It has been over 15 months here at The Terry Thomas, and while we know the building is working great, it is nice to finally have real numbers.

The big news is our cost for energy usage — it is really low! Compared to the average national cost of $1.65 per square foot, according to the EPA’s National Action Plan for Energy Efficiency for office buildings, The Terry Thomas is running at $0.58 to $0.60 per square foot. For those of you who build (or renovate) and hold buildings, this is a great case study for long-term savings.

The other good news here is that our original modeling suggested that we would cut our energy use 30%-40%. As it turns out, the first-year numbers indicate that we have reduced our energy consumption 41.88% for the whole building and 49.14% for Weber Thompson’s offices compared to the national average. As we continue to fine tune the systems and fill up the entire building, we anticipate that these numbers will continue to improve.

Data collection

Here is a brief overview of the analysis and numbers:

We spent the first few months commissioning and working out the details for this building, so our data collection didn’t start until June 2008, and goes through June 2009.

The data is analyzed in two different ways:

• Based on the entire building excluding unheated, sub-grade parking square footage. With assistance from Stantec Engineering, projections had to be made for energy usage for the few spaces that do not have tenants.
• The second set of numbers is for Weber Thompson’s offices only (LEED Platinum certified) located on levels two and three.

1) Whole Building         Amount Used       
Electricity:                  21.80 kBtu/sf/yr (47% of total energy usage)
Natural Gas:              24.58 kBtu/sf/yr (53% of total energy usage)
     Total:                          46.38 kBtu/sf/yr

2) Levels 2 and 3         Amount Used
Electricity:                 21.87 kBtu/sf/yr (54% of total energy usage)
Natural Gas:             18.76 kBtu/sf/yr (46% of total energy usage)
    Total:                         40.63 kBtu/sf/yr

Based on the EPA’s National Action Plan for Energy Efficiency for office buildings, the average annual energy intensity for office buildings across the United States is 79.8 kBtu per square foot.

As part of this, we got the post-occupancy survey back on the building. We will summarize and post the survey next week.

As always, if you are interested in a tour, or want to talk about how we designed a building with such great energy-saving results, feel free to give us a holler at (206) 344-5700.