When officials in a western Kentucky school district embarked more than two decades ago on a plan to cut energy costs, they had no idea that their quest would eventually produce the green school of the future.

But the Warren County School District’s dogged pursuit of conservation—a policy that has yielded $5.5 million in avoided energy costs since 2003—and a willingness to incorporate increasingly aggressive efficiency measures into a wave of new schools has placed them at the forefront of sustainable design.

The latest fruit of those efforts is the new Richardsville Elementary School, the nation’s first public school designed to produce as much energy as it consumes, a concept known as net-zero energy construction. The super-insulated facility requires less than a quarter of the energy used by a conventional building, and the electricity generated by a 348 kilowatt (kW) solar array is expected to more than compensate for the building’s annual draw of power from the grid.

The school, located in a rural area near the town of Bowling Green, is one of only a handful of net-zero schools slowly cropping up across the country, but green building advocates say that it is only a matter of time before the concept hits the mainstream. Buildings account for more than 40 percent of the nation’s energy consumption, and school administrators, pressed to trim operating expenses, are increasingly looking for ways to hedge against rising energy prices, they say.

In addition, the availability of new technologies can dramatically lower a building’s energy use, and they need not significantly raise the cost of construction, say school officials and architects who have worked on such projects. They also point to a growing body of research showing that many of the elements included in green school design have a positive impact on student learning and teaching.

Maximizing Efficiency
The key to achieving a net-zero building is to shrink its energy footprint to a level so low that whatever amount of electricity it sucks from the grid can be balanced out over the course of a year by clean-energy sources. Typically, this is accomplished with an “integrated design” process, a collaborative approach that includes input from all parties who will use a building—including teachers and, often, students—which views a building as an interdependent, holistic structure to ensure that the different systems that make a building function, such as heating and cooling, work together, thereby cutting down on energy waste.

The Richardsville school, which opened last September, is projected to use 17.5 kBtus (Kilo British Thermal Units) of energy annually, compared to 73 kBtus for a conventional school. The structure is made of insulated concrete forms, a technology that provides 3 times the insulation value of conventional construction and has been used in all new schools built in Warren County since 2005. Costs will be lowered with geothermal heating and air-conditioning, energy-sipping appliances in the kitchen (which typically guzzle as much as 22 percent of a conventional building’s energy use), and a dramatic reduction in the need for artificial light during the daytime through passive solar design.

Classrooms face the sun and are flooded with daylight piped in via solar tubes, or with light entering through a row of clerestory windows located below a sloping ceiling. The classrooms are typically so bright that the lights are not switched on, even on cloudy days, said Joanie Hendricks, public relations coordinator for the Warren County School District. Students can monitor the building’s real-time energy use on “green screens” located in the hallways, and student-run energy teams devise strategies to cut electricity use even further.

Kenny Stanfield, a principal in the architecture firm of Sherman-Carter-Barnhart, which designed the building, said that, excluding the solar panels, the facility cost $169 a square foot, well below a cap of $203 set by the Kentucky Department of Education for conventional new school construction at the time. The solar array was purchased with a $1.4 million grant from the state of Kentucky. Factoring in that expense brings the building’s entire price tag to $199 per square foot.

In most projects that endeavor to reach net zero, the cost of installing on-site renewable energy is still prohibitive, said Stanfield. But Warren County’s experience shows that it can be affordable to build schools that are “net-zero ready”—buildings with an energy footprint low enough that any power they draw from the grid could be compensated by, or “netted out,” with clean energy at a future time, he said. Two other recently completed schools in the district were constructed to be net-zero ready, at a cost of $165 per square foot.

In a sense, the school district’s combination of growth and its aggressive pursuit of efficiency have made it a unique testing ground to employ the latest thinking in high-performance school design. Warren County has been building, on average, one new school a year to keep pace with a student body growing by an average of 400 new students annually. Each new building has provided an opportunity to take efficiency to a new level. Getting to zero there may have been a natural step, but elsewhere, achieving this goal might be more of a leap, said Stanfield.

“I think more and more people are becoming aware of it, but what I don’t think they realize is that it’s affordable,” said Stanfield.

Getting Off Oil
Nevertheless, green building advocates say it is becoming more commonplace for school officials to consider energy expenses when projecting future budgets, given concerns that once the economy improves, oil will resume its upward trajectory, especially with the fast-growing economies of China and India ratcheting up global consumption of oil for buildings and transportation. If current growth rates continue, buildings around the globe will become the top energy consumers by 2025, and could guzzle as much energy as transportation and industry combined, says a 2008 report from the National Science and Technology Council. The good news is that the energy and greenhouse gas footprints of new construction can be slashed by 40 percent using available technologies, the report claims.

Increasingly, government is playing an important role in nudging the sustainable design movement forward. Thirteen U.S. states and the District of Columbia have adopted policies promoting the rating system known as Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) for new school facilities, said Nate Allen, schools advocacy associate at the U.S. Green Building Council’s Center for Green Schools.

Since 2008, a bipartisan network of state legislators across the country has participated in a “50 for 50” green schools caucus initiative, which advances policies to encourage sustainable schools. Last spring, officials in Kentucky unanimously voted to adopt a green schools caucus, he added.

“A lot of the most important decisions have been at the state level,” said Allen. “What we’re finding is that it’s not something that’s just focused on New England or the West. It’s all around the country.”

