Environmental Benefits of Sustainable Building Are Priceless, Says Texas Community College Sustainability Officer
in Green Buildings & Green Technology, HVAC
Dr. Johnette McKown, Executive Vice President at McLennan Community College (MCC) in Waco, Texas, says the college’s administrators knew they were forging a new path when they began making plans to build three new buildings with a view to achieving LEED certification. “When we were looking at our LEED buildings, we noticed there were no community colleges in Texas pursuing that,” she says. “So we knew we were departing on a road that many Texas colleges hadn’t walked.”
That was three years ago. Today, MCC is beginning to reap the benefits of that boldness. March 26 saw the opening of the 93,000-square-foot Michaelis Academic Center (MAC), named after the college’s longtime president, Dr. Dennis Michaelis, who will retire on August 31 of this year and be replaced by McKown. The MAC is expected to receive LEED gold certification, which will make it the first LEED-certified building on MCC’s campus and the second in all of Waco (see “Michaelis Academic Center becomes first tangible benefit of ’06 bond election,” The Waco Tribune, March 25, 2009).
Two other new buildings opening in 2009 will continue the trend. The new 95,000-square-foot science building is also expected to receive LEED gold certification. The Emergency Services Education Center (ESEC), which is being built in a collaboration between MCC and the City of Waco, is expected to receive gold certification but the builders are aiming for platinum. Significantly, it has been selected from more than 2500 projects by Real Estate & Construction Review-Southwest to win a Green Building of America Award, and will be featured in a special “Green Success Stories” edition of the publication.
This is all big news for MCC and the City of Waco, and we knew it would be of interest to our audience of HVAC-minded readers with their professional and personal interest in issues of greenness and sustainability. So we called up MCC and spoke briefly with Dr. McKown and at greater length with Sid Ross, the college’s Sustainability Officer and also its Director of Facilities, Planning, and Construction, and came away with a story about one college’s sustainability efforts that we think you’ll find well worth reading.
FYI, in talking to us about MCC’s LEED-oriented efforts, Dr. McKown said something that brings up an issue you’ve seen us talking about before: “Part of the hesitation among colleges has been the idea that building green will cost a lot more,” she told us. “Many institutions have been reluctant to pursue LEED building because they’ve thought the cost would be prohibitive. But we did a thorough cost-benefit analysis and found it was quite feasible to build to LEED standards, and we think the benefits have been exciting to see. The more we learn, the more we realize that we can fulfill our environmental responsibility to our children and future generations by doing things that also happen to help us financially. So I’m excited about being a leader in that in our community.”
Sid said more about the very same thing when we talked with him, and we also (naturally) asked him for lots of details about the sustainable HVAC aspects of the new buildings and the rest of the campus. We hope you enjoy and profit from reading his words.
Interview with Sid Ross, Sustainability Officer and Director of Facilities Planning and Construction for McLennan Community College in Waco, TX
JUST VENTING: Thank you for giving us this interview, Sid. To begin with, how did you end up in your present position of Sustainability Director for the MCC?
SID ROSS: In June 2007 Dr. Michaelis, our college president, signed the American College and University Presidents Climate Commitment, which was developed in association with AASHE (the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education). This indicated MCC would align itself with the commitment’s goal by taking positive steps toward sustainability and becoming a carbon neutral campus. He appointed me to the position of Sustainability Director. I had already been Director of Facilities Planning and Construction for two years, and before that I was director of the campus’s physical plant.
JV: What responsibilities are involved in your job? What kind of activities and programs to you specifically pursue?
SR: I’m the chair of a 10-person sustainability committee that includes a cross section of faculty, staff, and students. We’ve done things like implementing and improving a college-wide recycling program and working to integrate sustainability issues into the curriculum. Last year we did a greenhouse gas inventory and submitted it in June, to be examined by our administrators and eventually AASHE. There’s more but you can find out about it through our section of the college’s website.
JV: Thanks for the overview. Now let’s talk about the new buildings, which make for a fascinating topic. Tell us about the new MAC. What kind of green features does it incorporate?
SR: Some of the more prominent ones include a clear story that provides natural daylighting, dual-flush toilets, water miser faucets, motion sensors that control lighting based on room occupancy, energy-efficient HVAC systems, and CO2 sensors in all rooms to sense carbon dioxide load.
FOCUS ON HVAC
JV: Let’s pause on this, because the HVAC stuff is of particular interest to our audience. Can you tell us more?
