GETTING TO 50

Smaller, Older Building Energy Retrofit Potential

The Preservation Green Lab of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, in partnership with colleges and universities across the county, is conducting a national survey of older, smaller buildings as part of a major national initiative to increase the rate of building energy retrofits and thereby encourage adaptive reuse and preservation of existing buildings. 


Launched in March of 2009, the Seattle-based Preservation Green Lab was established with the mission to further the scientific understanding of the value of our existing building stock.  In its work, the Preservation Green Lab develops and promotes strategic policies for integrating the reuse and retrofitting of older and historic buildings into city and state efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and achieve other sustainability objectives.


The focus of the field survey is on commercial and mixed-use buildings smaller than 50,000 square feet. “Small” commercial buildings represent 95% of the existing building stock but are largely overlooked in the energy retrofit market. The Green Lab has identified 26 major groupings, or typologies, of these buildings to be targeted for building surveys.


If you have questions, feedback or would like to sign-up for the survey, please contact Ric Cochrane at the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s Green Lab: Ric_Cochrane@NTHP.org.



Building Energy Efficiency

Building energy efficiency is widely recognized as a core component of efforts to mitigate environmental damage and realize economic benefits. Large buildings (greater than 50,000 square feet) are most commonly targeted for energy retrofits, perhaps because of economies of scale and simplified ownership structures (large buildings tend to be owned and managed by institutional owners and portfolios) that cater to traditional finance mechanisms.


Small commercial buildings are too often overlooked, yet buildings 50,000 square feet and smaller represent 95% of all buildings by number and 50% of gross area. These building are more diverse than large buildings, in terms of physical characteristics and market influences.  New technical tools and finance mechanisms are needed to reach small buildings.


The New Buildings Institute’s (NBI) energy retrofit experience indicates that common retrofit strategies –
“rules of thumb” – apply to certain broad categories of building typologies. Identifying the physical and other contextual parameters of each typology is necessary to specify which retrofit strategies are optimal. The goal of the building survey is to provide owners of small buildings with easily accessible strategies for undertaking energy retrofits – to preclude or at least reduce the need for specialized consultants and expensive analysis.


The goal of field verification is to:

  1. •Field verify common building typologies to confirm assumptions about typology characteristics

  2. •Create a searchable database of smaller, older commercial buildings 

  3. •Provide additional building characteristic information not available through existing data sources

  4. •Refute or support certain building characteristic parameters that are difficult to verify, due to veracity of or lack of data

  5. •Provide physical examples of building prototypes to help with the New Buildings Institute’s Multi-Measure Tool designed to assist with smaller, older, commercial building energy retrofits

For further information about ‘Getting to 50’ and existing buildings visit:

http://www.newbuildings.org/

http://blog.preservationnation.org/2011/09/22/uniting-preservation-with-energy-efficiency-in-smaller-older-buildings/


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