Energy Metering in a Multi-tenant High-rise Laboratory Building

Timothy Stoll, BioMed Realty

Laboratory research buildings are among the most energy intensive categories of today's commercial building sectors. Their users must satisfy strict safety and mission-critical standards to ensure that their research and testing operations are conducted in a safe and affective environment.

Today's reserach building owners and operators face new challenges in mitigating energy usage and carbon footprint while maintaining the demanding parameters that their owners require. Not only do new building technologies play a role in helping owners and users derive new techniques to minimize energy consumption but managing user behavior is too - with remarkable results. At the Center for Life Science Boston, an 18 level institutional urban research building located in Boston's Longwood Medical Area, BioMed Realty and its tenants have worked closely together to devise an energy metering strategy that has enabled users to monitor their energy use and also motivate and incentivize them to change their behavior and support the investment of new energy saving technologies.

The effort to submeter, measure and report the core utilities within a high-rise, mulit-tenant laboratory building did not come without significant efforts, challenges, and lessons learned. Among them, (1) the investment to install the devices and software to support this technology, (2) the consensus among users to employ common metering products and protocols, and, most importantly, (3) the effort to map a massive among out data into meaningful information were the key hurdles that the team faced. The outcome of this effort has clearly resulted in a change in behavior among some of the heaviest users, who's grant-driven revenue stood to realize great benefits from reducing costs relating to unneccessary energy usage and waste. For the owner, BioMed has realized new reporting and billing-related benefits such as tenant-by-tenant usage and trend analysis as well as lessons learned in how to incorporate similar levels of control in other buildings within its 16msf portfolio, but without the same upfront efforts and costs that it faced at the Center for Life Science Boston. This seminar focuses on the events that led to taking on this effort, the tools employed and the lessons learned by the owner and tenants. It focuses not only on the technology that was required to enable this level of energy control and reporting but the other aspects that played a role, such as lease exhibits, vendor support and consensus builidng among users.

Learning Objectives

  • Identify opportunities where metering technology may yield opportunity to reduce energy consumption
  • Prepare a business case for the implementation of a new metering strategy in an energy-intense research facility
  • City the reseources required to roll out a successful metering strategy within tenant leases, design documents, and operational documents

Biography:

A graduate of Washington University’s Architecture program Tim has spent the last 15 years leading multidisciplinary teams on a range of projects. During his time with BioMed he has successfully lead a number of notable project teams including the completion and close out of the 700,000 SF Center for Life Science Boston in the Longwood Medical Area (2008), the development of three new buildings comprising 360,000 SF on BioMed’s Landmark Campus in Tarrytown, NY occupied by Regeneron Pharmaceuticals (2009), entitlements leading to site plan approval for BioMed’s Traville Parcel D in Rockville, MD and approvals for 500,000 SF of additional FAR for the Landmark Campus in Mount Pleasant, NY (2010), redevelopment of the 90,000 SF Fresh Pond Research Campus in Cambridge, MA (2011) and the transformation of a portion of the former J. Craig Venture campus in Rockville, MD into the multi-tenant Center for Life Science, Shady Grove with built out flexible lab spaces (2012).

As a Senior Director of Leasing and Development based in Cambridge, MA he is currently supporting BioMed’s team leads on the development of the 60,000 SF plus lab capable office ready shell located at 450 Kendall Street in the heart of Cambridge’s Kendall Square, development of two new buildings covering over 300,000 SF for the expansion of Regeneron Pharmaceuticals on the Landmark Campus in Mount Pleasant, and the completion of redevelopment of the Cambridge Place properties covering approximately 300,000 SF. Prior to joining BioMed in 2008 Tim spent time working with Clark Construction who served as the Construction Manager on the $450M plus Boston Convention Center completed in 2004 and as a Project Manager for Spaulding & Slye and Jones Lang LaSalle in Boston where he oversaw a range of tenant improvement projects for laboratory and office users. He holds an MS in Construction Management from Colorado State University and an MS in Finance from Boston College.

 

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