Inland Power and Light uses headquarters to showcase efficiency

When John Francisco began sketching out the design for the new Inland Power and Light Co. building, the project manager found a Venn diagram-like blueprint taking shape. The main circle represented the commitment to the cooperative company’s 38,000 members and its ongoing mission of energy conservation and showing customers how they can conserve as well. Today, the member-focused part of the blueprint is symbolized by the glass-encased, visitor-friendly lobby in the recently built West Plains headquarters 10 miles north of Spokane. Outside the facility, just yards from the side entrance, a few more visible indicators — a 40-foot wind turbine, a row of solar panels and state-of-the-art battery package — point to the company’s focus on alternative energy and conservation. “The whole building was designed around the lobby in the middle, which signifies our commitment to our member-owners,” says Francisco, who also serves as the information technology manager. While standing under the 2.5 kilowatt power-generating wind turbine and 2.4 kilowatt power-generating solar panel array on a brisk February morning, Francisco adds, “We purposefully built them on a residential scale so that our customers could come and see how alternative energy can work for them.” Even though the solar and wind generate a very small amount of power compared to the total used in the building, he says, “Our goal was to simulate what our members could do on their own, to give a real-world demonstration of what it costs and what to expect in terms of feedback from the systems.” The other outlying circles in the facility’s design, Francisco explains, included everything and everyone from personnel to maintenance to supplies to likely future needs from the company. The mantra of energy conservation and efficiency guided nearly every decision during the planning and construction phases. The end result is a 26,000-square-foot showcase for alternative energy and conservation for the non-profit company, which also offers its 109 workers a productive and vibrant workplace. For roughly four years Francisco and a team of planners worked on the facility’s design. After 16 months of construction, the new HQ was finished in September 2009. Throughout the sprawling administration building, which sits on a 21-acre plot of land with a warehouse and fleet-maintenance building also owned by the company, alternative energy systems can be found from the vaulted ceilings to the tunnels underneath the patched floor. They are all part of the company’s effort to earn the building a “gold” Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design designation from the U.S. Green Building Council, which Francisco says could take up to a year from construction completion date before the designation is decided on. In laying out the headquarters, not many alternative energy systems escaped the design process, Francisco said. Energy savings, water efficiency, carbon emission, indoor environmental quality, stewardship of resources and sensitivity to their effects on the environments were all checked off from a long list of LEED requirements. On top of that, construction crews minimized energy use during the building process while all building materials came from within a 500-mile radius of the site, another “gold”-certified requirement. “We are very confident we will get gold,” Francisco says, in a tour of the building’s large training room, which features several energy-conscious decisions that went into the facility’s overall design. The new headquarters, located on West Hallett Road, just off exit 272 on I-90 near Medical Lake, opened for business late last summer. The wood and brick building is in sharp contrast to the old Inland Power and Light Co. administration building on E. Second Avenue in Spokane, which was built in 1954 and operated out of for almost 60 years. A series of ducts housing electrical conduits and the air circulation system, which requires less static pressure to circulate compared to overhead ducts blowing air down, runs underneath the raised floor of the building, and a patchwork of 2-foot concrete panels covering the ground offers easy access below. The panels can be unscrewed anywhere, so the heating and air-conditioning diffusers in the floor can be relocated as furniture configurations change. Most of the furniture throughout the headquarters is used or has been reconditioned, which Francisco says reduced costs significantly. Natural light pours in from large glass windows surrounding the exterior walls and the central walkway, the carpets are free of any volatile organic compounds (VOCs) – “At any time, we never had that new car smell,” the project manager boasts — and motion-detection light switches reduce energy use in every office. “We focused heavily on natural lighting and we hit 93 percent day lighting,” Francisco says. “As a company, we had a drive to build a nice, clean work environment.” In addition, the landscaping surrounding the administration building features native plant species and grasses, while a drip-fed sprinkler system greatly reduces water consumption. There’s also an exercise room for employees. About the only energy-saving system not included was a rainwater collection process, which would have increased costs significantly, Francisco explains. “Every penny we spend comes from our co-op members,” he says. “So we did things that make sense from a business perspective as well as from our customers’ perspective.” The total cost, which Francisco is reluctant to share since it included construction of buildings outside the LEED-designated zone of the administration building, came in at $780,000 under budget. And incorporating all the alternative energy and conservation systems added on only about 3 percent to the total budget, Francisco offers. While the improvements and energy saving techniques to the new facility are obvious compared to the old headquarters, what’s harder to measure is worker productivity. But even that has shown a marked increase since moving out to the West Plains, according to Gene Steinolfson, member services manager and co-collaborator on the building’s design. “It’s much more efficient,” he says about the new headquarters. “It’s a way nicer work environment that I think all the employees appreciate.”