide]
I want to talk now about staff collaboration and interaction and the way that this workplace will contribute to it. I want to talk a little bit about the efficient design aspects of the building. And then I want to talk about training and awareness for staff and the local people here in Colorado.

[Next Slide]
As I said, the work environment is extremely open. For those of you who have ever worked in an environment like that, you'll find that it's very different than what most people are used to. Because of that, we've prototyped this workspace in other buildings, and we've tried to address early on staff concerns about privacy and noise. The RSF has pink noise installed throughout. The furniture has noise-absorbing fabric. We have acoustic noise-absorbing panels on the ceiling and some walls.

Workstations, as you can see, have very low walls. The panels are 42 inches high. The bookshelves that you see in the middle are about 54 inches. Management and senior staff level workstations will have six-foot panels with doors, but they'll have open ceilings to support efficiency. We've talked about daylighting already, but basically the low walls are vital to both the circulation of air and to getting daylighting penetrating deep into the building.

[Next Slide]
We've got a lot of common spaces for staff interactions. We've got 38 huddle rooms. We've got 22 shared conference rooms. We've got a lunch area, which you can see here. We have an information commons; for those of you of my generation, that's a library. We've got exterior spaces for collaboration as well. We've got a couple of courtyards associated with the building, and we've got several balconies that staff can use to gather and talk about the day's activities.

[Next Slide]
The building is designed for max connectivity. It's wireless throughout the building, which gives our staff the ability to work in a mobile manner. We've got research and administrative staff collocated. We've got a lot of capability for virtual meetings. We're using Voice over IP, and we will do extensive telecommuting as part of our traffic control and carbon mitigation efforts.

[Next Slide]
In terms of efficient design, if you're trying to get to net zero energy, literally every watt counts. If you take the energy usage of the building, it's about 283 watts continuous power for occupant, and that's about the equivalent of four to five incandescent light bulbs for each occupant. For every watt that we save, we avoid $33.00 of photo-voltaic arrays that's needed to offset the watt, and so every watt is literally key to the success of the building.

[Next Slide]
When you get to this kind of a level of energy, every—plug loads become extremely important. And I'm showing you here what a typical workstation will look like and what some of the savings we'll get. If you talk about monitors, a 24-inch LCD energy efficient monitor's about 25 watts as opposed to 200 watts for a 24-inch cathode ray tube. We've got sensor-controlled LED task lights—15 watts versus about 35 for a standard workstation light.

Voice over IP phones are about 4 watts. We'll use laptops initially and then move to thin client technology for our computers. That takes you to 60 watts and 35 watts as opposed to about 300 watts for a normal desktop computer. And basically all of the things that our folks have become used to like space heaters, private printers, etcetera, will be banned from the building. And you can see the kinds of savings we get. If you remove a space heater, it's like 1,500 watts. If you remove the printers, that's about 460.

[Next Slide]
So building-wide, in terms of efficiency, we're replacing all of those printers, of which there are currently about 600, with about 16 multifunction machines that will do basically all of the work of the 600 that we currently have. We'll have globally regulated temperature controls. We've already talked about operable windows, but they will have significant shading. They're all triple-glazed. We have temperature-controlled operations, and on the east and west ends of the building we will have electrochromic and thremochromic windows.

[Next Slide]
We have radiant heating and cooling throughout. You can see here the raised floor. Voice and data, power, radiant heating, ventilation, etcetera, will also be beneath the floor. We've already talked about the building acoustics. We've got onsite power generation, as Phil talked about. We've got the rooftop PV system, and the transpired solar collector that Phil talked about earlier was patented here at NREL by one of our researchers. I mentioned the centralized, multifunction equipment. It will replace all printers, faxes, copiers.

[Next Slide]
We've got a green data center that we believe will be one of the most efficient in the land when we get done with it. Basically, we're shifting from what would be traditional servers to Blade servers which will reduce our power consumption significantly. The waste heat from the facility—for from the computing center will be used elsewhere in the building. We're going to use outside air for cooling. We've got evaporative cooling as well. And then net result is that we will use very little air conditioning to power that center.

