An Exclusive Special Feature by Holley Chant, Executive Director of Corporate Sustainability and Commissioning at KEO International Consultants
Achieving a Zero Net Energy building is a challenge under the best of circumstances. From design to construction to operation, the potential problems associated with cost premiums and resistance to behavioral change are significant.
Trying to do so in the Gulf region – with its harsh climate, history of sub-par construction and culture of conspicuous consumption – is an even greater challenge.
At KEO International Consultants, we are involved in many Zero Net Energy and other sustainability efforts across the Gulf Cooperation Council. One of the most rewarding initiatives is a project to design and build villas in the United Arab Emirates that achieve ZNE performance attributes while minimizing capital cost impact to developers. Even at the villa scale, this is a difficult endeavor.
We live in a warming world, however, and KEO firmly believes that sustainability and commissioning engineers play a crucial role in helping save it. Consider that a significant part of the global carbon footprint comes from buildings that consume approximately 30- 40 percent of all primary energy. Engineers can positively impact reductions of the greenhouse gasses that emanate from our cities and contribute to climate change.
As KEO’s Executive Director of Corporate Sustainability and Commissioning (SUS), I lead a team of 42 specialists stationed in the GCC with a lofty but inspiring mission: to play a proactive role in solving the incredible business challenge that climate change presents to humanity. Without continued investment in energy-efficiency technologies, we believe, it will be difficult to keep global warming below a 2°C increase by 2050.
Our efforts are extensive and far-reaching. We overcome cost barriers with clients, eliminate GHG emissions in new and existing buildings and enhance human health and productivity. We act as eco-sentinels during value engineering to ensure those exercises do not devalue sustainability strategies. We zealously safeguard sustainable design attributes during construction.
Our foundational expertise is in green building and community certifications, with specialization in building physics and commissioning. We have a strong construction sustainability services initiative because we believe if what has been engineered to be sustainable is “built as usual” then we have failed.
In the case of the UAE villa project, a key component of our strategy is to include developers and technology providers in our R and D integrated design process and provide developers with ZNE education.
They have been receptive to the potential market differentiation that extremely low energy performance in a villa can bring to a competitive real estate market.
Building the SUS team
When I joined KEO more than eight years ago after a stint heading the Abu Dhabi Urban Council’s Estidama program, CEO Donna Sultan issued this challenge: “Your job is to change the company, to turn the ship. So go hire the best sustainability people available.”
This was in the eye of the storm of the global real estate crisis. It takes courage to invest in talent when everyone else is pulling out. We hired wonderful people and never looked back, and I will always appreciate that Donna empowered our team this way.
As a talent and client value enhancer as well as a sustainability advocate, I am passionate about advancing the unique ability of each SUS team member to its highest and best use. I find great fulfillment helping clients develop a sustainability strategy for their organizations and project.
Public engagement is integral to promoting a green economy, and I am active at many professional conferences as chairperson or keynote speaker. I judge and emcee industry excellence competitions, lecture at Harvard University, and work with other academic institutions such as the Masdar Institute and Heriot-Watt University.
Initiatives, interests, influences
Our SUS team has the feel of a start-up even though we are part of a mature, multidisciplinary consulting firm with a staff of more than 2,400. Despite having grown rapidly and now operating in three out of the ten KEO offices across the GCC, we remain a close team focused on “figuring it out” every day. The team has a combination of great sustainability engineering skills, emotional maturity and a highly developed capacity for influencing change.
The early revving of the economic engine of our business came from clients seeking accredited professionals to achieve sustainability compliance requirements. While these services continue to feature strongly in our project backlog, we are laser focused on developing innovative sustainability services that will provide new value to our clients.
Our innovation focus manifests in day-to-day operations as initiatives led by sub-discipline leaders. Kevin Sullivan, our Head of Commissioning, and Senior Building Physicist Irene Montserrat are passionate about modeling and analytics. They advocate monitoring the critical relationship between design phase modeling and operational phase data from Building Management Systems. With Kevin and Irene acting as initiative champions, SUS recently began a City Information Modeling (CIM) pilot for an intelligent building model project with an international software developer.
