When Brown University embarked on an upgrade of the Barus and Holley building—a seven-story laboratory, office, and classroom building that had largely gone unrenovated since it was built in 1965—its initial goals were mainly to fix what was broken. The project’s priorities were to upgrade the mechanical systems, including installing a new fire alarm system, rehabilitating the elevators, converting the ventilation system to 100 percent outside air and incorporating heat recovery, replacing chiller plant and cooling towers, and replacing the electrical switchgear. However, the university chose this project to implement its very first Integrated Project Delivery contract, and the efficiency and collaboration of the team allowed for much deeper application of green retrofits. Brown University realized savings of US$1.2 million on a US$12 million project budget, which was applied to a thorough study of the inter-relationships between the mechanical systems and a highly technical analysis of the hot water system that will save water and energy for years to come.

“Having the subcontractors at the table during the initial phases, offering their input on the best way to construct, was by far the biggest contributor to our cost savings,” according to Thomas Cousineau, project manager at Brown.

Because the team worked closely together it was able to identify creative ways to provide added sustainability value at no extra cost, such as installing energy recovery for toilet exhaust (which was simple because they were already doing so with the ventilation system) and replacing two old air handling units with just one and purchasing a spare motor for back-up. As the work progressed, team members also discovered issues that they could fix and, because they were incentivized to care about the project as a whole rather than just their scope of work, they were more willing to take on those easy fixes. For example, the team ended up replacing six leaking water riser valves and stopped leaks from a manhole into the adjacent Prince laboratory’s electric room.

The biggest obstacle was getting the necessary approvals in a timely manner, according to Cousineau, so the team switched to having principals’ meetings every two weeks. That worked well but reinforced the need for an active, engaged owner and responsive decision makers. At the start, the project strongly engaged the operations staff, “but it was difficult to keep them involved due to the frequency of meetings,” says Cousineau. Eventually the team realized they could be more engaging by relating to the staff’s own values. At this particular project, notes Cousineau, “the actual building occupants won’t notice much of a change except perhaps in more reliable systems.” The team realized that the operations staff people “were basically the owner, as the new equipment was really for them.” Changing that message became a theme for the project.

Possibly because of the strong input from operations staff, the University decided to keep its share of savings within the project and invest in other, more long-term items. The project team’s efficiency paid for spare paint jobs, revising the sequence of operations for the high-temperature hot water system, and a “cross-connection investigation” to understand the interrelationships between different systems for future work.

Overall, “though it took some effort to get everyone to understand the new contract and its ramifications,” says Cousineau, in this case, “it is what allowed the team to truly collaborate. What had been one of the biggest energy hogs on campus is now a model of efficient systems.”