Apple Campus 2: the greenest building on the planet?

Jerry Yudelson, president of the Portland, Oregon-based Green Building Initiative, likens sustainable architecture to sex.

“It’s all about performance, not promise. Show me your numbers,” Yudelson says.

A few years ago, Yudelson, together with German architecture critic and professor Ulf Meyer, asked hundreds of owners of the highest-rated new green buildings around the globe to reveal their actual performance data. Their request included details on measured energy and water use, which they would compare with other buildings.

Perhaps embarrassed that performance might not live up to promises, a lot of building owners propositioned by Yudelson and Meyer demured. But some did not. The results are presented in their book The World’s Greenest Buildings, published in 2013.

“We wanted to show that high levels of energy and water efficiency and high levels of aesthetics are not incompatible. Sort of like a beauty queen who can do higher math,” Yudelson says.

In addition to providing examples of elegantly designed sustainable buildings, the book is a convenient reference for fact-checking the rising number of claims by building owners and architects worldwide that their green buildings are the greenest of all.

In the most recent and high-profile boast, Apple CEO Tim Cook said during the recent Climate Week conference in New York: “We are building a new headquarters that will, I think, be the greenest building on the planet.”

But will the actual performance of Apple Campus 2 – with its futuristic solar-powered, spaceship-like main building – match its promise?

Will the campus at Cupertino, California, due to open in 2016, be more sustainable than the Bullitt Center in Seattle, which stakes its claim to the title “greenest commercial building in the world”? Or the YS Sun Green Building Research Center in Taiwan, which is alleged to be the “world’s greenest building”? Or how about One Angel Square in Manchester, England, “the world’s most environmentally friendly building”? There are also NuOffice in Munich, Germany, “the most efficient and most sustainable office building in the world”; Powerhouse Kjørbo in Norway, “world’s most environmentally-friendly office building”; and The Crystal in London, which is more modestly advertised as “one of the world’s greenest buildings”.

As Yudelson says: show me your numbers.

Apple Campus 2: green but not ‘greenest on planet’

While Apple is known for being secretive at times, the iconic Silicon Valley tech giant actually has released a ton of detail about Apple Campus 2. In accordance with California environmental laws, the company produced a 650-page environmental impact report on the project, which the city of Cupertino approved last year.

It details everything from Apple’s strategy to power the entire campus with 100% renewable energy and its promises to plant at least 7,000 new trees and use recycled materials.

For example, Apple projects its maximum energy use across the entire 5.9m sq ft (548,000 sq meters) campus – including office spaces, research centers, parking structures and other buildings – to be around 142,000,000 kilowatt-hours per year. Based on the total area of all the buildings on site, Apple Campus 2 will have an energy use intensity of about 257 kWh per sq meter per year.

That easily beats typical office buildings in the United States, which use around 500 kWh per sq meter a year. It even beats more comparable facilities with energy-intensive research labs, such as the Center for Health and Healing at Oregon Health and Science University in Portland, a highly rated green building.

But, technically speaking, Apple Campus 2 will be far from the greenest building on the planet, at least in terms of energy efficiency. In fact, there are 41 buildings profiled in Yudelson and Meyer’s book that beat it. Even if its actual energy use turns out to be significantly lower – say, 200 kWh per sq meter per year, or even 100 kWh per sq meter per year – Apple Campus 2 would still trail numerous commercial buildings already populated and producing actual performance data.

The greenest of all?

The best energy-efficiency performer profiled by Yudelson and Meyer is the YS Sun Green Building Research Center at National Cheng Kung University in Taiwan. Colloquially known as the Magic School of Green Technology, it uses just 40.43 kWh per sq meter annually.

However, the Bullitt Center, which was completed in 2013, after Yudelson and Meyer finished their research, is an even deeper shade of green – possibly the deepest. That building, which is nestled into Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood, used only about 32 kWh per sq meter in its first full year of operation.

On top of that, thanks to low energy use coupled with a large rooftop solar array, the building actually produces much more electricity than it consumes.

“Currently, we produce 70% more than we consume,” says Denis Hayes, president of the Bullitt Foundation and Earth Day founder. “When all our tenants are fully staffed and we have settled into normalcy, I think the stable surplus in a normal year will be 20% to 30%.”

Producing more electricity from rooftop solar than it consumes in kilowatt-hours per year, the Bullitt Center is unique even among the greenest buildings in the world.

“Zero-energy and energy-positive buildings are sexy, and the performance metrics are easy to measure,” says Hayes, who stands by the claim that the Bullitt Center is the greenest office building in the world.

“The admittedly very subjective claim is based upon the Bullitt Center’s position at the cutting edge of so very many aspects of green building performance simultaneously.”

But the father of Earth Day certainly won’t be happy unless the Bullitt Center has plenty of competitors. And that requires performance, not just promises.

Garrett Hering is a San Francisco-based journalist covering energy, technology, business and the environment. His articles have appeared in California Energy Markets, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and elsewhere.

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