Another movement that has been working to raise the bar in efficiency is the Collaborative for High Performance Schools (CHPS), a nonprofit formed more than a decade ago by utilities in California seeking to encourage energy efficiency in schools. CHPS offers tools for educational institutions to achieve a variety of energy and environmental goals, and its high-performance criteria have been adopted by more than a dozen other states and tailored to suit their needs.

One of those states is Rhode Island, which has mandated that all schools comply with the Northeast CHPS, and offers schools financial incentives if they incorporate into their facilities a range of efficiency and environmentally friendly strategies, such as improving indoor air quality, using on-site renewable energy, and installing low-flow water fixtures. Several other New England states offer similar incentive programs.

Educating a Community
Sustainable design professionals say that, despite this progress, there are still many barriers standing in the way of building super-efficient schools, from a dearth of incentives for renewable energy technologies to a lack of knowledge of the benefits.

“By and large, I still think people are reticent because they think that it costs more money. It really doesn’t have to,” said Kenneth Filarski, a Rhode Island architect who specializes in green building design. “People don’t realize that a lot of the time it requires a multiplicity of different designs and strategies, because every situation is different.”

Filarski will be collaborating with the firm Perkins Eastman on a net-zero energy building for the Paul W. Crowley East Bay Campus of the Met School, a state-run, public high school in Newport, Rhode Island. The school uses a nontraditional learning model that sends students into the community to work alongside professionals at real-world jobs.

Though neither the design nor the final contract with the state had been finalized at press time, Filarski said the team was considering a range of tools to maximize passive design features, such as solar orientation and natural ventilation, to help keep costs within a budget of $247 per square foot for the 19,000- to 20,000-square-foot structure. There has also been talk of having the project serve as an incubator of new technologies, such as building a greenhouse to grow algae, which feeds on carbon dioxide, and using it to make biofuels that would power a generator. The Request for Proposals issued by the state envisions a school/community center that turns the facility into an educational tool in and of itself.

“We’re treating the building, the site context, and the community as an ecology,” said Filarski. “We’re really trying to create an ecosystem.”

The idea of using a school as a showcase for sustainable design has been a rallying point for the Irving Independent School District, west of Dallas, Texas, where construction is under way on the 150,000-square-foot Lady Bird Johnson Middle School. The plan is for the net-zero energy facility to produce its own power with a 550 kW solar array, wind turbines, and geothermal energy harvesting. The price tag is estimated at $4 million more than the $25 million in bond funds set aside to build the school, but officials hope to sell sponsorships and partnerships to bring in revenue to cover the increase. The school has already hired a company that designs museum exhibits to create display areas, said Scott Layne, the district’s assistant superintendent for support services.

There will be a learning lab the size of two classrooms, four interactive learning “nodes” where students can study wind, solar, geothermal, and conservation. They will be able to turn a crank to generate electricity, among other hands-on tools. “The whole building is like a huge science experiment,” said Layne. “We know that people from all over the country are going to come to see [it].”

Coming Out Ahead
Whether the latest projects will have a domino effect elsewhere remains to be seen. Bill Maclay, founding principal of Maclay Architects in Waitsfield, Vermont, said that his firm was capable of making net-zero energy buildings at least 15 years ago, but he has seen an uptick in interest only recently.

Historically, the practice has been more openly embraced by the private sector. But that is changing, he said, as volatile energy prices over the last few years have created a general awareness that when considering the future affordability of any building, energy costs will likely be a wild-card factor.

“What’s new is that people are beginning to recognize that fuel escalation rates are going to be important in the future,” said Maclay. “Many people are saying, ‘If I retire and energy costs go crazy, how do I protect my house?’”

The firm has eight net-zero projects under way or completed, including a $5.5 million, 16,800-square-foot net-zero field house that opened in late 2009 at the Putney School, a private boarding school in southeastern Vermont.

The building, designed to have zero carbon emissions, uses low-flow water fixtures, composting toilets, natural ventilation, and a range of other high-efficiency and sustainable features. Electricity is generated by a 36.8 kW array of sixteen sun-tracking photovoltaic solar panels located in a field next to the building. A $221,000 grant from the state of Vermont covered half of its cost, and the school raised the remainder of the money.

Putney earns a 6-cent-per-kilowatt-hour premium on electricity the solar panels send back to the grid. During its first year in operation, the field house had a power bill of negative $3,800, said Don Cuerdon, the school’s director of communications.

Cuerdon said Putney has a policy that any new construction has to adhere to high standards of sustainability. The school is currently formulating a master plan, and there has been discussion about shrinking the energy footprint of every building, through retrofits, to a level where it would be feasible to add alternative energy to neutralize the amount of power drawn from the grid, cost permitting.

“I think the goal is a net-zero campus, unofficially,” said Cuerdon. “That’s what makes sense to us.”

“Maybe it will take us fifty years,” he added. “Maybe it will take ten.”

According to the White House, the Better Building Initiative will feature a program called Race to Green, a competitive grant process modeled after the Race to the Top program in education. Race to Green will encourage state and local governments to reform their building codes and make it easier to retrofit buildings.

Three democrats will join the panel: Third-year Democrat Al Franken of Minnesota, and freshmen Democrats Chris Coons of Delaware and Joe Manchin of West Virginia. Five freshmen Republicans also will join the panel: Mike Lee of Utah, Rand Paul of Kentucky, Dan Coats of Indiana, Rob Portman of Ohio, and John Hoeven of North Dakota.

For more information and analysis of how the additions may change the structure of the panel, see source (below; membership required).