Microsoft posts its own story on geothermal wells for heating and cooling its new campus.
“We knew we wanted our new campus to be zero-carbon in its daily operations,” says Katie Ross, global sustainability lead for Microsoft real estate. “So we had to think outside the box on how to provide heating and cooling needs for these buildings. That’s really what drove us to geoexchange technology.”
In the rest of the story was nice to see Mike Green who I have met on another occasion is referenced.
For Mike Green, senior project manager for the Thermal Energy Center, the outcome will be worth the effort in building a sustainable future. The campus project is also building cisterns for 200,000 gallons of rainwater, diverting 95% of its demolition waste from landfills and reducing embodied carbon in building materials by at least 30%. Embodied carbon is carbon released in the manufacturing, production and transportation of construction materials.
“I’ve been in construction my entire 40-plus-year career and have never done a project that has such a commitment to the environment like the Thermal Energy Center,” says Green, building systems director of OAC, a construction and project management firm.
SeattleTimes has a guest opinion post by Anthony Hickling on carbon impact of construction material. In this article Anthony references the above Microsoft project for using its carbon material analysis tool.
For example, Microsoft is investing in a multibillion-dollar refresh of the company’s main campus east of Seattle. This project leveraged the Embodied Carbon in Construction tool, a calculator that was conceived by the industry, incubated by CLF and is now administered by a new nonprofit called Building Transparency. This tool compares the sustainability attributes of similar materials throughout design and construction to enable data-driven decisions that facilitate carbon-smart building material selections (think lower carbon concrete, steel, etc.). Since its launch in late 2019, this free tool already has attracted more than 12,000 users who together are signaling market demand for products with lower carbon footprints.
I’ll be syncing with Anthony in a couple of weeks to discuss his efforts and share my own regarding greener construction methods.