Comparing Energy Use

When developing new projects, we aspire to create better buildings — in many ways. One aspect is in energy use. To create goals, we must have benchmarks to improve upon. Existing buildings provide those benchmarks. I am trying to compare Swedish hospitals and Pacific Northwest hospitals to see if the PNW can learn from the Swedish examples. First, I’ll look at the amount of energy that hospitals use now. These are averages of real hospitals that are in operation. In the US there is often just one meter for each kind of utility: electricity, gas, steam, etc. It is typical in Sweden, and actually mandated for new buildings, to separate “building energy” from “activity energy.” This is a description of the type of use that falls into each category:

Building energy use
building’s electricity, fans, pumps
cooling
heating tap water
room heating
heating and ventilation

Activity energy use
activity electricity, lighting
activity electricity, equipment

This chart demonstrates the difference between the baseline energy use in Sweden and in the Pacific Northwest.

Clearly Sweden has already addressed some of the energy use questions that we are just starting to ask. That is one reason that I am here. How are Swedish designers and engineers able to create buildings and systems that run so efficiently.

A couple more numbers to keep in mind that I just learned. Southern Sweden’s maximum energy use (“building energy use”) regulation for any new commercial building is 100 Kwh/m2/year (32 Kbtu/ft2/year). Any energy used beyond that must be produced. So really that is the maximum bought energy — or delivered energy — that is allowed for a new project.

There is also a new EU directive that will require energy labeling of all new and remodeled buildings for their energy use. There are definitions of how this energy must be metered and what conditioned area should be included in the calculations. Thus, energy use is going to be easily traceable for all of these buildings, for everyone. This will make benchmarking and creating comparisons between projects much easier. It will also create awareness about the amount of energy that buildings produce in an open, direct way. For more information on this directive visit this site.

BASTA

Lars Jarnhammar at the IVL works on a database that aims to phase out substances with hazardous properties from construction materials. The system began in 2003 and over 100 suppliers are now registering their products in the BASTA database. The database is a qualification system for building materials where an assessment of the substances in the materials must be made then the manufacturer of the product must qualify their product in order for it to appear in the database. A rigorous agreement and auditing system is set into place to create an environment of quality assurance in reporting. Products that meet the admissible levels for 15 unwanted properties are allowed to appear in the database because they have no known deleterious effect on human or environmental health.

These criteria are as follows:

• Carcinogenic
• Mutagenic
• Toxic to Reproduction
• Sensitizing
• Very Toxic
• Toxic
• High Chronic Toxicity
• Volatile Organic Compounds
• Very Persistent and Very Bio-Accumulative Organic Compound
• Persistent, Bio-Accumulative and Toxic Organic Compound
• Lead, Cadmium, Mercury
• Dangerous to the Ozone Layer
• Very Toxic to Aquatic Organisms
• Environmentally Hazardous, Long-Term Effects
• Toxic to Aquatic Organism

For the database to have the most success, building designers, contractors, and owners should utilize the system for specifying materials that are certified under the BASTA system. Ultimately more manufacturers and more products will need to be in this system for full projects to specify a majority of their materials that are BASTA certified. This can be accomplished if there is sufficient pressure put on the manufacturers to evaluate their products, certifying those that already qualify and improving those products that contain substances that are known to be hazardous.

While this system has been developed in Sweden, and is intended for broader use in the Nordic region and eventually the EU, I think that the US has a place for this kind of evaluation system. We have many different evaluation systems in play, but one centralized system that everyone can equally measure the quality of a product by would be a great improvement to any system that we have today. First, an agreement of what qualifies as a hazardous material must be reached. The next step would be getting manufacturers to agree to qualify their products in a transparent and auditable system. Once some manufacturers have entered the system and have their products in the database it would be possible for the building sector to begin specifying products that are BASTA certified, i.e. known to be safe to human and environmental health. With momentum (and pressure from the building sector), more and more manufacturers will enter the system in order to keep competitive market competition. Eventually this will lead to more choices in hazard free building materials and ultimately safer buildings for the work environment during construction, for the building occupants, and for the emission of toxic substances into the environment.

Of course this has a significant link to healthcare architecture; where we area hoping to heal people in the building, hopefully we are not making people sick with the building. Elimination of hazardous materials in the building is a large area of research and discussion. It has not been the focus of my research, however, because it does not inherently change the form that the building takes architecturally. That does not mean that it is not a very important concern. Specifying healthy materials is as important as planning a healthy building by bringing in daylight, it just happens at a different stage in the planning process. This entry highlights a little bit of insight into how further research may push building materials research to think about a more solidified classification system.

For more information on BASTA please click here for their website.