The Future. Built Smarter.

How Ann Arbor seeks to lift up an underserved neighborhood through community geothermal

This episode features Missy Stults, Sustainability and Innovations Director for the City of Ann Arbor, MI, one of 11 communities being funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Geothermal Technologies Office to design a community geothermal heating and cooling system. Joining the conversation is IMEG Sustainability Director Adam McMillen, who is leading the analysis and design portion of the project. 

“In Ann Arbor we have the goal of achieving a just transition to communitywide carbon neutrality by 2030,” said Stults. “One of the things that is really critical is centering equity in our work, and so from the very beginning we said we have to make sure that we're working with neighborhoods that we've traditionally disinvested in.” The city’s Bryant Neighborhood—an underserved, energy-burdened community of 262 households, 75 percent of which are considered low-income, with over 50 percent of residents being minorities and renters—was chosen for the project. “For almost three years we've been working with Community Action Network (CAN) and the residents of Bryant to figure out what would it mean if they became the most sustainable neighborhood in America,” said Stults. “What would it mean if you flipped the script on a neighborhood that we sort of just forgot about and made it be the centerpiece of climate action? And then this project came about.”  

The goal of the project is to design (and eventually build) a community-scale geothermal system that covers at least 75% of the heating and cooling load for all 262 households as well as for a local school, a county community mental health service center, and the City of Ann Arbor’s public works facility. The project will directly lower the neighborhood’s greenhouse gas emissions by 40%, significantly improve indoor air quality, eliminate the energy burden for low-income residents, and enhance year-round comfort.  

The project team is led by the City of Ann Arbor and consists of 14 entities including CAN and other community organizations, mental health providers, the public school district, utility providers, geothermal design firms, and workforce development and training organizations.  

“The answer to the climate crisis isn't brand new neighborhoods everywhere,” said McMillen. “It is: Work with what we have in a smarter way, reuse resources we have, then lift everyone else up with us. And make it replicable so anyone can do it.” 

Read more about the project. 

UW Health bringing a proton center powered by the sun to Madison

This episode offers a preview of UW Health’s Eastpark Medical Center in Madison, WI. Expected to be fully open by Fall 2024, the seven-story outpatient facility will offer advanced imaging and lab services, destination services, multidisciplinary adult specialties, and women’s complex care. The center also will feature the state-of-the-art UW Health | Carbone Cancer Center, one of the few in the country to offer proton therapy and, in collaboration with Leo Cancer Care, the first healthcare facility in the U.S. to offer upright proton therapy.  

Discussing the new center and proton therapy aspects of the project are Jerry McGuire and Steve Mumm, senior project managers for University of Wisconsin Hospitals and Clinics Planning Design and Construction, and Kevin Langan, an IMEG mechanical engineer working on the project. “Proton therapy is a relatively new cancer treatment,” says McGuire. “It’s an advanced form of radiation therapy using a precise dose of radiation that conforms to the tumor itself—reducing side effects and causing no damage to surrounding healthy tissues.” The new center will offer both a rotating gantry where a patient lies down on a couch with the machine rotating around them, and an upright fixed beam system in which the patient sits up. The upright system is being found to provide improved outcomes— offering greater comfort, reducing patient anxiety, and improved accuracy—and is particularly beneficial for pediatric patients.  

The planning, design, and construction not only of the proton therapy spaces but also the infrastructure to support the technology was like no other healthcare project. “There were huge implications well beyond the proton therapy space—for example, the chiller plant gets larger, an additional electrical service was added, and larger generators,” said Langan. “It also required a lot of coordination with the proton therapy vendors to make sure we were providing what they needed.” To withstand the neutron dose rates of the treatment bay and contain the radiation, the proton therapy space also required 7-foot-thick concrete walls below grade. A temporary system to pump glycol through tubing within the poured concrete was required to keep the concrete from overheating and to cure appropriately.  

Eastpark Medical Center is also seeking LEED v4.1 certification for healthcare and has several sustainable features, including a 1MW rooftop solar array which provides the approximate energy needed to power the proton center. “We basically will have a carbon-neutral proton center in Madison, Wisconsin,” says Mumm. 

