The New Building in Town – Workplaces of the Future

Make way, Colorado; a ground-breaking workspace will call our state home this June.

As you may know, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is building a sustainable office space in Golden, Colorado that will support some 800 staff from both its National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and the DOE’s Golden Field Office. The building, which will be located on NREL’s campus, will feature roughly 220,000 square feet of space that meets LEED Platinum certification requirements. The project, for which the Department of Energy awarded $64 million in contract funds, will be “a showcase for energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies” (Source: www.nrel.gov).  (Image Credit:  http://online.wsj.com)

A Net-Zero Footprint - Smart Spaces on a Budget

The primary goal of this office is net-zero energy use and the hope is that what they learn in the planning and building processes transfers toward the DOE’s previously stated goal of commercially viable net-zero energy buildings by 2025 (Source: www.eco-structure.com, September 19, 2009). In order to serve as a model project for the commercial construction industry, a key goal is to keep the building’s construction within reasonable cost levels – it comes out to about $280 per sq/ft unfurnished – and to widely publish the project’s results (Source: http://online.wsj.com).  (Photo Credit: www.nrel.gov)  

The building is slated to open in June of this year and is called the Research Support Facilities (RSF) center. Everything from the workspace layouts to the general structure was shaped and oriented to maximize natural light exposure.  The building itself resembles an "H" shape and is engineered so that no area inside is more than 30 feet from a window and natural light sources. High-level staff members, for example, will work in offices that have walls only six feet tall and cubicles will be in an open-air configuration with very little in the way of walls in between them. Click here to read more detail on the workspace engineering concepts included in the RSF. (Image Credit: www.nrel.gov)

Windows That Do More 

A system of smart windows plays a large role in the efficient use of the variety of lightning conditions that the building will experience, including:

• Heat-loss control
• Angled interior reflection to maximize interior lighting
• Sunshades to prevent work station glare

The windows will also open to vent excess heat in the warm months at night and will use the cooler night air to naturally bring down the temperature of the building. They were built with a special self-darkening film - which could cut down on energy waste via windows by up to 40% - that responds to the outside temperature.  To find out how the windows work, please click here and select the "Raven Window" option.   (Photo Credit: www.nrel.gov)

A Different Kind of Basement

Another unique feature of the building is an innovative basement-level series of concrete walls that will either capture and slowly transmit heat - from the computer center and a transpired air collector - or capture and transmit cooler air (from nighttime collections), depending on the seasons.

Pulling the outside air through this concrete labyrinth can warm it up by 5 - 10 degrees. The key to heating the building in the winter is the transpired air collector design, which minimizes loss and allows ventilated air to be heated as it enters the building. To read more about how these transpired air collectors work, please click here.

Turning on the Lights - On-Site Renewable Generation

Desk-based lighting is automatically controlled by the building to illuminate when a certain level of darkness is reached. In addition, there’s no “set temperature” for the building – it will be allowed to fluctuate between 68 and 80 degrees before energy-powered heating or cooling sources kick in. Even the cubicles themselves were built to use less energy than the current standard of 10.8 kilowatt-hours of electricity a month (instead using 2.8), and the workstations save additional energy by using laptop computers instead of desktops (Source and Image Credit: http://online.wsj.com/).

For the inevitable amount of energy that the building will require to operate, the DOE is building a Photovoltaic system that can generate up to 1.4 megawatts of energy specifically for the RSF.  Given that Colorado has the fifth greatest solar potential in the United States, these panels should be capable of covering most of the building's leftover energy needs (Source:  www.energyboom.com, April 6). To see how the construction and architecture group got around the hurdles associated with the recycled piping, please click here. 

Even the Building Blocks Are Green

When the DOE and NREL originally started the planning process on the Research Support Facility, they tried to keep the footprint of the building process itself as green as possible. The building structure consists of recycled steel pipe from old natural gas lines and the building uses beetle-kill wood panels and interior throughout. For information on how the construction team worked

Final Note

Don't be fooled by all of the functional design of the RSF - efficient does not mean bare.  This building achieves all of the above and still comes complete with such luxuries as a fitness center and a library for employees (Source: 
www.nrel.gov).  To learn more about this amazing, ground-breaking building, please click here.