Cooper Green Design | The Blog

In 2000, I worked at the Center for Building Performance & Diagnostics at Carnegie Mellon University. My office was in the Intelligent Workplace, an energy efficient space that functioned as working laboratory on the roof of Margaret Morrison. One of the research projects that I was involved in was Building as Power Plant, or BAPP. The goal of the project was to use both ascending conditioning strategies and descending conditioning strategies to design a building that would produce more energy than it consumed. (Ascending strategies prioritize reducing energy load, then implementing passive conditioning followed by active conditioning. Descending or cascading strategies use the waste heat or water from one system to drive the next system.) This was envisioned as a 6 story building in Pittsburgh, which is a relatively cool climate, with significant cloud cover but some solar potential. While the building has yet to be constructed, the research project has been instrumental in pushing legislation and design and construction research in new energy efficient directions.

Elithis Tower Screen

Arte Charpentier Architects and Elithis Engineering have achieved their own example of a building as power plant. This month, the Elithis Tower in Dijon,  France opened. The 10 story office building is billed as the world’s first energy producing building. Inhabitat and AIArchitect each have posts about the building this week. The solar screen is gorgeous and reduces solar heat gain while allowing for adequate daylighting. The heat from building exhaust is reclaimed to provide warm air to the building. For those engineering and facilities nerds out there that enjoy a cup of coffee while watching your meter run backwards on a sunny day, you can drool over the intense sensing and tracking equipment in this building. 1,600 sensors will track energy production and usage and display the information in the building’s lobby.

There are other net energy producing buildings: an active house in Denmark produces more energy than it needs, although it came with a large $794,400 price tag for a small single family home, and Rock Port, Missouri claims to be the first town that produces more power than it consumes, due to 16 million kilowatt hours of power produced by a wind farm.

What I find most interesting in about the Elithis Tower is that it functions as a mainstream office building in an urban area. While operating the building will certainly be different than your standard office, the occupants will not need to “sacrifice” their comfort to achieve the positive energy generation. With an $185/sf construction cost, this is proof that buildings as power plants are achievable and affordable.

Elithis Tower

Elithis Tower

Dijon, France

54,000 sf

$10 million

Arte Charpentier Architects