by Shane Henson — December 26, 2012—San Diego, California, will soon be home to the nation’s largest carbon-neutral office building to date, according to Hines, an international real estate firm, and equity partner J.P. Morgan Asset Management.
The 13-story, 415,000-square-foot building under construction at San Diego’s La Jolla Commons will be fully leased and occupied by LPL Financial LLC, a large independent broker-dealer, says Hines. It is being developed and will be owned by a partnership of Hines and institutional investors advised by J.P. Morgan Asset Management. Construction began in April 2012 and completion is scheduled for mid-2014, says Hines.
The new building will achieve carbon neutrality on an annual basis through a combination of high-performance building design, directed biogas and on-site fuel cells that annually will generate more electricity than the building and tenant will use, explains Hines. The building design incorporates a highly efficient under-floor air system, advanced curtain wall materials and many other features that reduce the energy required to operate the building.
The fuel cells, acquired from Bloom Energy, will generate approximately 5.0 million KWh of electricity annually, which is above what the building will consume. The fuel cells convert methane into electricity in a non-combustion process. Sufficient methane for the system will be acquired from carbon-neutral sources, such as landfills and wastewater plants, and placed into the national natural gas pipeline system. Total on-site energy production will be roughly equivalent to generating the electricity required to power 1,000 San Diego homes. This system will contribute to California’s ambitious goal of deriving a third of its electricity from renewable sources by 2020, says Hines.
According to Hines, this achievement is the result of an extensive research study undertaken by Hines and engineering firm WSP Flack + Kurtz to evaluate currently available technologies and combine them with Hines’ long history of maximizing the efficiency of office buildings in a state-of-the-art, commercially viable building.
“LPL Financial at La Jolla Commons is one further step in our objective to put new building strategies and technologies into practice in an economically viable way, using our experience to continually reset our own standards of quality,” said Hines president and CEO Jeff Hines.
