The Alliance Center’s High-Performance Building Renovation

It means exploring ways to transform ordinary buildings so that they are more resource-efficient, healthier, more desirable as properties, and more supportive as workplaces. By using its own historic building (the Alliance Center) as a living laboratory, the Alliance aims to explore and document the business case for resource efficiency in existing buildings and to create a replicable framework applicable to other existing buildings.
It means understanding that nearly 47 percent of all greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are from the existing building stock, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Reducing buildings’ energy consumption is thus critical to a sustainable future.
It means reducing a building owners’ O&M costs of actually running the building.
It means looking at what we have today and figuring out how we can make it last with the least possible long-term social, environmental, and economic impact.

It means buildings that are more attractive to tenants and that maintain higher occupancy rates than less energy-efficient buildings, according to the Urban Land Institute (ULI).
It means more comfortable and healthier work environments for tenants—less light-, air- and noise pollution, more collaboration, and less employee turnover.
It means that the owners and tenants can feel good about the building they own or work in.

President Obama has called on all Federal agencies to reduce their carbon footprint by 28 percent by 2020. We can expect more incentives and regulations pertaining to building resource efficiency for both the public and private sectors.
The International Code Council aims to publish an international green construction code in 2012.
There has been over a 236 percent increase in LEED-accredited professionals in the world since 2000.
Every day an additional 900,000 square feet of building space is being LEED certified. This means that people—the market—will increasingly come to expect this level of performance in a building.

The Alliance is LEED certified Gold for Existing Buildings and Silver for Commercial Interiors.
The Alliance will aim, with the renovation, to achieve LEED Platinum.
The building has an Energy Star rating of 85.
The Alliance is a Multi-Tenant Nonprofit Center, providing below-market rents to nonprofit organizations focused on some form of sustainability. (For a list of our tenants, click here.)
The Alliance Center and its 38 tenants have reduced water consumption by 80 percent since 2004.
The Alliance actively promotes alternative forms of transportation to and from work, such as cycling and public transport.
In general, the high-performance building renovation will further investigate the functionality and cost-effectiveness of innovative technologies that save energy, water and materials while enhancing the building’s character as a comfortable, pleasant and well-lit workspace.

For more information on this project and the goals the organization has set, download this PDF.