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High-tech Common Sense
 A vintage tug-boat engine named Mable has found a new job using waste vegetable oil as fuel to power what will be the world’s greenest mixed-use building. Mable is one player on the rapidly-renewable-energy team at Independence Station in the historic downtown district of Independence, Oregon, a town of about 8,000. While most efforts to build green take place either in urban centers or in rural areas, Independence Station is bringing sustainability to a small town. The idea for the project was spawned in the mind of Oregon green developer, Steven Ribeiro. At the time in 2004, he was still in the conventional sector but had an inclination for efficiency. But after giving up TV and instead spending time researching green-construction and development principles on the web, his Independence Station project took on a new meaning.“The entire theme for Independence Station is retro-futurism,” he said. “We know that traditional town planning principles worked. I’m taking the best of the past and blending it with the best of the future. I’m combining them into something that really works.” Independence Station integrates good old-fashioned planning and style with modern high technology. It’s a 57,000 square foot, mixed-use building, home to 16 condos, a restaurant, retail stores, high-tech offices, data server center, a research lab and classroom, and a small-business incubator. He even has virtual office space for sale that can give others an affordable, cool green address if needed. Ribeiro says he is shooting for a record number of LEED points with his project, which is planned for completion in 2008. He says if all goes as planned the project will earn most all of the 69 LEED points available. “There are three points that are physically impossible to obtain” says Ribeiro. “There are three points available based on how much of an existing building on the site you are reusing. In this case, we bought the site and there was no building on it.” But the building should earn all or most all of the rest of the points for energy efficiency, water use, building materials and innovation.  Based on energy modeling, Independence Station will save in the neighborhood of 74% on energy costs compared to a standard energy code-based building. To accomplish this feat, a multifaceted approach is used. Mable, the 1960’s tug boat engine, serves as a 250 Kilowatt (kW) generator. It will run more in the winter when heat demand is highest and less in the summer when a large photovoltaic (PV) array really kicks in. If needed, the building has been designed to be able to run off grid for months at a time. One of the nice things about the project is that the Department of Chemical Engineering at Oregon State University has a planned satellite location bio-fuels lab and lecture hall in the basement and will make enough different fuel blends to power Mable. Researchers and students will experiment with waste vegetable oil and refined bio-diesel blends. A smaller gasoline engine will run on pure ethanol and a few smaller diesels will be in the unique engine room next to Mabel, all available for viewing by the public. Ribeiro says these smaller engines will be fired up when energy needs don’t quite call for Mable’s muscle.One of the brilliant things about this system, and why it’s used mostly in the winter, is that it doesn’t just produce electricity, but also heat. Because it is a marine engine, it already has a water-cooled exhaust manifold and a water-cooled turbo intercooler on it. “We’re pulling most all of the waste heat off of the engines into a 26,000 gallon underground, insulated vault,” says Ribeiro. He says a typical car is a far more efficient water heater than it is transportation. He says only 22% of the energy in the fuel goes to power the wheels of a typical car and most of the rest becomes heat and is discarded. The waste heat from Independence Station’s tug boat engine room is then directed to where it is needed in the building through radiant tubing that runs through all of the building’s concrete floors. Enough excess heat is generated to heat condo patios, terraces and the city sidewalks around the building as well.  In summer peak hours, 130 kW of photovoltaic panels located on the roof and top of the driveway canopy will power most of the building. PV panels over the canopy are designed to rotate and track the sun as it makes its circuit across the sky. PV power will also be stored in batteries so that the solar energy collected during the day can be used for lighting in the evening. PV panels over the building’s windows will do triple duty: produce electricity, shade the windows in the summer to block unwanted heat gain and also capture rainwater from some of the 44 inches of local rainfall that will then be piped into a cistern for reuse in the building. Maximizing the potential of each component at Independence Station is what Ribeiro is all about. The captured and filtered water will be used to run tenants’ washing machines, flush toilets and irrigate the green roof vegetation. Waste heat and a belt drive from one of the smaller biodiesel engines will run a vacuum distillation system to purify the building’s grey water sewage. In the summer when rain is scarce, the pure distilled water will cycle back to the cistern. Black water will still flow into the city’s sewage system, but Ribeiro says he is researching a small modular bio-membrane reactor to possibly handle it on site. Cooling the site was another challenge that Ribeiro’s team was able to solve with some ingenuity. They drilled a 440 foot-deep dry well and ran heat-exchanger tubes into it so they can loop heated water into the ground when the thermal storage tank gets full. When they need more heat later, they can recapture some of the stored heat from the ground. Their other system is to use a highly efficient ground-water source heat pump from two regular wells on the property for heating and cooling. Rather than trying to shed heat from the building’s cooling system into 90 - 100 degree air in the afternoon like with most other buildings, they can easily shed it into cool 55 degree ground water. For some heating purposes, when it is 25 degrees outside, they have a head start pulling heat from the 55 degree water. The building structure is all concrete and that is one of its benefits,” says Ribeiro. “We’re going to bring the cool ground water up via a heat exchanger as far as the third floor. We’ll then circulate that cool water through the whole building” he says. “So the entire thermal mass of the building will cause it to feel like a cool basement in the summer.” Another system in the building will make ice at night when the outside temperature is low and then melt it during the day for cooling the whole building. “For the most part, we are heating and cooling the building itself, rather than just the air in the building like most people still do,” he says. “That way, you feel comfort on your skin and can still have fresh air to breathe.”  