Zero Energy Buildings: The Future of the Built Environment

Energy and Sustainability at the Los Angeles Community College District (LACCD)

Larry Eisenberg, Executive Director, Facilities Planning and Development

Setting the Policy

The Los Angeles Community College District is a national leader in the implementation and development of sustainable building and renewable energy technology. In 2009, the colleges and satellites of the district will feature numerous LEED certified building and more importantly much of the energy need will be met through the use of renewable energy generation technology. The story of the transition from being an aging educational colossus to a gleaming example of the best that architecture and technology can offer follows.

With more than 220,000 students a year attending classes, the Los Angeles Community College District (LACCD) is the largest community college district in the world. The nine colleges of the district and major satellites serve the 882 square mile district and 36 incorporated cities. The infrastructure at the nine colleges was largely built in the 1940’s, 1950’s and 1960’s. With the passage in California of Proposition 13 in 1969, funding to public entities was severely curtailed and community colleges were no exception. As a result, for nearly 30 years, despite a rapidly growing population, the LACCD colleges saw little investment in new buildings and hardly any investment in maintenance of existing buildings. Time and intense use took their toll and eroded the quality of the buildings to the point that potential students living in the District chose to go to surrounding community colleges that had been able to invest in and maintain their basic building stock.

In 2001, the Board of Trustees of the LACCD asked the District’s voters to approve a general obligation bond issue that would end the more than 30-year drought in construction and a growing deferred maintenance backlog for the nine colleges of the District. The voters in the nine campus district approved not only the initial bond proposal of $1.245 billion to make an investment in affordable higher education, but also approved a second bond issue of another billion dollars in early 2003 to create a combined construction, renovation, and restoration program of $2.2 billion. More recently in November of 2008, the voters of the District approved another $3.5 billion in bond authorization for a grand total of $5.7 billion in bond funding authorized.

The opportunity presented by the initial LACCD bond issue did not escape notice of the environmental community in Southern California. Working closely with the District’s Board of Trustees environmental advocates educated and cajoled to explain the importance of a sustainable building program. The message was simple: Not only would a sustainable building program have long term benefit for the District and its students, but it would serve as an educational laboratory that could move sustainability into the mainstream.

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After numerous hearings, prolonged conversation, and careful study, the Board of Trustees adopted the LACCD sustainable building and renewable energy policy in 2002. The policy established by the Board required that all buildings built under the new bond program would be built at least to the then new LEED “Certified” standard. The policy also set a goal of self-producing 25 percent of the District’s energy needs with at least 10 percent utilizing photovoltaic cells. The result would be more than 40 new buildings built to LEED standards and a few megawatts of renewable power put in place.

In retrospect, this policy, although bold and courageous in 2002, was really quite modest. The Board consciously set a modest policy since no other large organization had set such an ambitious sustainable policy, and there was genuine concern that this policy would create significant added cost to the District’s nascent bond program. In conversation about setting the sustainable policy, the Trustees had been told that there would be at least a ten percent cost premium if they chose to build at the LEED “Silver” level rather than at the lower LEED “Certified” level. They were also told that the technology was not really available to support a significant renewable energy commitment. The reality in both regards proved to be quite different.

Implementing the Policy

In the fall of 2003, the District hired a new Executive Director for Facilities Planning and Development with a background in large capital programs and with knowledge of and commitment to sustainable building requirements. He was charged with implementing the Board policies for sustainable building and renewable energy. In turn, the Executive Director hired several talented individuals with a background in these disciplines to create a core sustainability / energy team.

The result is that LACCD is currently undertaking the largest sustainable building program in the United States. The more than 500 projects include renovations, upgrades, modernizations, and most exciting of all, more than 90 new “green” buildings, representing the best in environmentally sensitive building techniques. Utilizing $5.7 billion in voter-approved funds, the District is executing an extensive building program to address much-needed campus improvements and transform its nine community colleges into state-of-the-art educational resources for students and the community.

The District will also be building two new college centers, one of which will be an adaptive sustainable reuse of the historic Van De Kamp bakery in the Atwater area of Los Angeles. The other satellite project will be the adaptive reuse of the former Firestone factory in the City of South Gate to create a state of the art education center and sustainable technology institute.

Recognizing that a $5.7 billion program has the power to change the market place, the Board of Trustees created a requirement that each design team, of which we currently nearly 200 working, would include a certified Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) professional. When the program began, there were perhaps a dozen in all of Southern California. Today, there are hundreds of certified LEED professionals in the LA area. The training that these architects and engineers obtained to achieve the certified designation will of course not only benefit the LACCD program, but also every future project that they touch.

The educational process would be enhanced in the design of the sustainable buildings, the buildings themselves when complete as examples of sustainable choices, and the development of an integrated curriculum component devoted to sustainability. Students and faculty along with the community would be partners and learners in building sustainable and smart college campuses. After all, the purpose of higher education is to research, innovate, and educate.

