Green Doers

Aug 1, 2009

Matt Grace
Division Manager, Enermodal Engineering
Calgary

Canada’s leading green-focused building engineering firm is beginning to make its mark on the Alberta landscape with projects including the redevelopment of Calgary’s Currie Barracks, an upgrade of the University of Lethbridge, the CBE Safran Centre in Calgary and the Enmax Conservatory at the Calgary Zoo. As regional head Matt Grace points out, until 200 years ago virtually all buildings were sustainable – they were made of local materials and relied on their own, mostly renewable energy sources. Does that mean we have to go back to the future? Read on.

AV: How would you describe your business?
Matt Grace: We specialize in green buildings. That’s all that we do. We have about 80 people in the company in Canada, and everybody is working on some aspect of green buildings…. We’re typically contracted by either the developer or the architect, and it is our role to make sure the project meets its sustainability goals, which is typically, for example, a LEED rating of gold. It is our job to make sure those are met in the most practical and cost-effective ways.

How do you look at things differently than a mainstream engineering firm would?
First of all, you have to understand what the overall aims of the project are. [Take the] Enmax Conservatory at the zoo here in Calgary. A really important part of that project is to demonstrate how you can incorporate renewable energy into the building design so that the visitors to the zoo would go away with ideas that they might do on their own projects. So understanding that from the beginning helps you determine what the priorities are going to be.

But building design affects more than just the building’s users, doesn’t it?
The IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] identified that the building sector was the single biggest area for tackling climate change in a cost-effective way…. In Canada, I’ve seen anything from 30% to 50% of all the climate change is directly attributed to the building sector. Globally, it’s been estimated to be between 40% to 60% in various studies. The message is that we can’t actually tackle
climate change without buildings.

Speaking at Buildex in Edmonton this year, you said that it’s not just about energy efficiency. You have to start with location.
If you want to look at a truly sustainable development, you have to look at the location. We did some work recently with the City of Calgary that just highlighted the importance of transportation in terms of cutting carbon emissions for the whole of Calgary…. If you look at the Currie Barracks project, not only are green standards for the buildings themselves, but they’ve actually made great efforts to integrate transit and to make everything as walkable as possible. If you’re dealing with those at the planning stage, it’s sort of cost-neutral.

What do you recommend for the company that wants to operate in a more sustainable way?
The first thing is understand where your big impacts are. Tackle your big three items. If you’re a consulting organization and travel is a big part of your environmental impact – you’re not producing much product – then you need to look at travel. The first thing is get a baseline audit done of your major environmental impacts. Just tackle the big stuff and don’t worry about the small stuff.

Standards systems: good or bad?
I think they’re essential but they’re only part of the solution. What you’ve got with LEED in North America and BREEAM in the U.K. and Green Star in Australia and CASBEE in Japan is you’ve got something that says this is what an environmentally friendly building is; here is a benchmark. They’re absolutely essential for communicating standards with the whole construction industry.

What do you see as the end point?
We have to start getting down towards net-zero carbon buildings…. We can have buildings that produce all their own energy. It’s technically feasible. These will be comfortable and useful and very productive buildings. We also have to start arranging and locating those buildings so that we can cut back on the reliance on the car. This is all about having mixed-use buildings, about having affordable homes near jobs so that people don’t have to get in a car and drive everywhere. That’s what I’d like to see.