Case Study

New San Francisco Federal Building

Enovity is the LEED™ Commissioning Authority (CA) the HVAC, electrical and building automation systems for GSA’s new state-of-the-art downtown San Francisco Federal Office Building. Designed by Morphosis and ARUP, this innovative 600,000 square foot building features extensive use of natural ventilation for cooling. The building’s exterior skin consists of a glazing system that incorporates computer-engineered “glass chimneys” that modulate the amount of natural ventilation across the office tower floors according to space temperature, outside air temperature, wind speed, wind direction and other environmental factors. The building also incorporates extensive use of day lighting to reduce electric lighting. Fully conditioned areas are served by both under floor and overhead VAV air distribution systems and there is a central chilled water and hot water plant in the facility.

Principal Greg Cunningham was initially responsible for design review and DOE-2 analysis for Savings By design New Construction Incentives while with a former company. Enovity was later hired by the GSA to commission the building. The work involves authoring a Commissioning Plan, submittal reviews, comprehensive review of controls programming and sequence of operations, writing static and functional tests, startup procedures, and acceptance criteria. The BACnet™ Alerton BACtalk BAS will enable the building to be integrated to the GEMnet Region 9 network. The commissioning work is also expected to help the GSA achieve a LEED™ Certification for the project.

Enovity also authored a LEED™ Measurement & Verification (M&V) Plan to document the savings from the energy performance measures at the building; Enovity will self-perform the installation of required permanent meters.

Integrated energy measures, listed below, resulted in a building energy performance of 40% superior to Title 24, expecting to save GSA more than $300,000 annually. Energy efficiency measures included: