Nate Gillette has been at the forefront of "green building" projects and sustainability issues in the metro Grand Rapids area for a number of years, both in his former job as principal architect at Bazzani and Associates and though his professional associations. Gillette, 32, recently shared his thoughts with Mary Radigan about corporate America's growing interest in green construction and his new role as director of the new sustainability and energy consulting division for the Grand Rapids office of PM Environmental Inc. in Lansing.
Tell me about PM Environmental.
PM Environmental is a full service environmental consulting company, with eight offices in five states, east of the Mississippi. Their work touches into a lot of the due diligence work for real estate transactions and brownfield-type environmental work. Their client list is typically in the realm of large national banks.
What is your job?
They haven’t had a fulltime senior staff level position in Grand Rapids for a long time, and there hasn’t been a lot of market penetration. My job on some levels is to be the business development person for West Michigan and on other levels I’m also in charge of this new division, which is companywide program.
Is sustainability and energy efficiency a growing priority for businesses?
Absolutely. We’re seeing it on several different levels, (such as) energy efficiency needs in the realm of energy costs. The cost is doing nothing but going up, so companies in this economic climate are looking for any way they can reduce operational costs for buildings. We’re also seeing it from a regulatory standpoint, too. California passed a regulation that any real estate transaction now has to have an energy disclosure with it. That’s brand new and is being phased in, the beginning of next year. So that is coming, and the trend will continue across the nation.
Does Michigan have that regulation?
It’s not here yet, but we’re gearing up for the possibility. We’re developing a new tool right now for use by commercial Realtors and banks that they can use in what we call an ‘energy snapshot’. We can quickly take the energy use of the building and put it into a graphical format. We also translate that into what the greenhouse gas emissions are so that the companies can start taking a look at their carbon footprint.
What else are businesses and building owners expecting?
There’s a general trend in sustainability and energy efficiency in buildings that we see more and more. When new buildings are done, the owners just flat out expect you’ve done a good job designing and constructing the building, making it energy efficient. So it’s becoming more commonplace. We’re also seeing it expected from the facility managers level; the people who have to operate and maintain the buildings. A lot of times it gets down to operational costs. A lot of buildings built in the early part of the last century and in 1950s and 60s are just energy hogs, and they use far more electricity than what they need.
What do you do when you go to a building? What are you looking for?
We look at a couple of things. Heating and lighting are the two biggest users of electricity inside a building. Those are the things we try to zero in on the most. There also some fringe things we try to look at. Obviously the building envelope, how well it’s insulated; how well the windows are working. It’s a system, and you have to really take a holistic kind of a look. There’s no one silver bullet; you have to look at all the building’s systems and try to figure out what you can do to tune them up.
Is there something that works or doesn’t work when it comes to LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certification, which I’m assuming all of this builds up to in most cases?
In a lot of incidences it does. Certainly the ideas of sustainability and energy efficiency have been in place for a long time. LEED has been a nice, convenient certification package with many different programs we can take a look at. Its third-party oriented so that a building can achieve certification and have something that’s viable.
What can a business realize in savings if they get involved in these programs?
Through good design and construction principles, we’re able to reduce the energy costs in a building by 40 to 50 percent fairly easily without doing major and strange techniques to get the building to that kind of a level. Those are hard, actual numbers from the tracking on energy information we did at Bazzani and Associates for several of the buildings we had worked on.
Is there anything specific you’re working on in the Grand Rapids area?
We’re just getting into this right now. We’re integrating the sustainability services into areas that the company already has been involved in, plus we’ve got the new division set up specifically for sustainability and green building consulting, so we’re touching into a lot of the areas I was into before. But we’re seeing a huge increase and demand from companies that want to get involved in the Recovery Act grants and tax credit programs. We’re starting to take a good look at that and how we can help our clients get into a lot of the Recovery Act programs.
Can you describe the Recovery Act in a nutshell?
It was passed last year, with trillions of dollars allocated for different programs. It’s being funneled through the state and the state is overseeing it. The programs are coming out fast and furious and there seems to be a new one every day. There are tons of grants and tax credits for everything from energy efficiency to clean energy to companies wanting to get into manufacturing solar panels or wind generators.
So is that encouraging to businesses?
Absolutely. There are plenty of manufacturers who want to get involved, but we see companies really don’t know how to do the implementation plans. There’s a high level of accountability, especially in the realm of energy efficiency. If the government is shelling out money, they want benchmarking to say, OK, what was your benchmark before you started doing any of these energy upgrades, what is your benchmark afterward and how much benefit did you have by going through that money. That’s what we’re taking a look at to help companies and municipalities to set up this benchmarking and what their carbon footprint is, because that also is mandated a lot of times. We’re finding this is a huge market for us.
How does Grand Rapids fare against other mid-size cities across the country?
We’re faring pretty well. We’re fortunate to have a very progressive city and in terms of sustainability we’re fortunate to have a very progressive mayor (Mayor George Heartwell) who understands these principles and is implementing them city-wide. That’s certainly trickling off to be a region-wide effect. And when you’re talking about sustainability certainly a major city is the way you can have the biggest impact in the area. We were recognized as having the most LEED buildings per capita several years ago, which certainly is a great thing, and I hope that trend continues.
Where do you see this all going?
My ultimate hope is that in 30-50 years that the term sustainability goes away and there’s no differentiation between a traditional design and a sustainable design. That we get back to designing and building and maintaining buildings in the way they should be maintained and just do it because that is the way that it is done. I hope at some point we get a market transformation that’s big enough to where these issues, which are out of the norm for architects and building owners and people to (discuss), become just the norm.
Photographs of Nate Gillette by Brian Kelly - All Rights Reserved
Brian Kelly is Rapid Growth's managing photographer and a swell guy. You can follow his photography adventures here on his blog.
A veteran journalist formerly of The Grand Rapids Press, Mary Radigan is now a freelance writer based in Grand Rapids.
Enjoy this story?
Sign up for free solutions-based reporting in your inbox each week.