Sustainability is doing

Jeroen De Smet, as Head of Climate Action, is responsible for the environmental sustainability strategy to make Upgrade Estate net zero carbon by 2035. Robbe Fioen works at Upgrade Estate as a technical engineer. For Loop5, he worked in collaboration with study firm Boydens on the special energy concept implemented here.

By 2035, Upgrade Estate wants to be net CO2 neutral. What exactly does that mean? 

JEROEN: The European climate law (Green Deal) stipulates that every organisation must be net zero carbon by 2050. We want to reduce it all to zero by 2035. The strategy is initially to reduce CO2 emissions to the maximum. We can offset the rest by capturing CO2 through sustainable forest management and, as here at the Upoffiz Loop5 site, also use the wood as an alternative to concrete and steel, two materials with large CO2 emissions.

In what way does this project contribute to that? 

JEROEN: When it comes to a zero carbon organisation, we actually talk about 3 levels. The first level is limiting direct emissions like when using a gas boiler. In this project, that first level does not exist since this is a gas-free building. No fossil fuels are used, so no CO2 is released. The second level deals with indirect emissions needed to keep the building operational such as electricity not produced on the site itself. That is electricity supplied by an energy supplier from a nuclear power plant, a gas plant, a hydroelectric plant or a mix of renewable and non-renewable energy. For this site, we use the renewable variants as much as possible. Level 3 is about all the CO2 realised during the construction process. We map this by starting from the integral life cycle of a building project or site, assuming a life span of 100 years. We have developed a tool for this purpose. Within the Climate Action team, our colleague Anton is responsible for examining all of our suppliers and their products. This screening of how they operate and what products they work with tells us a lot about their social and economic sustainability. Not only Anton makes this ethical reflection, but it is applied in many departments to assess collaborations with suppliers and partners.

ROBBE: If we look at the outer shell of the buildings on this site, it is classically constructed with concrete as the basic material. If you look around inside the buildings, you notice that almost all the classic material has been replaced by wood. Both here in the shared meeting rooms, but also in the theater hall The Plectrum where the entire stand is a wooden structure. There we took a lead and saved a lot of CO2. In our next projects we will design more and more in wood with the intention to build CO2 negative.

JEROEN: A lot of preliminary research went into that. We finally chose CLT wood, but there are different ways of building in wood. We are constantly testing and experimenting. We are currently testing OSB4 as an alternative material for raising the outer shell, for example. As for the interior, by the way, all credits go to the Look & Feel team. They set themselves the goal of using 75% second-hand materials inside. All the furniture here, for example, is second-hand. For the exterior landscaping, 13,000 plants, 150 trees and about 100 shrubs were planted. In time, this will have an impact when you know that every m3 of trees removes a ton of CO2 from the air. Above all, it will also provide peace of mind. The positive impact on the mental well-being of the people here cannot be underestimated. 

And a lot of attention and then specifically the questions went to that STOEP principle. Can you then briefly explain once what that is? How has that been applied here?

JEROEN: The STOEP principle is a mobility concept where the S stands for walking or going on foot, the T for pedaling or cycling, the O for public transportation and the P for parking. The E before the P stands for electric. It reflects the way we want to focus first in terms of mobility. The pedestrian is king and those who do come by electric car will be able to charge at one of the 100 EV-chargers installed.

How have you responded to today’s mobility challenges with Limoengroen?

JEROEN:  The Loopsite was not always easy to get to in the past. Today, that happens a lot smoother. There are many ways to enter the site by bike or scooter. Of the thousand parking spaces provided at our site, five hundred are for “soft” mobility and five hundred for “hard” mobility. Proportionally, the focus is mainly on soft mobility, regular bikes, but people can also charge electric bikes and scooters on-site. Shared bikes are also available. Not unimportant are the facilities available to match mobility. We have 12 nice and cozy showers for cycling employees who want to start work in a pleasant and fresh way after their morning ride. For those who do come by car, just over 500 parking spaces are provided, 100 of which have an electric charging point. That’s 20% of the spaces and geared to the future. We are quite proud of that. 

The renewable energy concept is special, can you explain? Heating a project like this without a gas boiler seems quite challenging.

