Retro-Greening: Bringing sustainability to your existing facility Chris Carter Office Manager ESA, A Terracon Company Round Rock, Texas
uilding owners have a plethora of choices when it comes to classifying their future renovation as “green”: LEED, CHPS, and Energy Star to name a few. The requirements vary for each program but they all originated from a common idea—to facilitate the incorporation of sustainable, efficient equipment and practices into existing buildings where they do not currently exist. Sustainability is defined many ways, but it most often refers to minimizing or eliminating the carbon footprint that a building leaves on its environment. Energy efficiency is producing the necessary building conditions or manufactured product with as little energy use and cost as possible. Retrofitting existing buildings with systems that produce renewable energy and incorporating equipment and strategies that reduce wasted energy is referred to as “RetroGreening.”
considered utilizing a larger system at the wastewater treatment plant that would supply renewable power to the smaller distribution pumps, aerators and building lighting sources that operate throughout the day.
Lighting Many of our facilities were constructed with the intent to utilize daylighting strategies to limit the need for light fixtures to operate during the day, but the controls and equipment for implementing those strategies have been abandoned or were value engineered out of the original construction. There have been significant gains in the technology and reliability of daylighting controls and the
incorporation, or reincorporation, of these controls into the existing lighting systems is typically a relatively easy task. We find a number of areas in almost every building we survey that have an abundance of natural daylight supplied by windows, skylights or light wells, but operate all of the existing light fixtures in the space during the daytime. The introduction of a photocell into an existing lighting circuit that serves fixtures located in these areas will automatically control the fixtures so that they turn on when the ambient light is not sufficient, but more importantly, they turn off when the natural daylight satisfies the lighting requirements of the space.
Energy and sustainability retrofits can be accomplished in many different systems in an existing facility. This article illustrates a few examples of typical projects.
Renewable Energy ESA, A Terracon Company, assisted with the installation of a 101kW solar photovoltaic system on the roof of an existing parking garage to offset peak demand and consumption charges for a city hall. The system also offered the added benefit of providing additional shaded parking to the top level of the garage. The city has 76 APWA Reporter
May 2012
It is not uncommon to find light fixtures operating throughout the day in an area designed to utilize energy saving daylighting strategies.
