Advancing Sustainable Building Design through Micro-infrastructure Communities and Technological Innovation

Lance Davis is a sustainable design expert and a part of the Sustainable Design Program in the Office of Federal High-Performance Green Buildings within the Government Services Administration’s Public Buildings Service.

Davis helped write Sustainability Matters, a publication that provides examples of GSA's sustainability achievements. Some of his architectural achievements include the Korean War Veteran’s Memorial, the U.S. Capitol Visitor Center, and the LEED Silver-rated Walter Reed Community Center in Arlington, VA. Davis spoke with the Sustainable Enterprise Report about how the Government Services Administration is leading by example and helping other federal agencies to understand the importance of sustainable building design.

Government by Example: What initiatives have the Government Services Administration (GSA) taken to implement the 2030 net zero energy building requirements laid out in Executive Order 13514?

Lance Davis: Within that Executive Order, we’re required to put together a Sustainability Plan that really helps our federal agency set the targets for the year. Then, once we set the targets, it helps measure what we’ve actually achieved. Next, we report on them and then update the information for the next year. This annual update helps us to continue raising the bar. As a part of our sustainability plan, we have committed to providing at least three net-zero projects each year.

For 2010, those three projects are the Columbus, New Mexico Land Port of Entry; the San Ysidro Land Port of Entry in San Diego, California; and the Otay Mesa Land Port of Entry, also in San Diego. We are working with the respective design teams to help understand what we really mean by net zero. That was something we first had to define, and currently we are considering the concept as "net site energy."

The intent is for all the energy used in the building and onsite to obtain a net zero balance at the end of the year. For Land Port of Entry, that presents a very interesting challenge due to the fact that a lot of the equipments and plug loads in these facilities are "high-intensity," making it challenging to obtain net zero; however, we’ve been learning a lot with those projects and that’s part of the process for us because, come 2020, net zero designs will be a requirement. We’re growing smarter about net zero design and can provide that service to our federal agency clients.

Second, in our sustainability plan, we identify five actions to be taken. One is working with our customers to achieve their sustainability goals. We need to understand what’s important to them - what the Department of Homeland Security brings to us is usually vastly different from what the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) brings, for instance - and, by understanding these differences, we can provide a building that meets client requirements as well as federal mandates.

We’re incorporating carbon into our decision-making and gaining an understanding of how decisions concerning building materials and building siting can make a difference. It’s a change in thinking that we’re implementing in our Portfolio Management Group. We’re trying to better understand how to make smarter decisions instead of just considering cost per square foot, i.e., how do you make a decision based on carbon and then turn that into a greenhouse gas decision as well?

GBE: How possible is it for the majority of federal agencies to meet the requirements for energy reduction, water efficiency and waste diversion by the 2020 deadline?

LD: Well, I think it really depends on whether one holds a glass-half-empty or a glass-half-full mentality. Some groups are in a smokestack and they never get out. If these groups stay in these smokestacks, there’s plenty of dirty thinking in there; but if they break out and begin to think in a different way, there is a great opportunity here.

I believe that if each agency goes it alone, it’s going to be extremely difficult. Both the EPA and the Department of Energy have fantastic research arms with which GSA is not involved. If we take advantage of those research aspects they’re working on, they can in turn take advantage of the knowledge and expertise that GSA is able to bring to the table. And through our combined efforts, we can produce a much better solution, or design better opportunities overall.

And I think we’re already starting to see that happen. I know we’re getting into the proving ground a little bit, but I think that’s going to be a very interesting opportunity for the agencies to work together more effectively. The President has already directed agencies to reduce their real estate by $3 billion. Agencies need to work together to achieve that. Any that decide to go it alone are taking on a large burden.

When we start working together, I believe we can achieve much more - that is, when agencies on a federal campus begin to see themselves as neighbors and build a community.

And so we’re already having discussions with companies about this future vision and asking questions, such as: Why are we sending our sewage 20 miles away? Why are we acquiring our water from a river 30 miles away? Why is our energy coming from a coal-burning electrical power plant 15 miles away? Are there other options in our local community network?

One of our neighbor buildings may have an eco-generation power plant and we can acquire our power from there. Perhaps our building has a green roof where vegetables are grown, another building takes care of neighborhood storm-water management, and yet another building has a sewage treatment facility incorporated into it. This sort of thinking can potentially get us to where we want to go. It begins by disconnecting ourselves from the major infrastructure and considering micro-infrastructures.

GBE: Recently, the Public Building Service (PBS) established a Chief Greening Officer position and also announced the creation of the Green Proving Ground, through which PBS will test 15 technologies each year. Can you talk a bit more about the importance of these new developments and what role the Green Proving Ground will play in advancing the federal government toward its 2020 and 2030 sustainability goals?

LD: Eleni Reed is our Chief Greening Officer and she has helped us break out of the smokestack. In a sense, we are growing a green sustainability information tree that flows from Commissioner Bob Peck to Eleni Reed, and from that we’ve identified a person in each one of our business lines, central office and regions.

The regions quickly adopted the idea of having a sustainability officer in each of their business lines. Thus we’ve moved from individuals working in their own smokestack to a great network of people integrated and involved in working toward a larger goal. Ideas are flowing back and forth and we’re all starting to work together.

As well, Commissioner Peck developed the Green Proving Ground, which the Chief Greening Officer is managing.

For years, GSA has conducted pilot projects that usually only the building manager (who approved the project) and the product manufacturer (who supplied the product) knew anything about. This often resulted in the loss of important data. The project manager would move on to another project and the new person coming in wasn’t aware of it, so there was a lost opportunity for us to share the results of these test projects.

