Endress+Hauser facility in Burlington pursues three sustainability certifications

Renderings courtesy Endress+Hauser Canada.

Engineers at mcCallumSather and WSP are helping Endress+Hauser Canada target three major sustainability certifications—i.e. net-zero energy, the Zero Carbon Building Standard and Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Gold through the Canadian Green Building Council (CaGBC)—for the company’s new customer experience (CX) centre in Burlington, Ont.

Endress+Hauser, which develops measurement instrumentation for industrial process engineering, is reportedly the first private company in Canada to pursue all three of these certifications at once. Maple Reinders broke ground on Aug. 29 on a four-acre site for the $28-million, two-storey, 47,000-sf facility (pictured in rendering). Occupancy is planned for fall 2020.

“Typically, institutions have pioneered highly sustainable buildings,” says Drew Hauser, director at mcCallumSather, which is handling the building’s architecture, mechanical engineering and interior design, while WSP provides structural and electrical engineering. “For a private company to make an investment in zero-carbon design shows incredible ambition and foresight.”

The centre will feature a reflective roof with double-sided solar panels from Zon Engineering.

RWDI is serving as energy consultant for the building, which is intended to effectively function off the electric grid. It will integrate a high-performance building envelope, triple-glazed curtain wall, rainwater harvesting system, reflective roof with double-sided solar panels from Zon Engineering and heat pumps supplemented by Geo-Xergy Systems’ geothermal technology. At night, most electrically powered systems will be turned off, rather than drawing standby power.

“Our goal is to create a facility that will not only be sustainable on the day it opens, but will still be considered as such decades from now,” says Anthony Varga, CEO and general manager (GM) of Endress+Hauser Canada.