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
Thank you for noting this inclusion: I worked with Jerry Yudelson (not knowing his co-author) over the last two years, submitting the energy data that has accumulated since the day the building opened. . .
The actual title is “The World’s Greenest Buildings: Promise vs Performance in Sustainable Design”, and only reviewed LEED Platinum buildings, presumably because that is the current highest standard (higher soon to come) . . . the TERC building (it’s known as both TERC [UC Davis] and TCES [Sierra Nevada College] designation) received LEED Platinum status a couple of years ago. . .
It was fortunate & very interesting to have participated in the conceptual design of TERC, along with Vivian Loftness, the Dean of Carnegie-Mellon School of Architecture, and others in bringing this ultra-efficient building to Lake Tahoe; hopefully it will set an example to be followed closely by ambitions to redo Tahoe’s infrastructure, as this building’s performance is more about ‘not leaving money on the table’ than it is about “costing more”. . .the CEO of Turner Construction (they built this, along with about $ 20 billion more green projects) routinely talks about a “premium” for green being about .8 % (less than 1%) of the cost of a “regular” building – essentially one cannot afford NOT to build green at those rates.
Thanks to Jerry for this inclusion in his book, as originally he was limiting building size to at least 50,000 sq.ft., which TERC is not, at 40,000 ++. . .