SR: Well, the CO2 sensors can tell when the atmosphere of a room reaches a certain carbon dioxide load. When it reaches that point, the system opens up the building to bring in outside ventilation. This is both an energy-saving issue and an IAQ issue. It’s cheaper than conditioning the air and it improves the air quality. The building’s HVAC system draws off the central plant. It has air handlers with variable speed drive motors, which makes it very energy efficient.
JV: This is all interesting stuff.
SR: It’s all part of LEED. So are other building features, like the designated parking for alternate fuel vehicles and high-occupancy (HOV) vehicles, the bicycle racks, and the showers in the building for bike riders. I’ll point out that the MAC isn’t going for an “innovative credit” with LEED, but our new science building is.
JV: Then let’s talk about that. What can you tell us?
SR: We expect the science building to receive LEED gold as well. Its innovative LEED credit is a solar panel array that will provide enough power to operate the pumps that will keep three water features in the plaza/courtyard area operating. These will send water back into the system – which, by the way, is a rainwater harvest system. Any extra power that’s generated will be sold back to the grid. One neat feature, since this is a college, is that the photovoltaic panel array will also be used for instruction in science classes.
JV: And what about the new Emergency Services Education Center?
SR: LEED-wise, that’s our big one. The ESEC is going to for platinum. Its features include natural landscaping that doesn’t require sprinkler systems. The reflective roof serves to reflect heat and make building more energy efficient, and the use of concrete instead of asphalt eliminates the “heat island” effect and reduces the cooling load. The building has full cut-out lighting that only directs lights down onto the parking lot, which means it doesn’t let any light filter up to pollute nighttime sky. It has a 40,000-gallon rainwater system to harvest rainwater and then use it for toilets and other non-potable uses. A photovoltaic solar array will generate 12.5 percent of the building’s necessary electricity. It has natural daylighting, like the MAC.
JV: What about its HVAC system?
SR: ESEC has a geothermal HVAC system with heat pump air handlers. It’s a 50,000 square foot building and it won’t have the traditional array of units outside. Instead, it has 180 300-foot wells tied into heat pump air handlers. These take generated heat and pump it down into the ground 305 feet, where it’s cooled and then comes back up for use in cooling the building. For heating purposes, the building has a heat pump heat source.
JV: What about the rest of the campus? We’ve talked all about the three new LEED buildings. Can you tell us what you’re doing about HVAC efficiency elsewhere at MCC?
SR: All main campus buildings are on the central plant, which used to be a big energy hog, but two years ago MCC replaced a 20 or 25 year old cooling tower with an energy efficient one.
We replaced a conventional chiller with a variable speed drive, 400-ton centrifugal chiller, which can cool just one small part of a building instead of working to cool the whole thing.
We also installed a heat pump chiller at the central plant. The system captures heat from that chiller, which then goes into preheats for VAV boxes. Then it’s sent back through system to temper the chiller load. This maintains the right comfort level inside the rooms of a building.
FOCUS ON SAVINGS
JV: How does this compare to the way you used to do things? What sort of savings do you think you’ll see?
SR: We’ll probably save $120,000 per year. We only installed this last summer. In the past we had to run a natural gas-fired boiler in the summer, which was much less efficient.
JV: Here’s an equally pertinent question: What sort of savings have you already seen? You’ve described so many changes the college has been making. Are you already seeing visible benefits?
SR: Yes, we are. We have seen an overall reduction in electrical usage. The kilowatt hours have gone down. It’s hard to put dollar figure on it because electricity prices went up, but we’re definitely using fewer kilowatt hours than we were two years ago. Our water usage is already measurably reduced. And we’ve already reduced our greenhouse gas output. From here on we’ll have a measuring instrument to see how much improvement we’ve really had in greenhouse gas emissions.
JV: And what about all of this from a cost perspective? Dr. McKown told us that many institutions in Texas have been reluctant to pursue LEED certification because they thought it would be too expensive. How did costs actually turn out on your three new buildings?
SR: We saw about a four percent cost increase for the MAC and science building and about a 6 percent increase for ESEC (since we’re shooting for platinum on that one). But—and I think this is really important—you have to look at the global effect we’re having on the environment. This far outweighs the monetary cost. With the way we’re recycling building materials, we’re keeping a lot of material out of our landfill. With the various building enhancement we’re providing an excellent IAQ environment for our students and employees. Natural lighting, for instance, makes everybody feel better. The benefits of it all are just great.
JV: It sounds like you’re saying the human benefits are as important to you as the economic ones.
SR: Yes. You just can’t put a price on preserving our environment for our kids, and our grandkids, and for their kids. We owe them the right to have clean water and air. We owe them the right to have fish in the streams and lakes. Spending a little extra money to do that is more than worth it.
JV: Thank you for talking with us, Sid. It’s been a pleasure.
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