“This is due to the very nature of laboratory construction, with fume hoods, biosafety cabinets, and laboratory equipment,” explains Steve Gurtel, project manager of Whiting-Turner Contracting Company, the general contractor for the project.

The building includes a high performance envelope and ventilation heat recovery; daylight sensors in all of the offices; additional commissioning; and advanced refrigerant management.

Laboratories are used at all hours of the day, so conventional time-clock scheduling of lights off and HVAC setbacks are not good ways to manage energy use. Instead, occupancy sensors in the lab shut the lights and shift the fume hoods to a sleep mode whenever the lab is empty, day or night. The fume hoods drop from 12 air changes per hour and 100 fpm across the face of the hood, to six air changes per hour at 60 fpm.

Despite the energy-saving technologies, which exceeded the ASHRAE code, the building ended up with only three of a possible 17 credits in that category. With codes improving for energy efficiency, the next building will need to do even better if it is simply to meet the code, says Paul Stoller, a director of Atelier Ten, the environmental design consultant on the project.

“This turned out to be a big wakeup call for the University that more attention has to be paid to energy performance at the beginning of a project,” says Stoller. “Yale is continuing to increase its design requirements; the University now requires buildings to exceed ASHRAE code by 30 percent. We expect the next generation of laboratories to come out of Yale with half the energy intensity of this building.”

Stoller says they also could have used more efficient heat recovery, lower fan pressures, lower ventilation rates, and chilled beams rather than chilled air to cool the labs.  He also noted that the smaller steps taken forward on improved energy efficiency in the Malone Center have built a momentum at the University, which now is adopting new technologies and advanced performance design strategies across a wide range of building types to achieve previously unseen efficiencies.

“The question is what will be our future strategies to reduce energy use in our laboratories, and therefore reduce carbon emission,” says David Spalding, a program manager with Yale’s office of facilities construction and renovation.

L.W.