Below, Zach shares about his career as a sustainability professional at WSP, and why now is a great time for clients to be thinking about green solutions for their big challenges.
Can you tell us about your role and background?
I’m a Vice President on the Built Ecology team — Property and Buildings’ sustainability group — and came to WSP straight out of school 11 years ago. I knew very early on, before college, that I wanted to be involved in sustainability to make the world a better place.
I consciously chose not to be a mechanical engineer and studied environmental engineering instead. Funnily enough, now I’m a licensed mechanical engineer because I came to understand how mechanical engineering can drive sustainability. I initially taught myself how to energy model as an architectural intern and I chose WSP for its dedication to high-performance design and was able to learn building systems on the job to build on my sustainability background.
You help clients scale up from sustainable buildings to sustainable portfolios or districts. What are some of the challenges and opportunities of that work?
The sustainable design movement started primarily with small demonstration projects, like making a single building net-zero energy, often at a cost premium. But we’re talking about global climate change – literal gigatons of annual carbon emissions that we need to eliminate. The solutions had to scale. For example, when a corporation wants to decarbonize a portfolio, we can apply a small change to operations across 1,000 buildings to achieve a huge carbon impact, which often aligns with long-term financial goals as well.
When looking at a district level, problems and solutions often emerge together. Take Amazon’s Eco District and the Spheres in Seattle. The city needs heat most of the year, so we took the heat rejection from the data center to use as a resource for another building. Campuses like this involve cross-sections of WSP, utilizing technical engineers for buildings, systems and controls, with coordination from the energy teams on grid interface and new fuel sources. District-level projects add more tools to the engineer’s toolkit and allow clients to meet broader sustainability goals.
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Not only did the project use rejected heat from a nearby data center, but multidisciplinary solutions also allowed the project to exceed Seattle’s stringent energy code by 20%.
