Moderator Clare De Briere, executive vice president/regional manager for Skanska; Heidi Creighton, national head of sustainability for Skanska USA Commercial Development; Leigh Christy, principal at Perkins&Will; and Deborah Weintraub, chief deputy city engineer and architect, Bureau of Engineering, for the city of Los Angeles, during a discussion at the 2022 ULI Spring Meeting in San Diego.
A session spotlighting the city of Los Angeles’s goal for all new buildings to reach net-zero-carbon by 2030 and 100 percent of buildings to be net-zero carbon by 2050, drew a standing-room-only crowd, and prompted an engaging conversation during a panel titled “Commitment to Action: How Developers Can Help Achieve Citywide Sustainability Goals” on Tuesday at the ULI Spring Meeting in San Diego.
In addition to a soft unveiling of a net zero office building concept to be developed by Skanska and designed by Perkins&Will, the panel looked at how developers and cities can work together to implement a net-zero built environment, along with evolving best practices and challenges.
Panel members were moderator Clare De Briere, executive vice president/regional manager for Skanska; Heidi Creighton, national head of sustainability for Skanska USA Commercial Development; Leigh Christy, principal at Perkins&Will; and Deborah Weintraub, chief deputy city engineer and architect, Bureau of Engineering, for the city of Los Angeles.
De Briere noted that 20 years ago when she joined Skanska, the discussion was about the smart grid and the U.S. Green Building Council, which had just created something called “LEED”—Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design.
“There were so many people that were talking about it, but it hadn’t fully been embraced yet. And what we found was that once the financial institutions started saying, ‘Hey, this LEED thing is important to us,’ then developers started caring about it. And then cities responded, ‘Well, we can do this,’ and they created codes that reflected the requirements for LEED certification.” The standard city building code for Los Angeles is today essentially a LEED Silver certification.
It is the same financial institutions that today are pushing the drive to net zero as they embrace this requirement for environmental, social, and governmental (ESG) criteria, De Briere noted.
Two certifications from the International Living Future Institute are key to the conversation: “There’s net-zero energy certification and net-zero carbon certification,” said Creighton. “For the energy certification, you are providing 100 percent of the annual energy that you’re consuming on site and you’re not having any combustion on site. For the carbon certification, it’s a little bit more complex.”
Indeed, the carbon certification requires that 100 percent of the project’s energy use must be offset by on- or off-site renewable energy on a net annual basis, among other requirements, including a 10 percent reduction in the embodied carbon of the primary materials of the foundation, structure, and enclosure compared with an equivalent baseline.
Today, there is greater transparency, with environmental product declarations, or EPDs, essentially “nutrition labels for every product we use,” De Briere said. Also, more tools exist today than a few years ago. One example is Skanska’s Embodied Carbon in Construction Calculator, or EC3 tool, which tracks embodied carbon. (The free online tool, co-created by Skanska and industry partners, collects the carbon emissions data of thousands of types of building materials.)
Skanska and partner Perkins&Will used the E3 tool to develop the concept for a net zero carbon commercial office building in downtown Los Angeles’s Arts District—1811 Sacramento Street, acquired by Skanska in 2020 and slated for a net-zero “North Star aspiration.” Inspired by the inventive diversity of the neighborhood and the industrial history of the site as a railroad yard, Perkins&Will designed an ambitious, innovative, high-performance building that could achieve net zero embodied and operational carbon.
Christy said that in looking at the project it was important to consider every aspect of the design while still understanding that the price point and pro forma still need to “make sense.” From a creative perspective, a focus was what could be learned from the pandemic in terms of occupiable outdoor space, and what it would take to make that outdoor space on par with comfortable, usable indoor space. The impact on design was that 20 percent of the proposed all-electric project’s workspaces are outside.
Weintraub, whose responsibility is to bring many of the city of Los Angeles buildings—new and existing—to net zero, says the city is looking at many products like concrete that sequesters carbon for potential use in streets and parking lots. “It’s very important that you demonstrate to the public that a project will have some longevity and will hold up,” she said. “All of our projects will need to be fully electric, so we’re looking at projects our General Services Department will be able to maintain.”
While new policies are coming, panelists agreed that they are coming slowly. Panelists were also united in the view that the shift to net zero will be piloted by the public, codified, and then pushed by the public sector in the code.
“The policies continue to catch up with the aspirations on the embodied carbon front,” Creighton said. “There’s so much more information than we had even just a few years ago.”
SIBLEY FLEMING is editor in chief of Urban Land.