[Next Slide]
In terms of transitioning to the new workspace, this is a very significant change in the work environment, and it has some very significant cultural impacts. We have a multigenerational workforce here at the laboratory. We actually have about four generations as I speak, and as you might guess different generations have different levels of acceptance of this as a new type of work environment. We've been addressing staff issues and concerns. We've tested and evaluated the open workspace design. We've had a very extensive education and awareness campaign.

[Next Slide]
So internally, we have had brown bags. We've got a website that we keep updated daily. We've got articles in our weekly employee newsletter. We just recently kicked off a communications campaign that we're calling "Renew," and it will have things like a blog for staff questions. We'll have tours of prototype workstations. We'll have additional brown bags. We've got several e-ordering modules that are coming online, and we'll have an open house for employees as soon as the building is ready.

[Next Slide]
In terms of external communications, we've had a very extensive outreach to our stakeholders. We've had 14 articles to-date. We've got a press kit that's basically in place. We've got exhibits that we have shown, both our folks and external stakeholders. We've got technical papers, and we've seen a number of those in various publications around the country. We talked about the building at numerous conferences. We've got an external website, and you can see the link here if you're interested in going there.

We've kept the community abreast of construction updates. We've done brown bags with them. We've talked about economic—or we've talked to many economic development organizations. And we've spoken in numerous community forums. We've got a couple of videos that we're preparing. One of them is around the vision of the RSF, and the second one is a virtual tour of the building.

[Next Slide]
With that, I will turn it over for questions.

Jenni Sonnen:
Great!  Thank you, Bill. This is Jenni Sonnen, and I'm with the Building Technologies Program as well, and I'll be helping to wrap-up today. As Anthoney mentioned, we have two additional polling questions before the question-and-answer session starts.

[Next Slide]
So the first question should be up now. And if you'll go ahead and please answer what you were hoping to learn today. Just click on your screen. We'll leave this up for a few seconds. Okay, we're about to close and go to the next question, so if you're going to vote, please vote now.

[Next Slide]
Great!  Thank you. And then the last question is really just to ask if your expectations were met with the presentation today. So please go ahead and click on your screen to vote. Great—we're about to close this, so please vote now.

[Next Slide]
Great!  Thank you for your participation. As we mentioned earlier, we've asked people to submit their questions online. Each of our speakers will address as many questions as time allows. And we'll go ahead and start it off with Jeff, if you'd like to start.

Jeff Baker:
Thank you. We're going to try and again address as many questions as we can. I think we'll go around the room here a little bit so we all have some equal time. There's some great questions here, and with luck we can get through most of these. First question I'd like to address is the issue of—somebody asked the question, "Why Design/Build Institute of America?"  And then answer there is simply the DBIA is the leading _______ national professional organization on Design/Build techniques. We found them to be a very objective, very knowledgeable and very helpful organization, and they helped us think very critically about our process and helped us shape our process to make sure that it was as good as it could be. They can be found at www.DBIA.org.

Somebody asked a question of what ASHRAE standard were we using. That's ASHRAE 90.1-2007.

And then somebody asked a question, "Why PV?  Why not—why just photo-voltaic on the building?  Why not several renewable components?"  And as Phil discussed in his design—his discussion on the design approach was we had to figure out where the building was really using energy. It turned out because we had done such a good job on the energy efficiency side and using the building shell as kind of a thermal battery, we really didn't need BTUs. What we really needed was electrons. And so photo-voltaics turned out to be the best value approach for us to provide those electrons.

And then finally the question I'd like to wrap-up with and pass it off to my colleagues is somebody asked the question of, "How important is it in Design/Build to have complete drawings and specifications in the beginning of the construction?"  And that's a great question, and what I think I'd like to emphasize that this is a very progressive, performance-based Design/Build approach, and we really didn't rely on complete drawings and specs upfront.

The progressive part of this is that we could divide the package into, for example, three major or macro design components: one being site preparation, the other being shell, the other being interiors. And as we're finishing up, for example, the design packages on interior, we could actually begin construction at that particular time. It really allowed us to shorten the schedule and _________ the contract to control risk.

The other thing that it allowed us to do really is to, in effect, really examine the tradeoffs between cost and performance goals to the preliminary design process. So we really didn't have to commit to exactly what the design would be. We could wait effectively until the last minute, until we knew as much information as we could by taking a kind of staggered approach. And with that, I'd like to pass it off to Phil or Bill to answer any questions.

