San Francisco Business Times - by Lindsay Riddle

Buildings that offset all of their own power needs could be a net win for the earth.

By now, most have heard the statistics: Buildings, both residential and commercial, account for nearly 39 percent of UFactorThe factor representing resistance to heat flow of various building materials..S. energy consumption — more than even the transportation industry which accounts for 28 percent — and nearly 38 percent of carbon dioxide emissions (most of which is attributed to pollution produced while generating electricity).
That’s why multiple projects in the Bay Area and elsewhere are being designed to meet the net-zero standard — to produce with renewable resources as much energy as they consume. And new regulations are pushing the building industry in that direction so that instead of one-off concept buildings, the building community is working on ways to make net-zero a possibility for all types of buildings.
 

Zeta Communities is one business on the cutting edge of the net-zero energy movement.
 

The San Francisco-based startup’s factory-built homes and buildings can meet the net-zero standard by using building materials like super-efficient insulation and windows that lower a structure’s total power needs, and by adding solar panels to offset the electricity that is used. Its live/work demonstration town home in Oakland was Zeta’s first net-zero project. To push its efficiency to the limit, Zeta used an automated energy control and monitoring system it calls zTherm, plus an air-to-air heat exchanger, heat recovery ventilator and efficient appliances. That townhome is being monitored for its performance by the UFactorThe factor representing resistance to heat flow of various building materials..S. Department of Energy and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory to see if it performs as promised. Zeta has also replicated the model and has 62 other net-zero units in the works.
 

“It’s really a revolutionary change to the way buildings have been thought about,” said Naomi Porat, CEO of Zeta. “And it could change forever the way we think about buildings as great energy consumers, to (thinking about them as) great energy producers.” Zeta and others in the building industry believe these first projects will prove the potential of net-zero, but the real bang for the energy buck will be in large commercial buildings and in master planning whole neighborhoods and even cities to produce all of the energy they need with renewable sources.
Looking to China
 

Architecture firm Skidmore Owings Merrill cut its net-zero teeth on a 2.3 million-square-foot skyscraper in Guangzhou, China. Originally designed to a net-zero standard, the Pearl Tower’s owners didn’t go for every innovation that would be required to meet the mark and no mechanism was in place to allow the building’s owners to sell excess electricity back to the electric grid in China, which made it less economical. But SOM did come up with innovations that it hopes will be applied more broadly for net-zero designs.
 

“On a very large scale, mixed-use buildings and net-zero buildings make sense, though on a smaller scale it may not even make sense to do,” said Carrie Byles, an architect and director at SOM in San Francisco. “We’re going to get much closer to net-zero design if we can look at whole neighborhoods.”
 

New tools critical
 

SOM credits new tools that make net-zero design possible.
 

“The design software we use and the hardware we run it on has finally gotten to the point where we can really do some real complex environmental analysis,” said Byles.
 

She and other partners design buildings to optimize their performance, adapting them to the climate and positioning them so they take advantage of sunlight and weather patterns, studying how light is distributed, how air flows through, how the building heats up and other factors. They use technology to model all of these things before plans are finalized.
“Now we’re getting to the point where we have programs giving us almost real-time feedback on whether the design we’re considering will perform well,” Byles said.
 

“Five years ago,” added SOM partner Michael Duncan, “that wasn’t possible.”
 

With new tools and the collective will of an increasingly environmentally conscious public calling for aggressive strategies to combat climate change, net-zero projects are getting bigger.
 

John Andary, an engineer and managing partner at the San Francisco office of Stantec Consulting, is part of a team working on a 350,000-square-foot building for the Sacramento Municipal Utility District and a 220,000-square-foot research lab at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado. The lab hopes it will meet the net-zero standard and get the highest rating that LEED — the Leadership in Environmental and Energy Design program — offers.
“Renewable Energy labs, when they hired us to do this project for them, it was really to demonstrate that this is a viable way to design buildings for everybody,” said Andary. “We’re building buildings that are reasonable for dollars-per-square-foot and that are also net-zero and LEED platinum.”
 

Challenges continue

While technology is advancing to make it easier to design super-energy-efficient buildings, challenges remain, including the upfront costs. Architects and builders suggest net-zero buildings today in California cost about 10 percent more for design and construction than those built to current energy codes, and solar panels are often responsible for the bulk of that premium. Still, most builders and designers say higher upfront costs can be recouped in lower energy costs over time.
Building net-zero buildings is also complicated, requiring teams of engineers, architects and subcontractors to work together.
 

“Our industry needs almost a new set of professionals who will be able to manage this process, and I think we’ll see more firms like Johnson Controls that will take on that (general contractor) role and provide performance guarantees and possibly partake in the savings,” said Stanford architecture professor Ray Levitt, who studies net-zero building.
The federal government is fueling momentum in net-zero. The Department of Energy’s building technologies program has set a goal of making commercial net-zero energy buildings marketable by 2025.
 

Meanwhile, the California Public Utilities Commission called for all residential construction to be net-zero by 2020 and all commercial construction to be net-zero by 2025. And San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom just submitted legislation this month that would require commercial building owners to track their buildings’ energy performance, report it annually and get energy audits every five years.