Environmental Initiative of the Year Winning Project
King Shaw Associates was awarded the Environmental Initiative of the Year at the recent Building Services Awards 2007 for The Innovate Green Office in Leeds.
Nottingham-based M&E Contractor, Goodmarriott & Hursthouse, part of the Imtech UK group, provided the Mechanical and Electrical services to The Innovate Green Office which attained outstanding environmental credentials including the accolade of the building with the highest ever BREEAM score.
The success of the design can be summed up in two words: "resources conservation". The £5.5 million office has been constructed using recycled materials and has been designed as a giant insulated thermal store to minimise heating and cooling loads. In fact, it is so well insulated that people and equipment provide most of the building's heat. Additional heat and cooling is provided by a combined heat and power system, complete with a matched absorption chiller. The building's control allow this chiller to run overnight to store cooling in the thermal mass which can be drawn on during the day.
Annual emissions from the building are predicted to be over 80% less than for a typical office-park building, saving over 350 tonnes of CO2 a year.
The judges described the scheme as "a well-considered, integrated design with the potential to be replicated widely".