Phil Macey:
Thanks, Jeff. I'm going to kind of roll together a couple questions that have come in. There's some interest in what do we mean by "net zero," and how does that compare to carbon emissions. And the question of carbon neutrality is a tougher one. I think with the building actually being positive—a positive energy producer, over time it'll erase it's carbon footprint. That's a tougher hill to climb for the current construction methodologies. It is something that we're looking into. But what we mean here is—really net zero is defined by Paul Torcellini—Dr. Torcellini is a member of NREL's research staff and has written an amazing paper.

For anyone who's interested, it's available publicly from the NREL website. It gives you the definition of zero energy, which I suggest everybody take a look at. It's a powerful tool, and we've found it to be an incredible guide for our work.

There's a question also in that same question of, "What do you mean by net zero exactly?  And are we accounting for how the building—how do folks get to the building?"  And that's a challenge for a campus. Campuses aren't often in urban locations. You kind of deal with the land that you've got available. And the NREL campus is taking a whole long list of things that Bill might share with you to mitigate how folks get to work each day. We didn't, as a part of the building design, have the ability to say, "Hey, NREL, why don't we get a piece of land in urban Denver?"  But we have done a lot to mitigate the necessity to leave campus once you're there.

There's some questions that all kind of look at or have asked us about how we approach this from a design perspective. And for my architectural colleagues and engineers in the audience, it was very front-loaded in the sense of the way fees got shaken out, but it didn't necessarily change the way we looked at total fees. It just looked at the way we had to parse those out relative to how we were going to distribute our work. The work is incredibly front-loaded versus a traditional delivery process. It does mean you work pretty closely with your client pretty much day one.

There was a question about how the labyrinth operates and what did we mean by "labyrinth"?  And you know, that's kind of one of those archi-speak words. It's a crawlspace, and it's concrete. It's thermal mass. It's remote from the rest of the space, but it allows us a way to save energy just by moving either warm or cold air through it. The plans you looked at—north was up—so the north wing, you may recall, has a little bit of a crank to it—a little bit of a turn—15 degrees. It doesn't use—it doesn't hurt the daylighting terribly, but it was necessary to actually help the land use on a campus.

And there were some questions around have we—"Did we use Dim?"  You bet we did. It wasn't really material to the modeling of the building, I will tell you. There was actually four or five different programs used. Fundamentally, we used two different energy models from DOE-2 to eQUEST, but primarily eQUEST. There was a whole lot of work done using radiance for daylight modeling—very, very robust daylight modeling. And when you—for anybody who's a real extreme information hound, the guys at Stantec did develop some of their own software to actually figure out how the labyrinth words. So they did some finite element modeling to figure out how the labyrinth works.

There's more questions that have come in. I'm going to pass it forward to Bill, and if we get some time I'll come back and pick up some of the ones that have just rolled in.

Bill Glover:
Okay—before I answer any specific questions, we're getting a tremendous number of really good questions at the moment, and we'll take those, we'll answer them, and we'll post them so that you can get your questions answered at some point if we don't have a chance to address them here. The other point that I would make is that the request for proposal that was given to our contractors will be posted on our website, and so if anybody is interested in going there and looking at that, you have that available.

Phil Macey:
You should all know that's a gigantic 500-page document, so get ready if you push the download button.

Bill Glover:
A couple of questions—one of them is, "When do you plan to occupy the building?"  We will have beneficial occupancy in early June, and the first moves are scheduled for June 18th, so we're on a pretty aggressive schedule. The building is coming together nicely and should support those dates. But recognize when you're moving 800 people from one side of I-70 to the other it's a pretty good-size challenge.

"How does pink noise differ from white noise?"  The answer really is what part of the noise spectrum you're addressing and how you do that. The pink noise is a little softer. It's a little more effective in terms of noise dampening in the facility. It's interesting. I actually went and looked this up on Wikipedia this morning. If any of you are interested there's a very nice dissertation on what that looks like.

"Does the staff experience a greater range of temperatures relative to a conventional building?"  Obviously, we haven't occupied the building yet, but our anticipation is that the answer to that question is going to be no. We think that the temperatures in this facility will be very stable. And that's one of the things that as we occupy the building and we talk about this living laboratory, it will be interesting to see how that plays out. My good friend, Phil, tells me it's going to be wonderful.

