By Erin Mathe, Xcel Energy and Colorado Energy News

Setting the Standard

When it comes to building green - and achieving the highest levels of efficiency possible - one elementary school in Fort Collins, Colorado has achieved the triple crown. Bethke Elementary is the first school in the country to achieve the Gold LEED certification (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design), the first school ever to receive three Green Globes out of four from the Green Buildings Initiative and was designed to earn the ENERGY STAR award. The school’s achievements in efficiency
stem from the district’s long-standing commitment to environmentalism.

“It’s amazing to see how far we’ve come,” says Poudre School District Energy Manager Stu Reeve. Reeve is quick to credit partners like Xcel Energy’s Energy Design Assistance program for these achievements. “We know people who know what they’re doing,” says Reeve.

Bethke Elementary is seventh in the District’s growing line of high performance buildings. PSD’s team goal is to make each one better and more efficient than the last. But this one might be tough to top.

The 63,000 square foot, 2-story building will use roughly 40-50% less energy to operate than a comparable school designed without sustainability features. Among other things, it involves a state of the art evaporative system to address its cooling load and allow for year-round air conditioning, a super-insulated building envelope, high efficiency boilers, and operative windows that provide daylighting to 90% of the building’s interior.

Other energy efficient features include building orientation, site design, displacement air strategies and carbon dioxide sensors to control ventilation. Using a “micro-loaded” strategy the building also reduces heating and cooling costs by about half compared to a conventionally designed building.

“PSD uses an integrated design approach which is smart,” says Jessica Peterson, manager of the Energy Design Assistance program at Xcel Energy. “They invited everyone to the table early on, including the architect, engineers, contractor, building owner and others. The idea is that the advice and expertise of each discipline is maximized when they considers the building as a whole.”

The result is a building designed to promote greater student and staff productivity, less absenteeism and better health, to have less impact on the environment and provide operational cost savings.

Features designed into Bethke Elementary include:

Direct/indirect evaporative cooling
High efficiency boilers for heating
High efficiency/on demand boiler for domestic hot water
Full control of lighting and HVAC with building automation system
High efficiency automated irrigation system and low water use landscape design
Increased wall and roof insulation
Tower-free cooling
High performance glazing
Reduced lighting power density
Stepped daylighting controls
Energy Star equipment
Displacement ventilation in gym and cafeteria
Solatube daylighting
Heat recovery
Premium efficiency electric motors and variable frequency drives on all motors above 1 hp and larger.
10 kW photovoltaic system to be installed later this year

All of these things increase the building’s efficiency, reliability and comfort and simultaneously decrease energy usage, costs and maintenance.

Environmental History

Reeve says this commitment to building as green as possible started back in the 1990’s before ratings and certifications existed. In the beginning, they used things like daylighting and high efficiency lighting before such tactics became more mainstream.

In 1999, PSD formed a green team to look at the most efficient practices. “LEED was just getting off the ground,” says Reeve. “That was one of several tools we’d use to create our own sustainable practices. Our triple bottom line became building the best school possible with energy conservation, the economics of conservation and balancing that with environmental stewardship in mind. We learned a lot, but we knew better than to think we had all the answers. With each building, we’d ask, ‘How can we improve the next time and learn from the previous school?’”

Collaborative Effort

By 2000, PSD’s team was incorporating many entities into the planning mix: they began partnerships with Xcel Energy, the Department of Energy, the Colorado Governor’s Energy Office and the Environmental Protection Agency’s ENERGY STAR program. PSD’s team then began to include facilities managers, students, staff, administrators, maintenance, operations, designers and their utility companies. “We found that some of our best successes came from dropping our fences and listening to other ideas,” says Reeve.

All of that success came with some missteps over the years. One of their LEED certified schools included lighting controls tied to daylighting. The lighting controls became obsolete and the cost to retrofit new controls in each classroom would have run $800 per room. They opted not to make the changes.
 
“These are just snapshots in time,” says Reeve. “We want to continue to improve. We want to help other people achieve sustainability which includes telling them what not to do.”

Making It Work

Reeve says these various projects have proven that high performance sustainable schools could be done. “If you give people the latitude to be innovative, it’s amazing what can be done within tough parameters,” says Reeve. “We just needed to be smart with the money we were spending.”

They also spend more on the design phase of each building. If a typical budget allows for five to six percent spending on design, Reeve says they spend closer to eight percent. PSD would rather take longer on the front side of the project and get it built correctly. They seem to be doing things right:  average payback has been five years or less.

Bethke Elementary School Financial Snapshot

Xcel Energy Funding:
Modeling Cost $26,993
Incentives $65,450
Total money provided on project $92,443

Energy Savings*
Increase in Upfront Building Cost (Energy only) $123,000
Estimated Annual Energy Cost Savings $34,570
Annual Electrical Savings 274, 257 kWh
Annual Natural Gas Savings 234 MMBTU
Total Conditioned Area 63,000 square feet
Electric Peak Demand Savings 64%
Payback term Less than 5 years
* Statistics based on the International Energy Conservation Code 2003

More to Come

Bethke Elementary is in good company in the district. Of the seven high performance schools the Poudre District has built since 2000, several have achieved awards. Fossil Ridge High School received Silver LEED status in 2005 as well as the ENERGY STAR national Leadership in Energy Management award in 2003.  The district has earned 87 ENERGY STAR labels for schools since 2000 out of a total of 168 in Colorado.

The PSD team will tell you it takes the involvement of everyone to think green. “We have our little environmental posters that help the students focus on reducing electricity,” says Reeve. “We teach them to turn off the lights and educate them about things like recycling to divert trash from landfills. Everybody gets it - including the community around us.”

Reeves future goals keep getting loftier. One involves something called “Net Zero” energy use. It requires that 100 percent of the building’s energy be supplied by on-site renewable energy. Given what he’s already achieved, nothing is impossible.

For more information on this project, log on to www.psd.k12.co.us. To learn more about efficiency programs, contact your Xcel Energy account manager, or log on to www.xcelenergy.com/businessnewconstruction.