Green Buildings - Surrounded in Energy Efficiency

I have shared a number of exciting discussions of late on the subject of “Green Buildings.” One surprisingly simple design that I have discussed was that of a manufacturing plant that is built as a series of squares in increasing sizes.

The central, main square contains the office complex that is the most climate comfort sensitive. Built around that is a square of support areas such as storage, meeting rooms, cafeteria, and offices for those who shuttle back and forth on a regular basis from operations into manufacturing. These are the supervisors, purchasing, quality assurance and control and the like. Around that is the manufacturing, warehousing, and shipping and receiving areas.

A building like this takes up the smallest amount of space and uses a system of heat exchange between sectors to lower energy needs. Non occupied rooms would be shut off from heating and A/C until needed. This is a very efficient design from many standpoints with even shorter distances for employees to travel between sectors saving time, the most expensive commodity.

If you added solar water heating, windmills on each corner for supplemental power, passive solar heating and sky lighting you could reduce normal energy costs by a huge percentage. All in-house vehicles could be electric, powered by the windmills. Carbon capturing would eliminate a large percentage of GHG’s that would assure a cleaner bubble for the community. Waste water from the office areas and cafeteria could be filtered and used by manufacturing for cooling machinery. Plantings would lower internal air pollution.

This is a very exciting area and as we are faced with the reality of Carbon Caps becoming a fact of life, we will need to set to work on these ideas. Some of these ideas will require more upfront costs than others and that needs to be addressed in the design. All of the ideas that I have described are current technologies and readily available. We will need to explore new ideas and see how they could fit into such a project. We could also explore how these ideas could be incorporated into public buildings such as schools and civic buildings.

With an eye toward being carbon neutral these buildings would help communities meet local emission regulations. We owe it to ourselves to aggressively work on this idea with our local city planners, building designers and incoming businesses. We can make this or other ideas like this work.