Phil Macey:
Beautiful every day!

Bill Glover:
The question about glare with all of the daylight. The answer is there will be none. And if you walk into that building today, you can sit down pretty much anywhere and work without lights on and without any glare at all.

There's a question about real-time energy monitoring—this building will be monitored in ways that few other buildings have been monitored. That's part of this living laboratory discussion. We will basically look at the energy usage in this building through a microscope. Part of our goal when we built the building was to do something that was replicable elsewhere, and we need to prove that this works so that others will attempt to follow in our footsteps.

Okay—and with that, I guess I'll turn it over to Jeff. You've got a couple more?

Jeff Baker:
Yeah, here's one question about how in the world did we in fact get all of this energy modeling done in the design for the cost that's laid out. And again, I was just going to highlight it really was not our job to tell the design team how to do things. We actually provided a design/build contract to do this, and we let the teams decide for themselves. They determined what best value was. And that's really key, I think, to the project.

Again, we were not looking to specify exactly how to do things or what the project should look like. We simply said that we need solutions to the particular macro problems; we allowed the creativity of the design team to come through and allocate their resources as they best saw fit.

Phil Macey:
Yeah, and let me pick up on that. I think that that may be an unstated component of this is the degree of latitude that DOE and NREL allowed the Design/Build team to pursue answers. And initially, we were kind of looking around for a lot of limits and controls, and we expected to get a long list of things we couldn't do. And in fact, to DOE and NREL's profound credit, they set up—they basically gave you the kind of rules you would like, which are the outside boundaries that you had to work within: total dollars, total performance. It was very clearly identified from the first time we read the RFP what you would have to do.

And then it was up to you to figure out the best way to do it. Of course, that's a mixed blessing, but in the end it allows you to pick where you wanted to place the risk. And that's the only way you can get really high performance buildings to occur as an owner, is to give folks guidance relative to what you really want as the final endpoint and allow them to fill in the blanks. Now, naturally, we didn't do that in a vacuum. We didn't make those choices all alone, but we were allowed to make the first suggestions of, "Look, this is the way we think best to solve the problem."  We got a ton of feedback and really good direction, but the decisions at the end of the day were in many ways ours to make.

There's a couple questions I'd like to tie in here. Bill mentioned a question on glare that was asked, and I've got one here that is looking for the wall to window ratio, and it is pretty low. It's basically about 25 percent window to wall, which for folks who track this, is probably about half of what you'd see—maybe even lower than that. And primarily what that came down to, as you saw in the section there, we did a ton of study—if you can recall that early—the detailed section that showed a vision glass, and then up above it, it showed a daylighting component of the glass.

And we played many, many, many different scenarios in the type of glass and how much glass, and there's a sunshade that pushes forward out of those windows on the south side. And the integration of sort of that aperture, we really began to think of the window much more as a daylight aperture and vision aperture. What size did it want to be so that we could get the LEED daylight credit, which in this climate is a feisty thing to achieve, and also avoid or manage glare—keep it well under control. There are some times at the very edges of the season where we do get a little bit of direct gain, which is pretty soft light, actually.

Yes, we will commission this building both to the regular level as well as enhanced commissioning. There's a question about which level of ZED did we achieve. If you're familiar with Paul Torcellini's paper, we actually achieved all four levels of ZED. We did achieve it at varying levels of performance, which the guideline allows. We didn't have any super-serious issues relative to code. The air system is dampered. Below floor is a plenum, so we've got plenum-rated materials and all those sorts of things to deal with most of those kind of code issues.

A quick touch on evaporative cooling—that's primarily used to condition the data center. It's also used in the appropriate seasons of the year in Colorado where we have heat, but it's relatively a dry heat. So it's essentially controlled by picking the season of the year and the BAS system, Building Automation System, reads the exterior humidity level and determines whether we've got the appropriate parameters to use evaporative cooling.

And lastly, "Can the labyrinth be used to store warm and cool air simultaneously?"  It could. We don't think seasonally that's going to be necessary too often. But to the specifics of the question, "Do we ever do it?"  Yeah, in fact, the data center kicks off heat constantly, and we save it in the labyrinth adjacent to the data center and then use it to do pre-warm on some systems or move it to a plate exchanger as well in other seasons of the year. So the control system is a somewhat complex set of parameters. And I don't know if we've got time for anymore?  A few more? 

