San Francisco International Airport (SFO)

Strategy & Services: San Francisco International Airport (SFO) is one of the largest energy consumers in the Bay Area, consuming approximately 440 GWh annually, which results in a significant environmental impact. To address this and largely motivated by cost savings (estimated at $2.1M annually from a 5% reduction in energy consumption alone), SFO is in the process of evaluating its portfolio of over 100 buildings to identify priority areas for increased efficiency in their design and operations. This is part of SFO’s ambitious five-year plan that aims to achieve Zero Net Energy (ZNE) performance for the entire campus by 2021. The SFO team put together a four-pronged approach to achieve this:

• Align interests of all airport design and operational stakeholders toward the ZNE goal
• Review and update all airport contractual requirements toward the ZNE goal
• Perform campus-wide benchmarking to identify opportunities for performance improvement
• Develop a comprehensive strategic plan to achieve ZNE performance

Accordingly, SFO engaged Arup and stok to collaboratively lead this ZNE Analysis to put the airport on track to achieve its bold 2021 target. Arup’s team is coordinating the various stakeholders to align interests and helping SFO create a comprehensive strategic plan toward their ZNE goal, while stok is benchmarking existing SFO infrastructure to help identify avenues for performance improvement.

Project Details: stok’s team is mainly involved in benchmarking and auditing all campus buildings at SFO. Benchmarking helps assess how the buildings are performing, while auditing helps assess the state of energy systems in the buildings.

Benchmarking is the process of measuring the performance of a building against other buildings of similar use-type to assess how it performs in comparison. For typical building use-types, this can be done by comparing the building’s energy consumption to other similar buildings in EnergyStar Portfolio Manager. However, EnergyStar Portfolio Manager does not have energy performance information related to airport terminal buildings. Hence, stok is using a separate tool – Airport Terminal Building (ATB) EUI benchmarking tool – to benchmark the performance of all airport terminal buildings. stok will use the benchmarking results to identify buildings that require operational optimization.

An energy audit is an inspection and analysis of the energy systems in a building to identify potential areas for improvement. Building Energy Asset Score is a national standardized tool developed by the U.S. Department of Energy to help collect information about all building systems that impact its energy performance. Further, it generates a simple energy efficiency rating (the Asset Score) that enables the comparison of energy systems of various buildings. stok is using this tool to identify buildings that require energy system upgrades.

 

Outcome: While the project is still in the data collection stage, stok’s benchmarking profiles will be used to make quantified recommendations to SFO for areas to prioritize investment to achieve ZNE performance at the campus level by 2021. This is well ahead of local legislation’s ZNE requirement for all new commercial construction starting in 2030. By evaluating the Benchmarking and Building Energy Asset Score results, the project team will be able to pinpoint if a particular building in the portfolio needs design improvements, operational improvements, or both. This will allow the airport to strategically target impactful building upgrades, ushering the campus toward ZNE performance – an embodiment of SFO’s pioneering commitment to sustainability and a leading example for all airports globally.