Google’s New Office Will Be
Heated And Cooled By The Ground Underneath
The company’s Bay View campus will have the largest
ground-source heat pump system installation in North America, using the heat
from the surrounding ground to power the building’s climate control–and no
fossil fuels.
The system uses
geothermal heat pumps, relying on the steady 65-degree temperature of the
ground to absorb and reject heat.
At a construction site on Google’s new Bay
View campus–a few miles from its headquarters in Mountain View, on NASA-owned
land near the San Francisco Bay–cranes lift tubing high in the air and drop it
into holes that descend 80 feet into the ground. It’s a step that will allow
three new office buildings to heat and cool themselves without fossil fuels,
setting apart from nearly all existing offices, which use enormous amounts of
energy to manage the temperature in their spaces.
The system uses geothermal heat pumps,
relying on the steady 65-degree temperature of the ground to absorb and reject
heat. Excess heat from the buildings can also be sent into the ground to be
stored until it’s needed.
“We have to be conscious about how we design
our projects.” [Photo: Google]“In the wintertime, when we need to heat the
buildings, we’re actually absorbing that heat from the ground, and then in the
summertime, when we are cooling the buildings, we’re actually rejecting heat to
the ground and warming the ground,” says Eric Solrain, a principal Integral
Group, an engineering firm working with Google on the design.
It’s one piece of an overall design for the
campus that aims for LEED Platinum certification, the highest level possible in
the sustainability rating system for buildings. Outside, 20 acres of open space
will be planted with native species. Stormwater will be collected and treated
for reuse in on-site ponds. (Materials will be vetted through Google’s healthy materials requirements.) The windows–which fill the space with natural
light–are treated with a pattern that helps birds avoid crashing into the
glass. The windows can also automatically shade themselves and darken at night
to reduce light pollution. Electricity use, as in other Google campuses, will
be offset by renewable energy. By
using heat pumps, the company will reduce its carbon footprint even further.
“In the wintertime, when we need to heat the
buildings, we’re actually absorbing that heat from the ground, and then in the
summertime, when we are cooling the buildings, we’re actually rejecting heat to
the ground and warming the ground.” Without the heat pumps, the
buildings would have been heated with natural gas; the heat pumps eliminate the
use of gas completely. (Though the ground temperature hovers around 65 degrees,
the buildings can be warmer because the heat pumps concentrate the heat.) In
the summer, a standard design would have used cooling towers that rely on
piping in huge amounts of water to transfer heat. The
heat pumps can provide 95% of the cooling necessary–cooling towers will still
be used 5% of the time, on the hottest days of the year–and will save
approximately 8 million gallons of potable water every year, critical in a
region that’s already prone to drought and likely to become more so as climate
change progresses.
“The next challenge that we’re all going to
face is water,” says Asim Tahir, a project executive with Google’s Real Estate
and Workplace Services who leads building systems design and energy strategy
for Google’s office facilities. “We have to be conscious about how we design
our projects.”
Google has been considering the use of heat
pumps in its buildings for several years, and in 2010 it installed a small
system on its main campus to provide hot water for a kitchen. But until now,
the company hadn’t found the right project for a large system. In some cases,
heat pump systems use boreholes drilled into a separate field, but that process
is expensive. By using the deep piles, the foundational supports that are
required for new buildings–for structural reasons, the buildings need 4,000
long piles, spread out over a large area–as a way to extend pipes deep into the
ground, it was possible to make the system affordable.
“If
there’s an element in the building that is only serving one function, that’s
missing out on potential opportunities.” ]“Typically, in traditional design,
problems are solved in silos, and you might come up with a good solution, but
you might miss opportunities to look around and see what more can you achieve
from that,” says Tahir. “Here, one of the ideas we were encouraging the design
team to consider was that everything has more than one job. If there’s an
element in the building that is only serving one function, that’s missing out
on potential opportunities. That’s the sort of thinking that led us to combine
the geothermal element into the piles.”
In 2,500 of the buildings’ 4,000 piles, a
construction crew has been drilling holes, filling them with wet concrete, and
dropping in the tubing to create “energy piles.” (Only some of the piles are
used because if they’re too close together, the ground can get overheated or
overcooled, making the system less efficient.)
The system also provides other benefits.
Normal buildings recirculate air when it’s hot or cold outside because it’s too
expensive to keep bringing in and treating fresh air. The heat pump system uses
energy so efficiently that the new buildings can continuously use outside air,
improving air quality.
Though some buildings in Europe use similar
systems, Google’s will be largest in North America, with tubing that stretches
a cumulative total of 69 miles. The company plans to share what it learns with
others who want to implement something similar, and to promote something that
will be invisible when construction is completed.
“One of the beauties and the challenges of
this is once this is constructed, nobody sees it,” says Tahir. “So we can only
talk about it through the data and the performance. Right now is very
interesting because there’s a hive of activity going on at the construction
site, and now is the only time you can truly appreciate the scale of this. Once
we pour the foundation it’s invisible.”
BY ADELE PETERS
https://www.fastcompany.com/40484709/googles-new-office-will-be-heated-and-cooled-by-the-ground-underneath
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