Municipal Carbon Neutral Goals: Decarbonize City Hall
Meeting Local Government Sustainability Goals
The green focused Town of Corte Madera leveraged free municipal decarbonization services from the BayREN Zero Net Energy (ZNE) Technical Assistance Program to work towards its carbon emission reduction goal.
67%
GHG Emissions Reduction
37%
Annual Energy Savings
100%
On-Site Clean Energy
Feasibility Study Sees Future of Lower Carbon Emissions
With technical assistance from BayREN’s ZNE program Corte Madera pursued a feasibility study to help achieve is sustainability goals.
Summary
We delivered a Zero Net Energy / Carbon Feasibility Study Report which recommended potential building upgrades that would provide long term cost, energy and sustainability benefits to Corte Madera’s planned new Town Hall.
Going ZNE
After completing the analysis, we proposed the ZNE upgrade scenario as a cost-effective improvement to the current plan.
This scenario will achieve site zero net energy for the new town hall, which translates to the total projected site energy use being offset by on-site renewable generation.
The ZNE option achieves a 67% reduction in carbon emissions and a 37% reduction in annual energy use compared to the current plan and includes the following:
- going all-electric for the new expansion and
- adding insulation to the existing building.
ZNE vs ZNC
To demonstrate the energy savings between the current plan and ZNE and ZNC upgrades we broke out projected energy use by end use as shown in the graph below.
You can see the energy savings as the difference between the light green bars (energy use for current plan) compared to the darker green bars (ZNE and ZNC) where the ZNE and ZNC upgrade options results in a 37% and 55% reduction in energy use, respectively, compared to the current plan.
Carbon Reduction Options
We investigated three scenarios, analyzing the energy impacts and associated costs of each which included scenarios for:
- current plan which meets code efficiency requirements, and partial solar PV installation,
- zero net energy, and
- zero net carbon.
Building Impacts
We analyzed the energy impacts of the following Town Hall building components:
- building envelope,
- lighting,
- HVAC and
- other equipment and controls.
ZNE/C study tasks
- architectural drawing review of the new expansion and other site documents,
- reviewed plans and community input with Town personnel,
- developed an energy model using EnergyPlus software with OpenStudio to estimate energy consumption, and
- calculated the potential for on-site clean solar PV generation.
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