Green Building

Harvard Business School (HBS) sustainability efforts have caught the notice of quite a few people around campus...

Kevin Bright, Jessica Parks, and Jesse Foote have just completed a two-day hands-on training on Energy Modeling. This course, held at the Green Roundtable’s Nexus center in Boston, taught a step-by-step procedure for completing building simulation analyses using the eQUEST modeling software.

When the Fine Arts Library’s printed collections, photographs and graphic images were temporarily relocated to the Littauer building in July 2009, it was to allow for the renovation and expansion project of the Harvard Art Museum at 32 Quincy Street.

Achieving Gold Certification under LEED for Commercial Interiors version 2.0 in November 2009, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences’ (FAS) Schreiber Lab is a 1,700 square foot Chemistry Lab located on the first floor of the Naito Chemistry Building at 12 Oxford Street in Cambridge, MA.

In the early spring of 2009, Facilities Maintenance Operations (FMO) and the Office for Sustainability (OFS) joined forces to create a new Building Energy Auditing Service. This new service is expected to generate tremendous financial savings and assist the University in meeting its Greenhouse Gas Reduction (GHG) goals.

In October 2009, the Harvard Office for Sustainability’s Green Building Services (GBS) team completed an 8 hour Direct Digital Controls (DDC) training delivered by Harvard Facilities Maintenance Operations (FMO). Digital controls and a Building Automation System (BAS) allow operators to control their buildings in an efficient manner.

Harvard University has spent a considerable amount of effort developing its Green Building Guidelines, a set of building design standards for projects over 5 million dollars requiring the use of particular materials and power efficiency levels to ensure that all future construction projects meet certain sustainability benchmarks.

With the certification of the Faculty of Arts and Science's Zhuang Lab, Harvard now has 20 new construction, major rehabilitation, and interior renovation projects certified by the U.S.

The Inn at Harvard has officially been approved as an ENERGY STAR building and is listed on the ENERGY STAR website. The ENERGY STAR label is a nationally recognized standard of excellence in energy performance. It signifies that a building is doing its part to fight global warming by using less energy than its peers.

The University now has a new and powerful tool for determining, among other things, how much energy is being consumed. Energy Witness® is the new utility billing and reporting system replacing the Progress® online utility reporting tool.