Chad Giese, Plantation Homes

This afternoon my REAE 5304 class drove to Marine Creek Ranch near Lake Worth to see an affordable LEED-certified home being built. Chad Giese spoke to us about the features included in a LEED certified home, some of the benefits, and some of the obstacles a builder faces when constructing green homes.

Surprisingly, a home does not need a lot of expensive equipment like solar panels to classify as LEED certified. In fact, a lot of the "upgrades" that help with LEED certification are only a few dollars more than standard building hardware. Some of these affordable green features include thermal ply, cement based siding, hurricane straps (rafter fasteners), upgraded insulation, low flow faucets, and single filter

heating and cooling systems.

The sum of these green upgrades allow Plantation Homes to be certified as both Energy Star compliant and LEED certified. On the average, Plantation Homes' LEED-certified homes have Home Energy Rating System (HERS) scores about 30 percent lower than an average new home of the same size on the market. For LEED certification, though, Planation also needs to ensure that their homes exhibit durability, longevity, and innovation in design.

While I enjoyed Don Ferrier's talk last week about his custom built green homes, I am not sure that I would be able to afford one. I could see myself buying a Plantation Home, though. The LEED certification is a tremendous selling point, especially with the prevalence of greenwashing nowadays. It is nice to know that a third party is inspecting the homes to make sure that their green features truly are green.

Laura Blaylock, Tarrant Regional Water District

Laura Blaylock, a hydrologist and sustainability champion, gave my REAE 5304 class a tour of Tarrant Regional Water District LEED Gold Annex Building. LEED, which stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, is an internationally-recognized verification of environmentally friendly and sustainable buildings. 

Ms. Blaylock started by giving us an overview of the history of the TRWD and an explanation of its mission of providing water to over 2 million residents in an eight-county area stretching from Wise County in the northwest to Freestone County in the southeast. 

When the TWRD began to outgrow some of its facilities, it also realized that it needed to better centralize its organization and find a more central location for its SCADA IT command center. Hence, the idea for an annex building was born. Since the Water District's mission deals with maintaining a sustainable water supply, it only seemed fitting to try to construct a more sustainable building. 

Initially, the TWRD aimed for LEED Silver status. However, after Ms. Blaylock and others were able to convince management that the building plans made the building optimal for a solar array, the TWRD set out to construct the first LEED Gold building in Tarrant County. While the panels were expensive, they should pay for themselves in 16 to 18 years

Many of the building materials that were chosen also helped this building achieve LEED Gold status. For example, the conference rooms boast cork flooring, which is a renewable material. Building cabinets are made of a material that improves air quality, a key factor in LEED certification. Walls were painted with non-volitile organic compound (VOC) paints to further improve indoor air quality. The floors are polished with beeswax, another renewable substance. Most of the furniture comes from either recycled or recyclable materials, and even the steel used in the building is 40% recycled steel. 

The building even received LEED credit for its bike racks, its proximity to bicycle trails, its wellness center, and its eco-friendly meeting spaces that feature an employee-led recycling program.

The building's interior lights are responsive to daylight, and its exterior lights are downward facing LED lights that reduce light pollution.

Being a water authority, one would expect the building to demonstrate water conservation, and it does. It has three 2,500 gallon rainwater tanks and a drip irrigation system for its landscaping. 

Ms. Blaylock, like most other sustainability officers, was trained in a different field but became the organization's sustainability champion because she made a suggestion and was able to articulate the message of sustainability in business terms so that leadership could see the economic and social as well as environmental benefits of sustainability, the so-called "sustainability bottom line."