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Introducing Wellington East by Howland Green, Canada’s largest beyond net zero office building

Collection of net positive energy condo office spaces now for sale

There are those who say they’re green, and then there are those who are truly making a difference when it comes to creating meaningful solutions for sustainable building.

Howland Green is doing just that -building beyond the net zero standard into net positive territory. Its newest offering in Aurora, Wellington East Business Centre (Wellington St. E and 404), is the largest beyond net zero office building in Canada.

“Wellington East is the next in a series of buildings built to a beyond net zero energy standard, which means we will capture more renewable energy than we use on an annual basis for the operation of the entire building,” says Dave de Sylva, P. Eng., President of Howland Green Homes.

The building features first of its kind bifacial solar technology on its roof, which is capable of capturing approximately 870,000 kilowatt hours of energy.

Bifacial method means the photovoltaic effect -- the process that generates voltage or electric current when exposed to sunlight -- takes place on both the main surface, which faces out, as well as the underside of the panels, which are elevated above the building, allowing them to capture incident rays.

“It’s the first bifacial of that size anywhere, I’m sure, but the first bifacial for us,” de Sylva explains. “Based on the building system that we have built up over the last 15 years or so, we can pretty accurately predict that our operational demand will be using about 480,000 kilowatt hours, so that’s a huge surplus.”

In addition to the solar capture, the four storey commercial building also features enhanced insulated concrete form construction, triple pane fibreglass Low E Argon windows, geothermal heating and cooling, high efficiency LED lighting throughout (including motion sensing where applicable), and employs the use of a water recapture system.

“In addition to energy, which is about 99 per cent of our effort, we also capture all of the grey water and we use that for all the toilets and maintenance issues, which has resulted in about a 92 per cent reduction on water coming from the municipality,” says de Sylva.

All of that combined means Wellington East is able to reduce its operational energies by about 85 per cent, another impressive statistic de Sylva can confidently boast about, thanks to the constant monitoring of his efforts.

He compares this process to a lesson we all learned in high school science class -- when you conduct an experiment, you have a purpose, a method, observations and then conclusions. While it seems simple, de Sylva says many who claim to be “green” don’t follow all the steps.

“Our industry, and my profession of engineering, is guilty of reaching conclusions and then deciding on a method and not making any observations at all,” he explains.

“We make a huge effort of measuring our results, which is why we can talk statistically about what we’ve achieved and then maybe make changes after that for our next project.”

De Sylva believes measurement is as important as what you do because, without it, you don’t know what you did. Of course, being brave enough to be different is key as well.

“If you’re expecting change, it has to look different, otherwise you’re going to call it ‘same.’ You can’t say it’s ‘change’ when it’s not changing. You have to say, ‘whatever we did yesterday has to be different,’ and I know we’re different.” This collection of net positive energy condo office spaces is now selling. For more information, visit howlandgreen.com.

REAL ESTATE

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2023-01-28T08:00:00.0000000Z

2023-01-28T08:00:00.0000000Z

https://thestarepaper.pressreader.com/article/281947431986335

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