The LACCD Renewable Energy Program

Energy use and supply has become a significant component of the LACCD capital program. Living in sunny but energy short California leads one to naturally think of alternate energy sources such as photovoltaic and solar heating solutions. The modest renewable energy policy established by the Board of Trustees in 2002 has blossomed into a far reaching energy program working on the cutting edge of energy technology. This policy has given license to explore a broad range of energy technologies including all forms of photovoltaic energy, energy storage, fuel cells, wind power, hydrogen generation and use, nanotechnology based and industrial scale battery systems, anaerobic digestion, solar thermal, thermal storage and geothermal concepts.

Energy and power for the LACCD colleges comes from several sources that are central-gird oriented. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) is a Municipal Utility (MUNI) owned by the public and with a Mayoral appointed Board of Commissioners. It has six campuses in its jurisdiction. The Southern California Edison (SCE) is an Investor Owned Utility (IOU) company that supplies the other three campuses.

LADWP supplies more than 22 million megawatt-hours of electricity a year for Los Angeles’ 4 million residential and business customers. It is the largest municipal utility in California. The Department's model is time-tested and simple: a reliable and increasingly diverse supply of power, coupled with stable rates that are among the most affordable in the nation. This combination has effectively fueled the growth of Los Angeles for more than a century.

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To improve system reliability and to ensure that power supplies continue to meet the city's needs for the next 100 years, LADWP is spearheading an aggressive Renewable Power System energy program (20% by 2020) to enhance generation capacity, modernize transmission and distribution infrastructure, assure power quality and identify cost-saving, environmentally sensitive efficiencies.

For the LADWP to move ahead into the future, people must be educated and trained at all ages about energy, water, waste, land, transportation, and air which make-up the component parts of sustainability development. Edison on the other hand has implemented many renewable energy projects. And since it is governed by the State of California Public Utility Commission, it has raised rates in order specifically to fund solar/pv systems for homes, offices, and complexes including college campuses. In 2006, the rate increases started to generate $300 million per year for the next 11 years.

Working closely with LADWP and SCE, the LACCD has established a program that will meet the need to train people of all ages about energy, water, waste, land, transportation, and air which make-up the component parts of sustainable development. The core concept involved in this effort is to use the energy infrastructure that will be put in place at the LACCD colleges and satellites to teach the technology. This effort will be supplemented with stand alone touch screen kiosks and enhanced classroom capability to allow delivery of a sophisticated curriculum.

The energy generation program is at the core of the sustainable infrastructures for the nine college campuses and consists of four strategies that are now being implemented:

• Efficient Renewable Energy Central Plants
• Build Sustainable Central Plants that produce and deliver hot water and chilled water to heat and cool all college buildings
• Build a comprehensive four pipe distribution system throughout each college to deliver and return the hot and chilled water
• Utilize solar thermal and geo-thermal systems as the only energy source to drive the heating and cooling process
• Install thermal storage (ice storage) to reduce the afternoon peak heat load.
• Demand Management / Energy Conservation
• Conduct an investment-grade energy audit of all buildings on all campuses
• Retrofit all energy consuming elements in all interior and exterior spaces for maximum efficiency (e.g., lights, fans, pumps, etc.)
• Install state of the art and new technologies in all buildings (e.g., occupancy sensors, harmonic reduction filters, etc)
• Install individual building and building sub-system metering and monitoring systems to determine building and system energy use
• Add insulation, low e-glass, window film, white roofs, green roofs, etc.
• 100% Renewable Energy at each campus
• Solar – Solid Panels, Thin Film and Concentrator technology
• Wind – Urban building scale wind turbines
• Geo-Thermal – ground source heat loop
• Hydrogen Gas - Utilize locally generated electricity to electrolyze water to produce hydrogen gas
• Hydrogen Storage – Utilize low pressure solid state hydrogen storage system
• Fuel Cells – PEM and Alkaline Fuel Cells with direct hydrogen feed
• Micro-turbines burning pure hydrogen gas
• Lithium Ion Batteries for large scale energy storage
• Flow Batteries for redundant energy storage
• Sustainable Development Curriculum
• Build on different Campuses with basic focus courses as certificated, licenses and degrees
• Career opportunities and training for jobs, new companies and advanced degrees
• Collaborate with unions, private businesses, public, government and non-profit sectors
• Provide actual experiences on campus through building programs
• Sustainable Development Curriculum: solar, wind, geothermal, hybrids, etc as well as new businesses, accounting, operations and maintenance

Paradigm Shift

The desire to explore alternative energy concepts and the realization that the LACCD bond program will be adding 50% more square footage to the existing college building based led to a new thought: the idea that there will not be enough resources to effectively heat, cool, maintain and clean this significant expansion in space. At the same time, the District realized that an alternative energy program had the potential to supplement the District’s energy demand and in the process lower utility bills. Carried to its logical conclusion, alternative energy supplies could be developed in a manner that would entirely offset the District’s energy bill. At $9 million per year, this is a significant portion of the District’s annual operating budget, and if re-directed, could pay for a large number of additional maintenance and custodial personnel.