Concrete will also serve as the flooring in much of the building, says Ribeiro. He hooked up with a company called FGS/PermaShine. The company makes a chemical hardener for concrete that makes it extremely hard and durable. They grind and polish the concrete until it gleams like a mirror. “Imagine all the aggregate used in the concrete being exposed. It’s absolutely beautiful,” he says. “And if you plan it ahead of time, you can sprinkle the fresh concrete with different colors of glass or thrown in some junk nuts and bolts etc. So when they grind and polish it, it makes really neat designs and patterns.” Once the process is done there is no polishing, waxing or repairs needed. “Think about all the cost, labor, repair and maintenance over the years on a standard big box retailer’s or hospital’s shiny tile floor,” says Ribeiro. “This is by far, the better way to go.” Permashine is one of the many companies that will be featured in Independence Station as part of what Ribeiro calls a permanent green-building trade show. Many companies have approached him and offered their products at no cost just to be able to have the right to advertise that they are included in the world’s #1 scoring LEED Platinum building. Ribeiro is very selective in his choices of materials to enhance the overall function of this living building. Product suppliers will get much more exposure than just getting a place for a business card holder. The plan is to also take the idea to the next level using technology. “We’ve got a company that makes an audio hand-set for a self-guided audio tour, like in a museum,” he says. “You go to a different station, you push the button and then you hear the message for that manufacturer’s product that is in use and on display. Each manufacturer can have a station where you can learn about their product and if you really like it and want to learn more, you can push a button on the handset you’ll get an email from that company or a sample from them in the mail.” In addition to a linked directory on the Independence Station website, there will also be web cams all over showing off all these wonderful green products in use. The sustainability tours will educate realtors who want to learn about marketing green buildings, and also promote products to architects, engineers and caring consumers. “I’ll be bringing people in from all parts of the State by the bus load for these green education tours” says Ribeiro. Bringing people from a neighboring town will not be a hard thing to do either, because the project has a city bus which is being converted to run on waste vegetable oil. The “bio-bus” will run back and forth between Independence and Monmouth, a college town that is adjacent to Independence. This is all in an effort to help people get out of their cars, lower our use of oil and enhance our National Energy Security. Community businesses will help sponsor the bus and the route will have its stops near businesses. Ribeiro plans to also use the bio-bus to bring in people from local churches for day-retreats where they can do marriage building classes, parenting classes or financial planning classes. They can go to the restaurant, shop a bit, get a green-building education, hop back on the bus and head back. Cooking classes and wine-tasting tours are other possibilities. Ribeiro is working with three Willamette Valley wineries to have satellite wine-tasting rooms at Independence Station. The idea is to cut back on the number of cars driving miles through the countryside to the wineries. Instead, they will travel a shorter distance to Independence Station via the bio-bus or some other form of clean transportation. Permanent cubicles near the lecture hall will be equipped with flat-screen TVs connected to cameras and microphones at the winery, creating virtual wine-tasting rooms. Customers will come, taste wine, ask questions of experts via the virtual connection and purchase wine from an on-site wine steward. The same idea, says Ribeiro, can be applied for a number of different businesses. As far as living at Independence Station, Ribeiro is looking for 16 individuals who are ready for the ultimate green lifestyle. “I’m going to be highly selective about who lives here,” he says, “because I’m looking for people who can understand and appreciate what we’re doing. I am especially excited about people that may not know much today, but want to experience and learn about green living.” The whole building is going to operate like one entity. It will take some cooperation from residents to help raise the conservation bar on a national level to demonstrate how well and how efficiently an American who cares about our country, its economy and the environment can really live. “Green is the new red, white and blue” says Ribeiro. Long-term energy studies will be done and the systems will be always kept finely tuned. Johnson Controls Inc. is the General contractor and is highly suited to help in not only the construction phase, but the long term, record setting success of this better-mousetrap building. Part of this extreme efficiency will be possible because of the high-tech environmental monitoring systems built into the building. “There are going to be intensive controls on this project,” says Ribeiro. “We’ve got 136 BTU meters going in the budget. It’s all going to be web-based for everyone to be able to access. There even will be a weather monitoring station. The logic is that we’ll be able to ramp up our thermal storage in anticipation of a coming cold snap or a heat wave. We can anticipate humidity, wind direction, cloud cover and solar gain. All this data will go into the computer which will get the jump on getting various systems activated to deal with needs. It’s immensely complicated and fun.” Juxtaposed against the high-tech nature of the building, antique fixtures such as ornate steam radiators retrieved from a gutted 1910 hotel, will bring a classic touch to Independence Station. The building is as unique physically as is Ribeiro’s vision behind it. Part of what makes retro-futurism so powerful at Independence Station is Ribeiro’s own traditional values. He says that he feels he is a bit of a rare creature in the high performance, sustainable building movement because he is doing it for different reasons than most other green advocates. “I’m on the conservative side,” he says. “But I’m doing the exact things the people on the other side are saying we need to be doing right now. And I’m doing it well, but for different reasons.” He wants to bring these different groups together to strengthen understanding between them. “My main motivation is Earth stewardship or Creation care as some call it” says Ribeiro. “I believe that there is a God and that He created this earth. I cannot imagine that all the wonder in nature and everything that we see and all these incredibly complex systems like plants and the intricacies of the human eye are simply a result of random stuff mixing combined with time…that basic elements somehow got all organized by themselves and somehow stay that way all by themselves with no designer in the equation. I just don’t have enough faith to believe that this is all random chance.” Ribeiro gives credit to a book he has recently read titled Saving God’s Green Earth by Author Tri Robinson, as a great introduction to this budding movement. Ribeiro says he knows of Christian people who have been taught for years that ‘everything is going to burn anyway so why not just use it up?’ “I’m not like that,” he says. “I look out and see the wonder of creation and I think, let’s do what we can to take care of it.”
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