Housing director: ‘We’re providing homes where people can thrive’

Scott Campagna, Senior Director of Housing at IMEG, is featured in this episode—one in a series of conversations with the firm’s market leaders. Scott talks about the subsectors of IMEG’s housing work—neighborhoods, multifamily, student housing, and senior living—and the challenges and opportunities facing the market overall. “It's an interesting time,” he says. “There's a huge housing demand in all sectors but in the current environment, with the lending being pulled back, projects in all sectors generally are moving a bit slower.” Scott also discusses office-to-residential conversions, a trending topic in the market. He cautions that such pursuits always be preceded by an infrastructure assessment. “Certainly not every building is the same nor is it best suited necessarily for a housing conversion. You need to look at the systems infrastructure to ensure it will support the housing project. You don't want to be hit with any surprises after the fact or during construction.” On all projects in the market, Scott says the mentality at IMEG is to “Turn housing into homes. We understand we are drawing more than just lines on paper—we are providing a home where people can thrive and flourish within our communities.”  

Planning is essential for meeting education market challenges

In a continuing series of discussions with IMEG’s market leaders, this episode of The Future Built Smarter features John Holbert, vice president of education. John discusses the challenges facing the market, primarily those for higher education institutions, which face ever-increasing enrollment competition, changes in student demographics, limited resources, aging infrastructure, and difficulties with facility staff retention. Many higher education institutions, as well as K-12 school districts, also face challenges in meeting sustainability and environmental initiatives as well as the need to improve safety and security in their buildings and on their campuses. “Security has become a big topic, and we have started consulting on safety and security plans for campuses and districts,” he says. Such initiatives start with a vulnerability assessment and gap analysis, with planning and design including principles from Crime Prevention through Environmental Design, or CPTED. “We’re also seeing more referendums and funding opportunities for safety and security measures,” he adds. Before embarking on any building project, John emphasizes the importance of master planning to best prepare for the needs of the future. Such planning helps institutions meet their long-term goals and allocate funds and other resources accordingly—before it’s too late. “Across the landscape of education, we see a lot of deferred maintenance,” he says. “We're still going into 50-plus-year-old buildings that have original systems in them.” 

Keeping K-12 students safe demands a holistic security approach

Holistic security considerations for K-12 school design are examined in this 17-minute episode featuring Ryan Searles, IMEG’s security consulting group leader. Ryan spends an average of three weeks of each month traveling the country presenting at conferences or training organizations in crisis management, active shooter mitigation, and other security preparedness—with a growing number of school districts seeking his team’s services. “We keep seeing a rise in violence in the United States and more violent events occurring at places of education,” he says. “In K-12, particularly, it's really about what we can do to mitigate it from happening.” In addition to getting involved earlier in the design phase of new facilities, Ryan and his team are also conducting an increasing number of security assessments of existing schools, providing answers to such questions as, “What do we have in place? What are we doing right? Where are our gaps and where are our vulnerabilities? How do we fix those?” The most effective security design and emergency preparedness takes a blended, holistic approach, Ryan says, and includes not only physical and technology design aspects but also “the human aspect”—training, drills and rehearsals for staff and students, as well as proactive threat assessments of individuals and being vigilant about watching for early warning signs. “We've been a very reactive culture in the United States with school security and safety. We can't do that anymore—that's become very apparent and has a lot to do with my team being so busy. Schools are reaching out saying, ‘Come show us what we need to do to keep these kids safe.’ “

Ryan Searles will present "Security Considerations for School Design" at 8:15 a.m. Oct. 13 at the Association for Learning Environments' National Conference, LearningSCAPES 2023, in Chicago. Learn more.

Water, water everywhere—with many improvements needed

This episode—another in a series of discussions with IMEG’s market leaders—features Jack Kusek, market leader for water and wastewater. Listen to the episode and you’ll learn: 

• What PFAs are and what can be done about them 
• Which U.S. city has the largest concentration of lead pipes 
• Why security is a big concern for water and wastewater facilities, particularly in smaller communities 
• How two communities collaborated to ensure their water resiliency
• Why outsourcing facility operations is a necessity for many small municipalities
• How IMEG has helped restore Frenchman’s Reef resort on St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands following back-to-back hurricanes that devastated the property in 2017 

Jack also discusses his motivation for the work he specializes in, and the reward he receives when he’s able to help a community improve its water infrastructure and water quality and provide for one of the fundamental needs of life. 

“The fact that we can help people on St. Thomas and other communities so that they have new facilities, cleaner water to drink, and wastewater plants that aren't polluting the Top of Formstreams—just seeing how those improvements benefit people and how thankful they are, that’s motivation enough for me.” 

Environmental issues, expanding specialization key topics in S&T market

In the first of a series of conversations with IMEG market leaders and directors, Brandon Fortier, Director of Science & Technology, joins podcast host Joe Payne and series co-host Steve Rhoades, Vice President of Market Development and Federal Solutions. This episode, like the others to come in the series, provides a high-level view of the trends, challenges, opportunities, and topics that are top-of-mind for IMEG’s clients and partners.