This combined thought led to the paradigm shift: a comprehensive alternative energy program could be the source of badly needed operational funding to meet pressing needs. The development of significant alternative energy resources combined with either a long

term funding strategy, or a shorter term buyout strategy, the District could lower its energy bill in the near term, or eliminate the energy bill all together in the long term.

To implement this concept, the LACCD has adopted a four part energy strategy as outlined above. The components of the energy strategy are as follows:

1) Efficient Renewable Energy Central Plants

Given the age of the LACCD College’s facilities, for the very large part, the building’s heating and cooling needs were met by the use of traditional roof top heating and cooling units. In many cases, buildings were not even equipped with cooling capability, making teaching in the hot months a tenuous proposition at best. Some of the college’s were equipped with central plants that served part of the college heating and cooling need with chilled water and hot water based on the need at any point in time. These central plants utilized traditional boiler and chiller technology and distributed their chilled and hot water through a distribution network of pipes.

The first component of the new strategy is to move comprehensively to central plant provision of hot and cold water to all buildings. New central plants will include highly efficient boilers and chiller, and will have the majority of their energy supplied through the use of a new technology – the Sun Chiller solar vacuum heat tube. These tubes are placed on the roof of the central plant, water is introduced into the tubes, and the sun heats the water to nearly the temperature of steam. The very hot water travels into the central plant and through thermodynamics and heat exchangers the energy is removed from the water and used to drive the chillers and boilers.

Similarly, for those colleges with an existing central plant, designs have been developed that provide for a smaller new central plant to supplement the existing central plant, creating a virtual central plant that relies on sophisticated energy management system software that blends their capabilities together.

2) Minimize Energy Demand through Performance Contracting

An effective energy strategy requires that each building be retrofitted to present the lowest energy demand possible. To make this occur, every single energy consuming element needs to be analyzed to understand its potential to be retrofit with the most energy efficient version available within an economically viable payback period, usually seven years. In addition, the building needs to be analyzed for what does not exist, such as occupancy sensors, insulation, and multi-pane windows. A detailed building by building, room by room, device by device analysis needs to occur to determine what exactly needs to be retrofit and what needs to be added to the building in terms of state of the art technology to allow it to present the absolutely lowest energy profile possible.

Typically, a metering and monitoring system is added to evaluate performance of the building over time and allow fine tuning of energy conservation measures to occur.

For the list of items noted in the report that have an economically viable payback period, there are companies that are willing to come in for free to retrofit and add the appropriate energy conserving measures. These companies are paid back from the energy savings that they have guaranteed over a period of years. If the projected savings do not occur as predicted, the period of repayment lengthens to accommodate the amount of money available to payback the initial investment. In any case, the recipient of the retrofits has no out of pocket expenses beyond its current cost of energy, which is now made up of two components, the amount used to payback the performance contractor and the funds going to pay for utilities consumed.

LACCD is launching a comprehensive demand management performance contracting program to squeeze out every watt and therm possible from every building at each College. The result will be the minimal energy profile possible for every LACCD building. The cost will be borne by the performance contractor and supplemented through incentives and rebates available from the local utility companies.

3) 100% Renewable Energy and Energy Storage

The last major physical component of the LACCD Energy Strategic Plan is the installation of photovoltaic generating capacity at each college and satellite facility. One Megawatt of rigid frame photovoltaic panels covers approximately three acres and would cost approximately $7 million if purchased in today’s marketplace on a stand alone basis. Each college will need several megawatts of photovoltaic energy generation capability to cover the day time peak load and provide a good amount of excess capacity. Three acres of panels requires the construction of carport structures over surface parking lots or the use of numerous building rooftops.

At a cost of $7 million per Megawatt, photovoltaic panels would not be a cost effective solution to meeting ongoing energy generation requirements. However, we are at a unique point in history where the combination of incentives and tax law have driven the cost of photovoltaic installations into the cost effective range when done by a contractor that can utilize the tax incentives and rebates.

Cost factors that can be taken into consideration by a 3rd party vendor that has the ability to use or sell tax credits include:

• the current federal energy tax credit
• the rapid depreciation capability of the internal revenue code
• availability of state and local rebates on solar projects
• the sale of the renewable energy credits (green tags) created with the installation of photovoltaic panels
• price reduction through bulk procurement or captive production concepts
• other federal investment tax credits

When used in combination, it is possible that costs of 10 to 20 cents on the dollar can be achieved for a photovoltaic array, bringing project payback well within normal standards for investment payback.

