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Philip Macey is an architect who started work on the National Renewable Energy Lab Project,
the Research Support Facility, as an architect and then moved over to the construction side
with Haselden Construction. What did you learn from this whole process of doing that fantastic
award-winning project? Well! You know, we learned a book worth of
things but probably the thing I would most like to share with people is that we have
found the business case of sustainability. The business case such that you can permanently
reduce energy costs in a building and what we believe that represents is a new class
of real estate – Zero-Energy Real Estate. We are seeing a commercial interest in these
buildings beyond just their ability to create space and creating new office building but
actually as a way to permanently reduce operating costs.
In our white paper, we caller Net-Zero possibly the next frontier in Green Building. Do you
think that’s true? I think it’s more than the next frontier.
I think it’s going to recalibrate the way we can design, construct and operate buildings.
We are going to use a whole new range of design tools; whim will actually find its purpose
and that is to move from constructing buildings to manufacturing buildings. Constructors will
move to be manufacturers of high performance buildings. We will look at buildings in an
entirely new perspective and we need to educate, train and deploy a new range of building and
facility managers. Do you think that in Net-Zero fields, there
is going to be a sense of a more district need or larger perspective than just the individual
building? Absolutely! There’s not a question. The
real leverage point isn’t in a single building. The real leverage point happens at three buildings
and up. At that point you can reach levels of economy that only campuses have ever seen,
and as soon as we translate it into commercial real estate, we will ignite a completely new
development cycle.