“Science and technology intersects many different vertical markets and a lot of our clients’ questions and needs are very specific to their program,” says Brandon. “But the continuity between them is environmental related—sustainability, resiliency, climate change, decarbonization—things that we hear about in a variety of markets are the same ones that science and technology clients are very focused on.” At the same time, adds Brandon, “we're seeing a lot of different opportunities with specialization in the market,” including cell gene therapies, life sciences, and healthcare in general. “These have provided many opportunities for new research, and we’re seeing many owners expanding the market.”

Communication is vital for engineers to provide successful solutions to S&T clients’ needs. This includes not only communicating with facility staff but also the end users—the researchers and industrial hygienists and safety and chemical experts. “We need to address the needs of all end users in the facility design,” says Brandon. “We don’t necessarily need to understand the research they're doing, but we need to understand what they need out of the building systems.”

Decarbonization in Healthcare: Why it’s needed, how to get started

Many in the healthcare industry have come to recognize the significant and symbolic role that healthcare organizations, their designers, and builders, can play in reducing the carbon emissions, or greenhouse gases, introduced by the built environment of their facilities. In this podcast episode, IMEG Senior Director of Healthcare Eric Vandenbroucke and Director of Sustainability Adam McMillen discuss why decarbonization is needed in healthcare, the challenges and opportunities that will be encountered along the way, and how organizations can start down the path. For additional information, listeners can read the free IMEG executive guide, “Decarbonization in Healthcare: A Practical Approach for the Built environment.” 

Data is the key to getting more help from your building

The amount of data available from multiple building systems continues to grow exponentially. What this data is and how to decide what to do with it is examined in this two-part episode of The Future Built Smarter. Our guest on these episodes is Brendon Buckley, IMEG Protect Executive for Building Intelligence and Integration. In Part 1, Brendon discusses building system data and the potential it presents to owners for not only improving their building’s operational performance but their business outcomes as well. “Even though it's an amazing thing to be able to maintain a comfortable, safe, sustainable environment, there's a lot more we should be expecting out of our buildings,” he says. “What processes or areas could be improved with a little additional help from the systems within the building? What outcome or what result could that drive? I think each individual owner needs to brainstorm about what kinds of benefits they are not getting that they probably should be getting.” In Part 2, Brendon talks about the use of a “digital twin” to model changes in operations using building system data before any actual changes are made. “A digital twin in the simplest term is a virtual representation, using collected data, of the systems that are running in a building,” he says. Still largely just beginning to emerge on the scene, a digital twin can be used to determine not only how a building will react under different scenarios but also how the scenarios will affect occupants, staff, and processes. While useful for many different building types and markets, a digital twin can be particularly beneficial for mission critical buildings and those that must operate 24/7, such as manufacturing and healthcare facilities. “Being able to model critical environments that have so many systems in play is really tremendous,” Brendon says. “Understanding the data and being able to leverage a digital twin in actual building utilization is really a big deal, and I think we're going to see the use of this expand.”

 

Digital twin uses building data to model effects of system changes

The amount of data available from multiple building systems continues to grow exponentially. What this data is and how to decide what to do with it is examined in this two-part episode of The Future Built Smarter. Our guest on these episodes is Brendon Buckley, IMEG Protect Executive for Building Intelligence and Integration. In Part 1, Brendon discusses building system data and the potential it presents to owners for not only improving their building’s operational performance but their business outcomes as well. “Even though it's an amazing thing to be able to maintain a comfortable, safe, sustainable environment, there's a lot more we should be expecting out of our buildings,” he says. “What processes or areas could be improved with a little additional help from the systems within the building? What outcome or what result could that drive? I think each individual owner needs to brainstorm about what kinds of benefits they are not getting that they probably should be getting.” In Part 2, Brendon talks about the use of a “digital twin” to model changes in operations using building system data before any actual changes are made. “A digital twin in the simplest term is a virtual representation, using collected data, of the systems that are running in a building,” he says. Still largely just beginning to emerge on the scene, a digital twin can be used to determine not only how a building will react under different scenarios but also how the scenarios will affect occupants, staff, and processes. While useful for many different building types and markets, a digital twin can be particularly beneficial for mission critical buildings and those that must operate 24/7, such as manufacturing and healthcare facilities. “Being able to model critical environments that have so many systems in play is really tremendous,” Brendon says. “Understanding the data and being able to leverage a digital twin in actual building utilization is really a big deal, and I think we're going to see the use of this expand.”