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Albuquerque building is the cutting edge of energy-efficient design
Photo by Craig FritzTrbune
Trbune
Debbie Coburn works the front desk at Dekker/Perich/Sabatini, 6801 Jefferson St. N.E. The 80,000-square-foot building represents the cutting edge of energy-efficient design, including the use of natural light in most areas. The City Council and Mayor Martin Chavez are revising building regulations to encourage energy savings.
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From the outside, Jefferson Green looks like a typical modern and boxy office building.
The windows are big on this three-story affair, and a grand entrance greets workers and visitors.
But the 80,000-square-foot building on Jefferson Street Northeast, called home by the architecture and engineering firm Dekker/Perich/Sabatini and the local branch of Centex Homes, represents the cutting edge of energy efficiency.
As the City Council and Mayor Martin Chavez look to tweak building regulations with an eye toward reduced energy use, it also represents the wave of Albuquerque's future.
"We don't have endless supplies of energy or water," said Dale Dekker. "The world has changed."
What's so striking about the building - which uses about 45 percent less energy than average - is how simple it was to get those savings.
On a tour this week, architect Dekker first pointed to little vents in the floor - where the air conditioning comes from. Usually, it comes from ducts in the ceiling, but that way it takes more energy to blow the air down and more energy to make the air cool.
"That's where you get a lot of your energy savings," Dekker said.
Next, Dekker pointed out the windows. They're big, well-insulated, and the building itself is positioned to capture as little of the direct summer sun and as much of the winter sun as possible. With Mother Nature doing much of the climate control, the artificial systems don't have to burn as much energy.
Natural light percolates to every nook and cranny of the office, save the bathrooms and closets at the center of the building.
"There are groups up there," Dekker said, gesturing to an upstairs floor of the office building, "that don't turn on their lights during the day."
Besides a reduced carbon footprint, Dekker's efficiency efforts, which added 5 percent to the cost of construction, he said, reap about $50,000 in electricity savings every year.
Those conservation-minded improvements will pay for themselves in seven to eight years, Dekker said.
"If electric prices go up, that return will be sooner," he added.
Meanwhile, efforts to make sure the office buildings and homes of the future emulate some - but probably not all - of the energy efficiencies of Jefferson Green are in the City Council's court next week.
The council is scheduled to vote on a bill Monday, sponsored by councilors Michael Cadigan, Isaac Benton and Martin Heinrich, that would incorporate a body of rules called the International Energy Conservation Code into city regulations. It would also set out separate requirements for such details as the reflectivity of roofs, the size of ducts and the energy use of major appliances.
"They will pay the homeowner back quite rapidly," Benton said of the requirements.
Also at this Monday's council meeting, Chavez's more comprehensive rewrite of building codes will be introduced. That proposal will most likely be sent to a committee for further study.
Advocates of the mayor's plan say the council's is disorganized and will just set up a conflict if both end up going through.
"It will be a mess," said Katherine Martinez, the governmental affairs director of the Home Builders Association of Central New Mexico, who served on the committee that drafted the mayor's plan. "Code changes, especially something this important, should be written by the code department."
But where Martinez sees a conflict, Benton sees one proposal dovetailing nicely into another.
"We're just going to get out in front of it," he said. "I will happily endorse that when it gets done. I commend the mayor for upping the ante."
Regardless of how they get there, the city does appear poised, one way or another, to deploy regulation in the fight against global warming. Dekker compares the change in political winds to those that led to greater efficiency in cars.
Eventually, he said, environmental awareness and cash savings come to a head and change the way people do business, even if it only amounts to a few small but critical changes.
"It just requires thinking about it," Dekker said.
