We need light outdoors at night for safety, security, productivity, and enjoyment. Guidelines and technologies available today can help meet these lighting needs while providing good quality lighting that minimizes light pollution, conserves energy, and enhances community ambience, including the effect on wildlife and our view of the starry night sky.

Elevators in modern buildings are faster and more comfortable than their counterparts decades ago. But even when you are standing inside an innovative looking elevator cab, it is hard to identify the green features in the elevator and recognize their energy savings. This issue of e-News details major sustainable features in elevators and escalators and some design considerations.

A building may contain a vast array of efficiency measures, or it may be old and inefficient. Either way, the electricity used in the building will likely be produced with inherent inefficiencies. The efficiency of fossil fuel based electricity production averages 34% (although new combined cycle plants can exceed 50% efficiency). The ultimate efficiency of any building pulling electricity from the grid is limited by that number.

Though more costly to install and more complicated to operate, a chiller plant offers a number of benefits over simple packaged cooling units, including greater energy efficiency, better controllability, and longer life.

La Maestra Community Health Centers is an award-winning not-for-profit organization that has been serving low-income and immigrant communities for 19 years.

Process heating is a significant source of energy consumption in the industrial and manufacturing sectors, and it often results in a large amount of waste heat that is discharged into the atmosphere.

Ongoing construction and major retrofitting of hospitals in California, driven by aging facilities and the demand for new medical technologies, offers an unprecedented opportunity to dramatically improve the energy performance of healthcare facilities for decades to come.



The Tahoe Center for Environmental Sciences (TCES) is a three-story, 45,000 ft2 building on Sierra Nevada College's Lake Campus that demonstrates how an ambitious project team can successfully reduce energy usage by implementing a variety of innovative mechanical designs at minimal additional first cost.

Using the integrated energy design approach, designers can cost-effectively lower building operating costs while improving workers' comfort and boosting productivity.

It's no easy undertaking to design a high-performance laboratory building that uses very little energy while meeting comfort, health, safety and programmatic requirements. Laboratory buildings typically have very energyintensive heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems that operate 24 hours per day and use 100 percent outside air.

New high-intensity fluorescents outshine their high-intensity discharge competitors. They are often more efficient and feature lower lumen depreciation rates, better dimming options, instant start-up, and better color rendition.

The Pharmaceutical Research Institute in La Jolla, California, is a 123,000-square-foot laboratory and office building completed in 1999. Among the energy efficiency measures included in the building are systems for limiting energy waste associated with its 92 fume hoods and its air handling, space conditioning, and lighting systems.

Not all energy-efficiency measures are appropriate for all building types, but some are especially useful for particular buildings. This Design Brief reminds designers and builders of opportunities they should consider in each of their projects.

A few building simulation runs early in a project can lead to design solutions that, though they appear simple, significantly improve building energy performance.

In today's modern building stock, elevators can consume five to fifteen percent of a building's total energy usage, depending on the other services running in the building.