It's Electric News!

During the construction of the building, Franki Aitken (our CFO) has had to make a million decisions. Just the other day, there was a long meeting about hand soap (more on that later).

Last week, Franki selected the company that will sell us the electric power for the building. Like all such decisions, the environmental impact and the economic impact had to be worked out. Working with Renewable Energy Choice, a Colorado based company, Franki was able to purchase a very attractive contract for our electricity.

The exciting thing is that 100% of the electricity our building uses will come from wind generated power at a very reasonable price (roughly $.00378 per kw/h).

A lot of people don't understand how this works, so let me give it my best layman's explanation. Obviously, you can't buy a specific electron and know how it was generated. So the best way I've found to think of the power grid is as a stream. Up stream, somebody pours a gallon of water into the stream and sells to somebody downstream the right to take a gallon out. Obviously, the water gets all mixed up with other water in the stream, but the stream is kept whole.

That's pretty much how the electric grid works. People generate power lots of different ways and put it onto the electric grid for people to pull down. We're paying Renewable Energy Choice to put power that was generated by windmills onto the grid so we can use it to power our building.

So when you visit our building, remember that none of the electricity is adding pollutants to the atmosphere and it was a really good buy to boot!

Channel 69 Story

WFMZ Channel 69 did a story featuring our roof on yesterday's news. You can view it here.

Back on Track

If you check out the webcam, you can see that the roof panels have started to go on the building beginning with the right (west) side of the roof. The first one was placed yesterday (Wed.) morning. As of this morning, about a quarter of the roof is on. My guess is that if we're lucky with weather, we could have the whole roof on by the weekend.

We think the building will be ready for occupancy by about August 15. Keep an eye on our progress!

Hiccup

As Heidi Williamson reported the construction crews began to install the roof panels last week. Like most of the building the roof panels come prefabricated, which cuts down on waste and energy costs.

Unfortunately, the panels just didn't fit together properly. The company that manufactured them made a mistake and didn't get the joints right. This falls into the category of "stuff that happens" and is one of the very few construction glitches that we've hit in this project. I still believe that the reason we've had so few challenges on the job site is that the integrated design process we went through lead to a more thorough plan for constructing the building. While this little problem is an annoying delay, I think we've had fewer of those than on most projects.

So......we had been planning a July 25 completion date and we're now pushed back three weeks to mid-August. We still plan to do a series of events in September to introduce the community to the new building, but we'll just have a little less time to hang the pictures!

Saving Money AND Saving Landfill Space

Last week, Eric Burkey from Burkey Construction and I took a group from the Western Berks Ambulance Association on a tour of the building project.

We talked a lot about construction site recycling. Through April, we've generated about 217 tons of waste, with over 97% of it being diverted away from Landfills. I'd love to hear from readers of this blog if anyone has ever seen numbers like this in a prior project. As I talk to people who know a lot about green buildings, they're generally blown away by the landfill diversion rate.

Eric told the group that when we first made a commitment to recycling at least 75% of our waste, we thought it would actually add to the cost of the building. After all, the wastes need to be sorted and shipped to recycling facilities. Eric now believes that we're actually saving money (and the environment) through the virtual elimination of landfill fees.

Great news!

A video update

Heidi Williamson, our VP of communications, shot a two minute video of the building's progress today.

You can watch it here:

March Waste Report

Our goal on the project is to divert 75% of the project’s waste from landfills. Through March, 205.69 tons of material or 98.46% of the project’s waste has been diverted from landfills. Most of this has waste has been repurposed, but some of it has gone into the recycling stream.

The team is working hard on this.....and doing an amazing job. Just imagine if all construction sites did this!

New York Times Article on Concrete

Earlier, I wrote an entry about the concrete in our building and the inclusion of fly ash. The New York Times recently ran an article providing more details about the efforts of the Concrete Industry to lower their carbon footprint. You can check it out here.