Senior Commissioning Engineer Mike Rodriguez and Commissioning Manager Doug Buchan promote the use of dual-purpose HVAC dampers, such as combination balancing and fire dampers. Dual-purpose dampers can result in lower procurement, installation, commissioning and maintenance costs. Mike and Doug observe that dual-purpose dampers are not technically “new” but have yet to be adopted as standard go-to products by the industry.
Innovations on our radar
Technology innovations intrigue our team and stoke our inspiration. We invite technology providers to our weekly “SUS Confab” and strive for a two-way discussion between the provider and our engineers, similar to an integrative design process workshop, so that we are able to understand how we can infuse new technology into our projects and win the trust of our clients to try something new.
We closely follow a start-up called BIMstream, a cloud-based platform that hosts accurate “as-built” building data so owners and other stakeholders can access it across the enterprise in the form of maps and metadata. It’s essentially a data mart that allows anyone to build apps for nearly any aspect of the building environment.
Sustainability Principal Dr. Ioannis Spanos follows photovoltaic market trends, tracking costs and the efficiency of panels. He believes an industry game changer will occur when the efficiency of commercial panels reaches 26 percent. Because of the improvements to PV production, the “energy return of energy invested” is also improving, which makes the panels a better investment compared to fossil fuel electricity.
In the sphere of techno science, the work of the AI Initiative, with The Future Society started at Harvard Kennedy School, is very thought provoking. They focus on the impact of AI on society and leverage civic tech innovations in their work, and plan to launch a global civic debate using a collective intelligence platform to gather wisdom of the crowds on how AI will impact us and how societies can prepare.
Sustainability engineer specialization
Being an engineer who specializes in sustainability is certainly not limited to working on new design and optimizing existing buildings. There are significant opportunities that target community scale sustainability working on master plans and infrastructure, or working in construction as a sustainability site engineer. It is a dynamic career path with significant international opportunity for young professionals.
Obtaining international sustainability and commissioning accreditations is a key first step.
Aside from technical knowledge, soft skills are paramount in this arena. A significant amount of our work requires not only certified professionals but also individuals who understand how to facilitate change and have resilience when confronted with failure. Sustainability experts constantly have to improve and engage in continuous learning.
The business challenge of climate change will continue to task us to find fuel for innovation and creativity. When engineers explore sustainability, there is no finish line. One SUS team member describes this challenge as the ultimate BHAG (big, hairy, audacious goal). If an engineer is part of an endeavor where you are constantly pushing as a united team to chip away at such a goal, I believe the opportunity for deep professional and personal satisfaction is guaranteed.
Holley Chant is the Executive Director of Corporate Sustainability and Commissioning at KEO International Consultants, a 2,500-person organization ranked in ENR’s Top 20 International Project Management Firms and BD World’s Top 100 Architecture Firms. She has built the sustainability business from the ground up, driving projects that meet LEED, Estidama, CEEQUAL and GSAS sustainability standards for both public and private sector clients across the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC).
Leading more than 50 active sustainability projects spanning industrial and commercial zones; world-class sporting facilities; retail and luxury properties; schools, hospitals, and housing developments; renewable energy facilities; green roads and tunnels; corporate and municipal buildings; and museums, zoos, and outdoor public amenities, Holley has experience across all project stages ranging from masterplanning to refurbishments to ensuring contractor compliance.
As Estidama Planning Manager at the Abu Dhabi Urban Planning Council, Holley played an instrumental role in launching the GCC’s 1st mandatory sustainability compliance initiative. She created numerous educational series on the integrative design process for property developers, government authorities, and other high profile individuals in the fundamentals of sustainable building design.
Under her leadership, KEO Sustainability won the “QGBC Green Service Provider, Building Consultant” Award 2016 in Qatar. Holley is a recipient of the Middle East Consultant Leader of the Year Award in 2015 and the Middle East Architecture Awards Principal of the Year Award (2012). She has served as the sustainability judge in the Dubai Cityscape Global Awards (2014- 2017), The Middle East Hotel Awards (2015) as well as the Middle East Architecture Awards (2016 and 2014). She has spoken at numerous professional conferences internationally and lectured at educational institutions including Harvard University and the Masdar Institute for Science and Technology.
