In trying to create the most Earth-friendly, energy-efficient buildings possible, architects and engineers have stumbled on a problem they hadn't fully understood: You.

Your desktop computer that's on, even when you're out to lunch. The power-hogging photo copier in your office and its incessant red light. And then there's the space heater under your desk, keeping you warm because the building is too cold.Designers have found ways to make cooling and heating systems more efficient than ever, mainly by using cutting-edge technology and old-school techniques such as natural ventilation. But some of the greenest buildings in the world are undermined by human behavior and the traditions of engineers who design structures, build them and leave them for fallible humans to figure out later.

To make buildings truly sustainable, engineers say they need to sit down with the people who will live and work in their projects.

"Education of the occupants and involvement of the occupants is increasingly important," says Omid Nabipoor, president of Portland's Interface Engineering. "They need to buy into strategies and understand how they can change their behavior."

Energy-saving solutions

Strides in heating- and cooling-system efficiency have raised pressure to cut small appliances' power use. Here are some resources for cutting your energy use.



Energy Trust of Oregon

• The nonprofit offers information on conservation incentives and tips for conservation measures.

• Residential customers can go to energytrust.org/solutions. Energy Trust also offers a free home energy review for residential customers of PGE, Pacific Power, NW Natural and Cascade Natural Gas. It can be scheduled online through the link above, or by calling toll-free 866-368-7878.

• For businesses and landlords, Energy Trust has online checklists, information on incentives and industry-specific solutions: energytrust.org/commercial or 866-368-7878

Home Energy Saver

• The online, do-it-yourself home energy audit tool was created by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. hes.lbl.gov

U.S. Department of Energy: "Energy Savers"

• Tips for saving electricity in appliances, remodeling and other categories: www.energysavers.gov

American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy

• The Consumer Resources page includes a home energy checklist and a database of state and utility incentives: www.aceee.org/Consumer/index.htm

-- Dylan Rivera

It's true that consumer and desktop electronics are puny consumers of energy compared with the massive furnaces and air conditioning chillers that make offices comfortable year-round. At home, the refrigerator and furnace soak up far more energy than the cell phone charger and stereo equipment.



But the elite of the green building industry have already figured out how to cut energy bills for heating and cooling by 50 percent or more. In an age when green is a new metric of competition, and energy bills seem to go nowhere but up, energy use by small electronics has become a large concern.



It's keeping green designers from achieving their next goal: Popularizing offices and homes that have "net zero" energy use - meaning that in the course of a year they should use no more energy than can be produced by their own solar panels. Some months, they buy power from a local utility; other months, they sell excess back to the power company.



"When you've squeezed everything down to a much smaller pie, what's left, the human factor, becomes the next thing we need to tackle to get down to the next level," says Jason McLennan, an architect influential in the green building movement.



For years, architects and engineers could largely ignore the behavior of the people who would live and work in their buildings, says McLennan, chief executive officer of the Cascadia Region Green Building Council. A real estate developer would call for a house, an office building or a hospital, and the design team would draw up as much space as needed, with no regard for energy use.



They just assumed that every desk required a desktop computer, and not a more efficient laptop. And that workers wouldn't tolerate indoor temperatures higher than 75 degrees, even in August.



But programs like the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, or LEED, raised the question of how much energy and water are consumed by buildings. As architects and engineers pushed the program, developers reaped lower energy bills and some pushed for more innovation.

LEED calls for building designs that use far less energy than industry standards, and for testing on completion. But a question lingers: Are green buildings really as efficient as we think they are?



The answer: In many cases yes, but often not for the greenest of green buildings.



"We're being overly optimistic in what we think we're doing in designing the most elite buildings," says Mark Frankel, technical director for the New Buildings Institute, based in Vancouver.

Frankel spoke at the Living Future conference last week at Portland's Nines Hotel, where about 500 architects and engineers gathered to brainstorm buildings even greener than the LEED system requires.

The New Buildings Institute studied 120 LEED-certified buildings and found their actual energy use varied widely. Most were still more efficient than a typical nongreen building, but the actual energy use was often far from the forecast, Frankel says.

Designers assume that building managers understand new, often complex energy-monitoring systems, but often they don't. And the people who live or work in the building usually have no idea how much energy they use. That's because the building can't tell them.

A case in point: Oregon Health & Science University's first building on the South Waterfront is a highly acclaimed LEED "platinum" building. It uses 50 percent less energy than a typical medical office building, among a panoply of green features.

According to a post-occupancy study, the energy use for heating and cooling were about as low as forecast, Interface Engineering's Nabipoor says. But the OHSU building also consumes nearly twice as much energy from small electronic appliances as engineers had expected.

"Occupants are not as responsible as we once thought about turning things off," Nabipoor says.

The OHSU project isn't alone in underestimating the energy demand from plugged-in electronics, what engineers call "plug loads." A Pacific Lutheran University building in Tacoma uses more than four times the energy from plug loads that Portland's PAE Consulting Engineers Inc. had forecast.

Engineers are investigating what happened: They suspect some computer science professors are using multiple computers.



Interface Engineering has come up with energy-saving strategies for the Oregon Sustainability Center, a cutting-edge high-rise office building planned near Portland State University. The project is planning to have "net zero" energy use - a key requirement of the Living Building Challenge, a new green building system that goes beyond the LEED program to more sustainable standards.

Engineers and the nonprofits that will rent space in the building are considering a range of approaches. Perhaps each cubicle could have an energy meter. Workers could compare meters, see the effects of appliances and compete to use less energy.

Using laptops instead of desktop computers can reduce power consumption by 70$?percent. Ceiling-mounted occupancy sensors can power off electrical outlets when a worker leaves a workstation. Some receptacles could stay on at all times for items such as refrigerators and aquariums.

Technology alone won't get most new buildings to "net zero" energy use anytime soon, says Stephen Selkowitz, head of the Building Technologies Department at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

"The technology alone probably won't get you there, and the behavior alone won't get you there," Selkowitz says. "But the combination of the two is even more powerful."

-- Dylan Rivera; dylanrivera@news.oregonian.com