Frederick County has only one officially green building — the Fannie Mae Urbana Technology Center — but at least eight other projects are in the pipeline for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design certification.
If all are approved, Frederick County could boast more than 850,000 square feet of environmentally friendly space in the next few years. Several commercial centers, a school and vineyard’s tasting room are all registered to meet the certification criteria upon completion. This doesn’t include many new eco-friendly home models that more residential developers are offering.
Commercial developers are seeking out LEED certifications to prove to customers and the community that the buildings are as earth-friendly as possible.
Such buildings can be more expensive to construct and buy, but they can boost the owner’s bottom line in the long run, according to the U.S. Green Building Council, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit that developed the rating system in 2000. Since then, more than 14,000 projects worldwide have gained LEED certification.
Fannie Mae’s 220,000-square-foot data center in Urbana rated a certified level, the fourth — and lowest — LEED category, for its attention to features such as larger windows near employees, showers for round-the-clock workers and proximity to public transportation, said Frank Butler, facility manager.
The building also has stations to recharge battery-operated cars in the future. The exhaust reducing urea system for six massive generators did not earn LEED points, but its façade of locally made bricks did.
The eco-friendly features cost Fannie Mae roughly 10 percent more than conventional designs, Butler said. The home mortgage company’s motivation was enhancing its image, rather than saving on energy bills, he said.
The data center was the first in the nation to be LEED certified and has served as a model for others seeking ‘‘green” status, Butler said. Computers in its lobby walk visitors through the LEED specifics and a conference room filled with photos of green features is dedicated to the program.
More projectsseek green clout
Black Ankle Vineyard in Mount Airy is joining the green parade.
Owners Ed Boyce and Sarah O’Herron want to snag the platinum certification, LEED’s highest benchmark, for their 11,000-square-foot tasting room set to open in mid-July. With straw bales packed into walls as insulation, plants lined along its rooftop to manage storm water and construction wood harvested from the 145-acre property, the couple are still struggling with some criteria, O’Herron said.
The little vineyard, tucked in a valley in an agriculture area, has little hope of getting points for being within a half-mile of public transportation or having a bike rack. ‘‘We’re more inclined to put in a horse post – that’s the kind of area we’re in,” O’Herron said. ‘‘But you don’t get points for that.”
But Black Ankle is compensating with points for innovative features such as its use of onsite wood. O’Herron is optimistic that it will score a platinum rating this year, making it the first building in Frederick County to meet LEED’s most stringent standards.
‘‘It’s a fairly long list. LEED’s designed for big companies, for a place with like 500 employees, and not all [criteria] translate for a smaller business,” O’Herron said. ‘‘But we feel like we meet the spirit of platinum. We’re really out to use as much as we have here.”
The ‘‘living roof” of sedums helps soak up storm water so the property needs no expensive storm water management ponds. The excess rain is collected in barrels. The planted roof also keeps the temperature of the tasting room about 10 degrees cooler.
‘‘It’s a huge savings in terms of energy use,” O’Herron said.
Black Ankle uses minimal pesticides on its 22-acre vineyard, she said, and its farm equipment runs on biodiesel fuel.
‘‘We have a strong sense of wanting to treat the land well, but we’re also trying to capture a sense of place,” O’Herron said. ‘‘There’s the business issue in that customers want to know where wines come from. Our idea is that people will be able to better experience being in this spot.”
The Lucy School in Middletown is also aiming for platinum certification and will likely be the first LEED-certified school in Frederick County. Victoria Brown and her husband, Christopher Zachariadis, own the private school that runs through second grade. They plan to use the new, LEED-certified building for the older children.
The two-story building, tucked into a hill, is to feature a geothermal system, solar panels and a mirror system to draw in more natural light. Brown and Zachariadis sank roughly 10 percent more into the 6,500-square-foot project, anticipating returns on energy savings.
The new Lucy School building, set to open in the fall, will also have solar panels, a geothermal system and a rainwater filtration system. It is being constructed of stone from Bethesda and wood from Pennsylvania.
Meanwhile, a Frederick County Public School project, the Earth and Space Science Lab at Lincoln Elementary in Frederick, had registered for LEED certification but recently withdrew after directors realized it could not meet the standards without incurring additional costs. Director Jeff Grills said despite 100 solar panels donated by BP Solar of Frederick and a geothermal system, ‘‘We’ve taken it off the table.” The $5 million, 10,624-square-foot lab center broke ground last week.
BP Solar’s green-roof expansion, roughly half complete, is set to open in 2009 for manufacturing, shipping and office space. In addition to installing energy-efficient lighting and solar panels, BP officials are pursuing a water recycling system and rooftop garden as well as investing in heavy reforestation at the site.
Three other large-scale projects would bring Frederick County’s total green nonresidential building space to nearly 1 million square feet: Ballenger Center’s 267,022-square-foot shopping center; Union Mills’ three-story, 65,000-square-foot building on Carroll Creek; and the National Biodefense and Countermeasures Center are all seeking LEED status.
leadership in Energy, Environmental Design
Green features can be in the design, construction, operations or management of a building.
Five primary criteria are sustainable sites, water efficiency, energy and atmosphere, materials and resources, and indoor environmental quality.
A sixth category, Innovation and Design, awards points to projects that develop new solutions or technologies.
Going greenbusiness seminar
A free panel discussion on eco-friendly business techniques will feature representatives from Attune Development Consultants, DNC Architects and Natural Fusion Hair Studio. It will start at 8 a.m., May 30, 7:30 a.m. for networking and breakfast, at Holiday Inn-Fort Detrick, 999 W. Patrick St., Frederick. Registration: 301-662-4164 by Tuesday.