ROBBE: Under the foundations are 100 boreholes that go 150 meters deep. That’s called a BEO field where BEO stands for Borehole Energy Storage. In those boreholes are tubes through which water flows. In the winter, the ground has a certain temperature and we use this system to extract heat from the ground, cooling it. This has the great advantage that we can heat the ground back up in the summer. So the ground is the source for both heating and cooling our buildings through a heat exchanger. The site consists of offices and apartments. An office during the year mainly needs cooling. We sit here with a lot of computers and people together so we want to cool at those buildings throughout the summer. An apartment, on the other hand, mainly needs heating. There, cooling is less necessary, especially with the insulation and glazing we used. That ensures that the site as a whole does not need an extreme amount of power to be operational. The combination of different building types is very advantageous. 

Upgrade Estate is at the forefront of renewable energy, have you integrated any other innovative technology into Loop5?

ROBBE: The question at hand was how do we bring both heating and cooling to the users. As mentioned earlier, this is a concrete building. We also chose the delivery principle of concrete core activation. What is this? Briefly outlined, this is a type of underfloor heating where the pipes are not in the floor structure or screed, but in the concrete slab (and ceilings) itself. Hot water runs through there in the winter and cold water in the summer. It is a very stable system that copes well with large fluctuations in outside temperature. With a water temperature of 30 degrees, we can keep the whole building at temperature. A traditional gas heating system, for example, needs heat of 75 degrees. The combination of all these factors ensures that with a relatively limited capacity, without gas, we will be able to heat and cool a very large site. In addition to using all these techniques, we are also testing new applications on this site R&D-wise.

JEROEN: You have the techniques on the site, the hardware, but also the software is really impressive. The building management system that has been implemented contains so much data and can intervene at so many points that it will give us a lot of insight. That way, we can start distributing all the heat produced very efficiently to part of the buildings. For example, if people arrive at the office, but it’s a little too chilly at that time, we can send all our energy there. We can start to better anticipate specific requests, but also adjust our system to weather conditions. The last few days have been very hot, so we’re going to cool down and vice versa. We also have our own weather station for this purpose to better anticipate conditions.

There are rumors going around that 75% of Loop5’s energy is generated by Limoengroen itself. Is that true and how are you going to realise this?

JEROEN: We are on the site of The Loop, more specifically on field 5. More towards the highway, we are going to develop three fields of solar panels very soon, 12,000 to be exact. That’s a huge number. Those lands still need further development, but the long permit and lead times give us the opportunity to build a so-called solar farm for 10 years. We have also received permission to connect the 3 fields to this site via an underbore. This is quite unique in Belgium. We are talking about natural and renewable solar energy. To capture this energy, we are also going to install a large battery in a sea container. That too is R&D.

At Upkot and Upliving there are chickens to process the organic waste from the tenants. Meanwhile, have you also invented the office chicken?

JEROEN: They have already been given a place at the Pegula pavilion. That’s close to the Pilot Lab. Maybe they can come along and taste the leftovers of new dishes (laughs). So there will be an Upoffiz chicken present.The waste concept at the site is also very well thought out, both inside and outside the buildings, both individually and collectively. There are different premises for the different waste fractions, plenty of opportunities to selectively collect waste for processing. We work with a partner organisation that monitors all this in kilograms of CO2 per type of waste fraction. We also have conversion factors for this in function of our net zero carbon organisation by 2035. There will also be a press that compresses the waste as much as possible and reduces transport costs to a minimum. 

Everyone is talking about IoT (Internet of Things). What does this mean and how does it translate at Loop5?

ROBBE: On the one hand, there is the Campus app that controls all access on the site, both to the mobility zone and within all the buildings. The two other advanced systems on the site are the Building Management System (BMS) we talked about earlier and the Energy Monitoring System (EMS). Currently, this primarily monitors how much water and number of kilowatt hours of electricity are consumed. With Limoengroen, this is how we map and track heat and cold.

JEROEN: The EMS system constantly monitors with which we draw up statements for the tenants, check consumption and calculate our CO2 emissions, for example. The building management system is mainly very technical and controlling. AI is also used to constantly make predictions. The Campus app is linked to this. For example, if you book a shared meeting room, it can be cooled or heated in advance. So there, too, it’s an amalgamation of energy monitoring and building management. Access control and managing bookings are the primary focus, but there is an energy element to it in the background. Our IT team is working hard to bring together all available Loop5 data so that we can constantly check that everything is running as it should on the site. For example, we are thinking about smooth traffic in the parking lot, Internet working everywhere, are all online locks active, ... In this way we want to anticipate possible defects or inconveniences with the IoT.