This was unfair to the manufacturing industry because we were testing their products but weren’t really able to help improve on them and utilize them in other projects. Now we’re setting up a system that allows us to test cutting-edge products quickly in order to spread this knowledge to other federal agencies.

The Green Proving Ground provides a great opportunity to work with the other federal agencies because we can take advantage of some of their research arms to better understand what we should be measuring with each particular technology. This process allows us to help manufacturers because we are not disregarding products that failed, but rather reporting on the areas that need improvement. The federal government is taking a different sort of attitude with industry now.

GBE: There is concern that current technologies, even if implemented to their fullest potential, still aren’t advanced enough to help the federal government achieve the requirements of Executive Orders 13423 and 13514. What technological innovations do you think are necessary to help the government successfully meet those requirements?

LD: In a lot of my speeches, I discuss how we are not ready yet to take a half-million-square-foot data center and just disconnect from all the grids. We don’t usually have enough rooftop space to put solar panels to support that type of load.

We don’t have enough space to put disposable machines everywhere to handle the waste from those sorts of buildings, for example. Right now we are considering the current technologies and trying to find various inventive and creative ways to integrate them into our projects.

But what we are really doing is starting to talk to industry, and say, "This is where we need to be by 2020. How can you help us get there? What in your product line do you do well?"

When you first start an integrated design process, you bring a lot of people from all different disciplines to the table. They are allowed to throw out crazy ideas that get batted around for a while. And eventually some of those ideas boil to the top and then you can start to run with them and incorporate them into the design. I think we are in that integrated design process with industry right now.

I was meeting with a structural engineer not too long ago, and we were talking about the live load and dead loads that act on our buildings. We transfer those loads to beams and then into columns, and we bring that energy down to the footings to be dissipated into the ground. Is there a way to capture that energy? I personally have no idea, but it was worth me asking the question so that the structural engineer can go back to the office and talk to his structural experts, to say, "Hey! Can we invent something to make this work?" What the American industry needs right now is the federal government acknowledging where it needs to be in the next eight to nine years, i.e., "if you invent it and create it, we’re here to potentially buy it."

We’re providing a strong message to the industry not to remain stagnant, but to go back to the drawing board and invent the next great innovation. And we’re dealing with the concept that everything in a building may have to be generating power of some sort. For that reason, we’re considering technologies like piezoelectric floors and kinetic energy machines.

GBE: It’s really good to hear you engaging the industry because we encounter many vendors who feel that, even though they invest billions of dollars into research and development, they are often looked at by thought leaders as being the uneducated members of the team.

LD: Yes, that’s why we have an industry relations group. We’ve been discussing putting on something like a visioning conference, where the engineers and the vendors can come together without the marketing people. It would provide a way for vendors to develop an understanding of what these two executive orders and other legislation require of us, with an eye to designing technology solutions that meet those needs. I think that could be very valuable for both the government agencies and the vendors, so we’re trying to determine how best to make that happen.

GBE: There are a lot of - dare I say? - cynics out there when it comes to climate change and sustainability. How much of your thrust is solely about making the GSA more efficient/effective?

LD: I like to say I can walk into any federal building in the country and immediately save 50 percent on the energy bill. All I have to do is turn off the air conditioning and the lighting. Of course, we have a problem with that, don’t we? If you are in Atlanta, Georgia in August, you are not going to want to be in that building. So the reason we are designing net zero buildings is to provide the absolute best place for federal employees to work. That’s what’s important. It’s not that they are necessarily energy-efficient or sustainable; it’s that they are the best places for agency employees to do their jobs. It’s important to the federal government and GSA that we are providing work space that allows for higher productivity, provides clean air, protects employee health, and makes people excited to work for their respective agencies.

That sort of thinking is much broader than the concepts of green building or energy-efficiency, and when you start thinking along those lines, you don’t have to really be concerned about the role of climate change; you’re not designing buildings simply to address climate change. Of course, we want to be aware of the argument and the issues, and make sure we’re not degrading the environment, but the ultimate goal of GSA’s building design work is to provide the best possible workplaces for federal employees.

GBE: What about getting people to buy into this? How successful have you been in selling this vision, through the agencies, to your constituents?

LD: Well, something GSA Administrator Martha Johnson did recently was to take the entire executive leadership on retreat to educate them on the agency’s sustainability goals. She then asked them to incorporate a sustainability factor into their performance evaluations. Now that those executives are being evaluated on some aspect of sustainability, they are focusing more on improving in this area.

What’s also happening is that this attitude is filtering down to the everyday person who is dealing with our client agencies. Today, our customer representatives are a lot more educated about what GSA offers and what we are hoping to achieve, so they are better able to explain it to their counterparts in other agencies.

Once you are able to transfer that knowledge, it translates into an understanding of the value of sustainable building design, and the services we are providing to these other agencies.

Although it’s not quite at the level I would like it to be, we are a whole lot closer than we used to be: more and more federal agency employees are focusing on sustainability in some aspect, from those who choose how we clean our buildings to those who select the paper for our copiers.

Martha Johnson made a comment about our disposal group at a recent conference. She asked the question, "Why isn’t our disposal group - our property disposal people - part of designing construction?"

At first I was rather shocked. I wondered why she would want these two groups to work together. Eventually it dawned on me that she wanted us to be aware that we aren’t only designing buildings, we’re thinking about the lifecycle processes of what we’re providing. We are thinking more holistically about this overall process, and that level of thinking is permeating down through every level of our work at GSA.

*Footnotes