Wisconsin is home to greenest building in nation

Sep 22 - McClatchy-Tribune Regional News - Thomas Content Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Madison firefighters wash their trucks with rainwater collected in giant cisterns. Eighth-graders in Fort Atkinson swim in a pool heated by the sun and the earth, but without a furnace or boiler. And the Sisters at Holy Wisdom Monastery in Middleton worship in the greenest building in the country.

As the construction industry suffers, green building remains robust -- spurred by government and business efforts aimed at trimming energy costs and becoming more sustainable.

And for the second time in three years, Wisconsin is home to the greenest building in the nation, based on a scorecard developed by the U.S. Green Building Council. In 2008, the Aldo Leopold Legacy Center took top honors based on its Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design. Now, the monastery of the Benedictine Sisters on a restored prairie on Lake Mendota has the top honor.

"We don't pat on the back enough for being leaders in the green building industry when we're setting records nationally with our projects," said Sue Loomans, head of the Wisconsin Green Building Alliance. The group will honor the year's top green-building projects at a conference Wednesday in Oconomowoc.

The conference takes place a week after the U.S. Green Building Council singled out Johnson Controls' headquarters in Glendale with a platinum rating. It's the only corporate campus with four different buildings to win the top green-building rating.

Wisconsin is a hub in green design and energy efficiency, thanks to initiatives like the statewide energy efficiency and renewable energy program, Focus on Energy, said Manus McDevitt, principal at Sustainable Engineering Group, a boutique engineering firm with 11 engineers specializing in energy efficiency and renewable energy.

"We do a lot of work around the country, and Wisconsin definitely would be in the top 10," he said.

His 9engineering firm, which focuses on sustainable design, experienced a 50% growth rate for years. This year has been the company's slowest so far, and it's still growing at a 20% clip, he said.

Competitive cost

Features that helped the monastery stand apart include attention to energy efficiency, a ground source heat pump, or geothermal heating system, and solar panels that provide about 13% of the energy use in the building. Together, the building features help it consume only about 40% of the energy of a comparable new building, said Mark Hanson, director of sustainable services at the Appleton architecture and planning firm Hoffman LLC.

And it was all done at a cost of $249 per square foot, which made it competitive with new construction lacking green features, Hanson said.

"We've reached a tipping point on this," he said.

For Hoffman, green expertise is at times a prerequisite when it's bidding for construction contracts.

"We're seeing more projects where, if we weren't clearly committed to green, we would not be asked to be at the negotiating table or the competition table," Hanson said.

Last year, amid a down market for the construction industry, membership in the green building association grew by about 25% to about 300 today.

Water conservation

Though the monastery has been honored as the greenest building in the nation, judges in the state competition chose the Madison fire station as the top state winner in this year's competition.

"Energy efficiency is the star of this design," concluded the contest's jurors.

The fire station incorporates a geothermal ground-source heat pump heating-and-cooling system and a solar thermal system that heats water used for showers and laundry -- and for washing gear after fires.

"We really went after energy, but water is also very critical and not enough a part of the conversation," said John Holz, senior project designer at the Milwaukee office of Plunkett Raysich Architects.

"What we did was install 5,000 gallons worth of rainwater collection, divided equally into four cisterns, and that allows us not to use any potable water outside to wash the trucks," he said.

The final award winner, designed by Sustainable Engineering Services, was the project to replace aging boilers at schools in Fort Atkinson. The high school pool uses a solar thermal system. Elementary schools have geothermal heating and cooling systems.

But the middle school is the district's sustainable star.

"We basically took the boilers out of the building, and the swimming pool is heated by the sun or by geothermal," McDevitt said. "We can get 117-degree hot water when it's minus-10 degrees outside. And there's no gas whatsoever."