The other significant issue when considering a photovoltaic or wind driven energy solution, for that matter, is the fact that the sun only shines during the day, and wind does not typically blow in a consistent manner. If one is to provide solar or wind energy at night, or during the doldrums, there must be an energy storage technology employed. A host of new energy storage technologies are now being released that move far beyond the lead-acid battery and have storage capabilities in the multi-megawatt range. One example is a system that uses the excess solar power generated during the day, and generated on weekends to electrolyze water and captures the hydrogen gas that is generated. The hydrogen gas is used as the fuel stock in a proton exchange membrane fuel cell, and generates electricity and heat. The only byproduct in this system is water from the recombination of the hydrogen gas and oxygen in the fuel cell. The heat can be used to supplement central plant requirements, or meet other site specific needs such as heating a swimming pool.

A comprehensive photovoltaic / storage system will meet the needs of the LACCD colleges on a 24 by 7 basis with a redundant capability. The systems will be financed through the employment of a power purchase agreement where every watt generated and used by the colleges is paid for on a per unit basis. The per unit cost covers the cost of maintenance on the system, and the cost of capital that pays back the final cost remaining on the system after the employment of all available tax credits, incentives and rebates. The initial agreement developed by LACCD has establish a per watt charge of 13 cents compared to the present, and escalating cost from SCE of 16cents per watt. This difference results in an instant reduction of cost to the college for electricity.

The LACCD power purchase agreements will contain a buyout clause that will allow LACCD to purchase the system at any time, but in particular after year 5 (end of the rapid depreciation period), to eliminate the per watt charge. At that point, LACCD will own the means of energy production and eliminate its energy bill.

4) Sustainable Development Curriculum

The final component of the LACCD Strategic Energy Plan is the incorporation of the scientific, business and environmental lessons learned into the curriculum of the colleges.

The concept is that our students across all disciplines can benefit from sustainable curriculum elements in either an academic or vocational context.

The successful execution of the LACCD Strategic Energy Plan has the real potential to take the LACCD colleges off the grid, and presents an organizational model that can be readily replicated by any organization. The model offers not only an environmentally sound energy strategy but a comprehensive budget strategy that will allow organizations to supplement operational resources to meet other high priority needs.

Zero Energy Buildings - Next Step

Once LACCD has fully installed a comprehensive renewable energy generation and energy storage capability, all subsequent buildings to be built at the LACCD colleges will need to produce at least as much energy as they use to maintain the idea of paying no energy bill to the outside utilities. Buildings that can produce as much energy as they use are defined as zero energy buildings. With considerable forethought and skillful architecture and engineering, it is possible to design zero energy buildings. Many buildings with a zero energy profile that have been successfully built around the world over the last decade.

The successful design of a zero energy building requires the incorporation in of numerous common sense features to reduce electrical load and create a habitable building that supports user productivity. Features that should be included are:

• Ventilation through natural air flow. In other words, the building will not have any mechanical system to move air from space to space.
• Solar shading to prevent the entry of sunlight at certain times of the day and to encourage the entry of sunlight at other times of the day.
• Daylighting technology to control the amount of lighting needed where lights dim or go off when sunlight is present and activate when sunlight is not present to maintain a comfortable foot candle based lighting level.
• Chilled Beams where a cooling or warming fluid is circulated through elements in the path of the natural air flow to cool or heat the air as necessary to maintain occupant comfort.
• Radiant Cooling where a fuild is circulated through floor slabs to produced a cooling effect for the building
• Thermal Mass where a large mass of rock or concrete is placed in the building to capture natural heating and cooling forces based on outside temperature changes such that cooler evening temperatures. The thermal mass exposed to daytime heating or evening cooling can release that energy or accept energy to provide heating or cooling as required.
• Renewable Energy generation and storage components will be necessary on the building to produce electricity from photovoltaic or wind systems, including building integrated photovoltaics to meet the remaining electrical demand for light and buidling plug load.

The combination of these elements, designed in concert, will allow a building to produce as much energy as it uses and maintain and pleasant and productive environment for building occupants.

Conclusion

The LACCD is aware of its role as both an institution of higher education and a role model for the community, which is why it has embarked on an ambitious campaign to raise awareness on the benefits of sustainability. On a state wide level, its Board of Trustees has actively participated in the League of California Community Colleges, sharing sustainable building policy implementation techniques with other boards of trustees, and has participated in UC/CSU sustainability conferences, Green Build Conferences, the state-wide Partnership between Energy Companies and Colleges, and addressed many neighboring school district boards to encourage duplicative efforts in other school districts.

A core principle of the LACCD Capital Bond construction program, which is updating nine community colleges to better serve its students, is to incorporate best practices in sustainable design, construction and operations wherever it can. With each sustainable step, the LACCD is taking us one step closer to our goal of balancing the need for development while protecting our environment for generations to come.