Bill Glover:
Okay—I've got one here that basically asks if the transpired solar collector could be used on small affordable housing. The short answer is yes. They're available commercially. I think the technology is probably tens of years old at this point.

Phil Macey:
Yeah—very, very simple stuff. It gets used on industrial buildings right now. We hope it gets a lot wider use. It's a great idea, and free energy is always your friend.

There was a question about kind of overall building design approach. "Did we look at a daylight atrium between the rooms as opposed to an open courtyard?"  While we did consider it, the challenge that we ran into is that hanging—we just didn't have functions that would really support that where we would conceivably have folks sit in an atrium kind of condition. The program for the building just didn't guide us there. I would say, though, to the person or persons who asked that question it's absolutely an approach that would work.

You know, getting to zero energy is kind of finding the sweet spot between program, climate and budget. And in this particular project, the program just didn't give us a reason to take that approach. That doesn't mean that maybe a commercial building where a big product display floor or something like that might be appropriate that you absolutely wouldn't want to make that choice. It just—for us it wasn't a program driver.

Jeff Baker:
I'd like to emphasize something about this particular project. This project was something where we experimented with the process to get us to the creative solutions that we needed to, in effect, identify the risks for everybody to use the techniques and technologies. Our hope is that through this Webinar that everybody can see something—a little something of themselves in this particular project and then use what we've learned to reduce your risk.

Our focus on energy efficiency was pretty clear, again, as Phil and Bill both said. What we needed to do is take advantage of the free energy that exists. Our use of renewables help underscore two things. One is that renewables are available today, and if you do a good job using—on your energy efficiency side, your photo-voltaics, for example, can actually make up the difference. It also highlights that we need to work harder on our photo-voltaics and get the cost down so it's actually a little bit more universally applicable to various projects.

But moreover, what we like to highlight is that this project gave us the chance, I think, to provide a little national leadership on how to get these things done. And again, your thoughts and questions, and even after this your thoughts and questions will be more than welcome as we document what we're doing through the next year. And I hope to share all of that with you. Again, success in our minds is not that you duplicate our design, because, of course, our design really mirrors our climate and our particular program, as Phil outlined, but really that we learn from the process such that you can use the same techniques in your own climate to produce a solution that works for your particular program to achieve the best particular product that you can in your particular location.

So with that, are there any other questions?

Jenni Sonnen:
We've got time for one more.

Phil Macey:
Time for one more—I'll pick up a couple that were —that I didn't touch on earlier. There was a question about—back to the code issues—because when we start to do this sort of advanced stuff, there are a lot of things to look at. You know, we did have to do some third party code consultation. When you're moving as much air—and for any of the practitioners in the audience—you realize you've got air that moves through a transpired collector. We've got air that moves through a labyrinth.

We move that air through the labyrinth into air handlers and then back through the building for ventilation air. It's a pretty careful study. Having said that, it's not in any way outside of the parameters of the code. Do you end up with some more dampers?  Yeah, you do. Does that make your control sequences more complex?  It does, and that does really get back to the questions on commissioning. You know, we started very early with commissioning to define the prefunctional checklists.

That was a very serious early effort. It's led to a very serious and ongoing focus on commissioning those systems as they come online. And it'll continue over the next several months as we move towards building operation. One of the real challenges, especially under LEED, was getting to the flush-out capacities.

The building uses so little air that in fact we're going to have to rent freestanding fan systems to push enough air through the building to get to the LEED requirements for ventilation because we just—if we crank up the air handlers to absolutely 100 percent I think the calculation was it would take 165 days for the air handling systems in the building to do the flush-out. So we had to do some pretty exceptional things to catch up on the air side. I think we're just about there on time.

Jenni Sonnen:
Yeah—that sounds great. Thank you so much to all of our speakers today for your time today. It was a great presentation.

[Next Slide]
And we'd also like to thank all of you for participating today. Please visit www.Buildings.Energy.gov/Webinars.html for information about future Webinars. And we will be posting the slides from this presentation as well as some of the other materials that were referenced and a video from today on the archive section of that page. So if you go to the Webinar section and click "Archives," you'll be able to find all the information from today. And that concludes our presentation. Thank you very much for your time, and goodbye.

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