Canada GBC launching Zero Carbon Buildings Initiative

The Canada Green Building Council (CaGBC) recently launched the first phase of its Zero Carbon Buildings Initiative.

The new framework is a precursor to the launch of a Zero Carbon Building Standard in spring 2017. Canada is striving to develop more lower-carbon commercial, institutional, and high-rise residential buildings in an effort to reduce greenhouse gases by 30% by 2030.

The Zero Carbon Buildings Framework establishes five key components for evaluating building carbon footprints:

• Greenhouse gas intensity metric for assessing a building’s emissions taking into account regional emissions factors

• Energy intensity metrics to incentivize design of highly efficient, reliable, and resilient buildings

• Peak energy demand metric to encourage the use of peak-shaving measures

• Embodied carbon metric to recognize importance of building material lifecycle impacts

• Requirement that renewable energy be generated on-site or procured directly

Upcoming phases of the Zero Carbon Initiative will include the identification of specific pathways to zero carbon, a zero carbon building pilot program, and the development of a verification program.

New York City has two very large buildings dedicated to answering the 911 calls of its five boroughs. With more than 11 million emergency calls annually, it makes perfect sense. The second of these buildings, the Public Safety Answering Center II (PSAC II) is located on a nine-acre parcel of land in the Bronx. It’s an imposing 450,000 square-foot structure—a 240-foot-wide by 240-foot-tall cube. The gleaming aluminum cube risesthe equivalent of 24 stories from behind a grassy berm, projecting the unlikely impression that it might actually be floating. Like most visually striking structures, the building has drawn as much scorn as it has admiration.