Page 60 - Designing for Zero Carbon-Volume 2_Case Studies of All-Electric Multifamily Residential Buildings

CASE STUDY NO. 3
VERA CRUZ VILLAGE
46
Designing for Zero Carbon: Volume 2
Guerrero Avenue
Community Building
Building 615 Building 619
The construction work was organized and managed by SHE, which acted as general contractor in addition to working with a construction manager and an administrative consultant for prevail- ing-wage contracts. The several independent contractors for the total work of the project are listed in the Data Summary on the previous page.
Design Process and Low-Energy, Zero-Carbon Design Strategies
This renovation project consists of forty-nine (49) units of low-rise housing and the associated community building on the Vera Cruz Village site. The community building houses staff offices, a community room, computer lab and kitchen. The project was divided into three phases of work, each of which started construction at different times.
Phase 1 was the construction of canopies above the existing parking areas adjacent to the build- ings and the installation of a solar PV system on those canopies. This solar PV system serves the entire complex, both the residential and community buildings, and uses a VNEM 3 to allocate the energy production benefits to the individual users of the shared system. The technical details of the first phase are described in a following section on p. 58, “Renewable On-Site Energy Sup- ply”.
3 Virtual Net Energy Metering (VNEM) is a tariff arrangement that enables a multi-meter property owner to allocate the property’s solar PV system’s energy credits to tenants. The generated electricity does not flow directly to any tenant meter, but feeds directly back onto the grid. The participating utility then allocates the number of kilowatt-hours from the energy produced by the solar PV generating system to both the building owner’s and tenants’ individual utility accounts, based on a pre-arranged allocation agreement. The intent of VNEM is to help tenants receive the direct benefits of the building’s solar PV system, rather than all of the benefits going to the building owner. The VNEM tariffs were first piloted under the California-Solar-Initiative (CSI) Multifamily Affordable Solar Housing Program (MASH) as a means of providing equal and direct benefits of the solar PV system to low-income tenants in an affordable housing complex.
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