One of the first decisions we made for the Climate Innovation Center was to commit to a high performance, zero energy building that is all-electric with no onsite fossil fuel use. And we chose to certify our project as Zero Energy Certified through the International Living Future Institute to bring independent third-party validation to our project. To achieve our Zero Energy goal, we needed to bring the right team of building and design professionals together very early on in the building process.
Key Considerations
Our design team included the project architect, mechanical engineer, electrical engineer, and energy modeler. In addition, our commissioning agent and building envelope commissioning agent provided early-stage guidance on how to maximize performance of the mechanical system and building envelope to reach our goal.
We chose to use the International Living Future Institute’s Zero Energy certification for our project since it has a focus on ensuring that a building performs as a zero energy building, rather than simply meeting a checklist at design and construction stages. In addition, this standard doesn’t allow on-site combustion in the building, which aligns with our goal for the building to be emission-free.
The Owner’s Project Requirements (OPR) manual is the central guiding document that the design team and future contractors will refer to, and it needs to clearly explain that high performance and zero energy operation is a fundamental requirement for the project. We discussed our commitment to zero energy regularly with the design team as we refined our OPR.
Building Team for Step 1
