Linking Sustainable Water and Energy Infrastructure in High-Performance Green Building Projects

The proposed session will address the water-energy nexus topic by exploring the issue and specific opportunities to incorporate greater levels of sustainability at multiple scales of the built environment.

It will succinctly diagnose the issues and specific challenges drawing on first-hand experience in working at a variety of scales, including: infrastructure, planning, and at the individual building perspective. The session will introduce proven methods of analysis, assessment, and technical strategies for solving the current challenges facing urban populations across the globe. Finally, this session will discuss strategies for achievement that must continue to evolve in the midst of changing sustainability metrics, standards and regulatory environments that practitioners currently face.

Energy is used to move, treat and store water. Thus there are energy efficiency benefits of water conservation, and potential water savings opportunities of energy efficiency efforts, but too often these opportunities are ignored. However, increasingly some projects are tackling the issue and better assessing the cost and benefits associated with a more holistic approach.

First, at the infrastructure scale, the Transbay Transit Center is more than just a new multi-modal transportation and mixed-use destination in San Francisco. It will also add one acre of new greenspace to downtown while facilitating a new municipal non-potable water re-use infrastructure for future projects to connect with to drastically reduce water demands.

Then, at the planning scale, the session will detail the specific challenges faced when developing new projects in the rapidly industrializing world, specifically India. We'll focus on a new two and a half million square foot, mixed-use development that is being built on an existing brownfield site within greater Mumbai. Here a vital relationship exists between energy and water due to limited availability, lacking infrastructure, and prohibitions for using precious potable water supply for any use other than domestic consumption. These limitations have become major project drivers as the effort is targeting zero discharge and a comprehensive water conservation, on-site treatment, capture and re-use strategy in order to most efficiently meet anticipated future demands.

Finally, at the individual building scale, we will explore and show a series of water balance analysis calculations that can identify how a combination of centralized and decentralized strategies can work together towards developing the final low-energy, water conserving resource strategy.

At the end of this session, participants will take away a greater understanding of the issue globally and how they may address this within their own projects.