Tahoe building featured in green building book

When the Tahoe Center for Environmental Sciences building opened a few years ago at Sierra Nevada College it was immediately heralded as being extremely green.

The accolades for the Incline Village school continue with it being featured in the recently released book “The World’s Greenest Buildings” by Jerry Yudelson and Ulf Meyer.

“(The book) provides the very first large-scale study comparing building performance data worldwide from the highest-rated large green buildings of the past 10 years, using actual energy and water operating data from 57 projects in 18 countries. It offers architects, engineers and project developers a new way to understand how high-performance buildings can be designed and constructed,” is how the authors describe their work.

TERC is a platinum LEED certified building from the U.S. Green Building Council. To achieve this designation, the project design had to achieve more than 52 credits in:

• Sustainable sites

• Energy and atmosphere

• Water efficiency

• Materials and resources

• Indoor environmental quality

• Innovation and design process.

The green building experts choose the Tahoe school as one of 16 buildings to include in the book. It was singled out for its high performance and energy efficiency. Collaborative Design Studio was the architect for the project.

In the six years it has been open, the building has used 9.6 kWh per square foot per year. This is less than one-tenth of the national average of about 100 kWh.

It also has a rainwater storage system, photovoltaics, solar thermal hot water, cogeneration, low flow fixtures and concrete with 25 percent fly-ash content.

— Lake Tahoe News staff report