Design Fuels Energy Savings

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4 min read

SolTerra’s living walls and low construction costs

The Woodlawn, a four-story, 18 unit, mixed use building in Portland Oregon, demonstrates how technological and design innovation fuel energy savings, which in turn bring tax credits and lower financial costs – and keep pushing communities into new, cost-saving terrain.

“The LEED-Platinum certified Woodlawn apartment/retail project includes a gamut of energy and water-saving features,” says Andrea Wallace, Director of Design for Portland, Oregon-based SolTerra, which completed the building in 2015.  “Each apartment includes Energy Star appliances, an ultra-high efficiency heat pump water heater, and a ductless mini-split heat pump for space heating and cooling. Low-flow plumbing fixtures and high efficiency dishwashers and clothes washers save water and reduce hot-water demand. A 9,000 gallon rainwater cistern reduces annual irrigation demand by 66.8%. Solar canopies above a first-floor restaurant meet 10% of the building’s annual electricity demand.”

Such features translated directly into financing savings for the roughly $3 million project which received a $13,500 Federal Tax Credit for solar; about $75,000 in incentives for its solar roof and energy management systems; $275,000 in gap financing from the Portland Development Commission; and a $2.7 million construction loan from Pioneer Trust Bank in Salem.

Driving such tax-and-finance savings is awareness that cost savings to the city from such buildings can be significant.  For example, each year “eco-roofs” in Portland now remove from the sewer system an estimated 11.2 million gallons of stormwater, curtailing the need for increases in capital-intensive combination sewer and stormwater drainage capacity.

SolTerra was founded in 2008 as an installer of residential solar arrays, living walls and green roofs. Environmental-energy consciousness permeates whatever the company does. “We still believe that every building should take advantage of renewable solar power,” says Wallace. “But it goes much further. We source, for example, as many recycled and locally-manufactured products as possible, and we try to water all plants and flush all toilets with either rainwater or recycled grey-water.”

SolTerra focuses solely in Oregon and the state of Washington, which have the reputation of leading the country when it comes to clean energy technology, as well as tax and other incentives that encourage it. “We are constantly designing and incorporating market ready clean energy technology into our buildings smartly to achieve our return on investment,” says Ming Fung, SolTerra’s vice president for finance. “The key is market ready. Most of these technologies are available, however, they may still be cost prohibitive for most developers to implement. SolTerra is a vertically-integrated organization, from design to build to property management.  When we are able to eliminate costs, all the savings go back into the project – which allows us to build LEED Platinum buildings at 30% below standard cost.”

The business model is to keep pushing. Wallace adds:  “Walking around our offices, you will find our architects debating wall assemblies, our contractors building mock-ups, our engineers modeling hybrid heating and cooling systems, our landscapers designing patented living walls and our solar experts building relationships with new manufacturers.”

Aimee Carpenter, the SolTerra Director of Sales, sees one principal technological barrier impeding her company’s work. “The technology we’re using today,” she says, “is essentially the same as it was 50 years ago, it’s just improved in efficiency and cost. Current technology for solar requires rare earth minerals, so it would be more cost effective and scalable to use more commonly available materials. In the meantime, we’re working toward reaching and exceeding grid parity for solar in the cost of a kiloWatt hour. The way to achieve grid parity is to lower the cost of manufacturing solar.”

Carpenter cites the U.S. Department of Energy’s “Sunshot” project, which “aims to reduce the total installed cost of solar energy systems to $.06 per kilowatt-hour (kWh) by 2020,” and whose efforts have already supported a drop in the average price per kWh of a utility-scale photovoltaic from about $0.21 in 2011 to $0.11 now.