One way to tackle climate change: Start with federal buildings

DENVER — Robin Carnahan cruised a Ford F-150 electric pickup truck through a seemingly endless maze of federal buildings.

To an untrained eye, the dozens of buildings in the Denver Federal Center looked unremarkable, even drab. But Carnahan, who leads the General Services Administration, could spot how each structure was a secret weapon in the fight against climate change.

“Isn’t this cool?” Carnahan exclaimed to her spokeswoman in the back seat and a reporter in the passenger seat, pointing at the windows in Building 40 as they sparkled in the midday sun.

Advertisement

These weren’t just any windows, she said. They were designed to block summer heat and retain winter warmth — technology that could save the government hundreds of millions of dollars on heating and cooling costs in the coming decades.

Building 48, once a World War II munitions plant, was on track to reach net-zero emissions. Buildings 20, 25 and 53 had parking lots covered with solar panels and dotted with electric vehicle charging stations, where Carnahan’s borrowed F-150 electric truck would recharge later that August afternoon. Past yet another row of buildings, a sprawling field of solar panels would soon produce up to three-quarters of the energy needed for the entire center, home to the largest collection of federal agencies outside the nation’s capital.

Carnahan, 62, isn’t a household name, nor is the agency she leads. But she’s a central player in President Biden’s push to leverage Washington’s purchasing power to combat climate change — a push that could ripple across the economy and outlast the president’s time in the White House.

Biden in 2021 signed an executive order directing the government to become carbon-neutral by 2050, with federal buildings to meet this target by 2045. The GSA — one of the country’s largest landlords and biggest buyers of materials such as steel and concrete — is racing to remake its real estate portfolio, from Denver to D.C. The agency’s actions could have a significant climate impact, since burning fossil fuels to heat and cool buildings produces nearly a third of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. They could also drive up demand for green technologies, encouraging the private sector to follow suit.

“There’s not a lot of entities that can really move markets. But the federal government is one,” said Ben Evans, federal legislative director at the nonprofit U.S. Green Building Council.

Advertisement

The GSA’s work is not particularly glamorous. It involves traveling deep into the bowels of buildings to replace hulking, aging machinery with climate-friendly alternatives. In many cases, it entails replacing old gas furnaces with new electric heat pumps, or incandescent lightbulbs with energy-saving LED versions.

The scale of these efforts is enormous. The GSA manages nearly 8,400 buildings and spends more than $630 billion annually on goods and services. Using nearly $1 billion from Biden’s signature climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act, the agency is retrofitting more than 100 federal facilities to become all-electric or net-zero emissions.

“To me, this is just an incredible opportunity for the government to lead by example,” Carnahan said in an interview after the driving tour of the Denver Federal Center. “Think about it: Where do emissions come from? Buildings, cars, power production, manufacturing. And we touch a whole bunch of those things.”

In 2021, Biden tapped Carnahan, a longtime public servant from a prominent political family, to be the public face of this push. The daughter of a former senator and Missouri governor, Carnahan herself served as Missouri secretary of state from 2005 to 2013 and ran unsuccessfully for the Senate in 2010.

She sees her agency’s actions as one of the most durable planks of Biden’s climate agenda. A future Republican president might undo the Democrat’s environmental regulations, she reasons, but they probably wouldn’t rip out energy-efficient appliances from federal buildings — especially if those appliances were saving taxpayers money.

“As long as things make economic sense, they’ll keep happening,” Carnahan said.

A new project underway at the Denver Federal Center promises significant cost savings. The $88 million project with Ameresco, a renewable energy company, involves the installation of heat pumps and solar panels, as well as heating and cooling system upgrades, at 18 buildings across the complex. It’s projected to save more than $2 million annually on energy costs while reducing carbon emissions by more than 29,000 metric tons annually — the equivalent of taking nearly 6,500 cars off the nation’s roads each year.

‘A big transition’

About a half-hour drive from the Denver Federal Center, the GSA’s efforts are already helping one sustainable supplier take off.

Alpen High Performance Products, a window manufacturer based in Louisville, Colo., last year completed the GSA’s Green Proving Ground program, which evaluates innovative building technologies for use in federal facilities. The goal is to drive down the costs of these technologies so they can be more widely used across the country.

Recent work has pushed Alpen toward that goal, company executives told Carnahan when she visited in August.

“The association with the Green Proving Ground has provided a lot of credibility,” Alpen chief executive Brad Begin said. “It’s a badge of honor. And we’ve never seen the market move with as much momentum as it has.”

Since the onset of the covid-19 pandemic, the company has more than doubled its workforce — growth it attributes in part to working with the Green Proving Ground, which tested the company’s signature quad-pane windows in 2021. In a typical commercial building, about a third of heating and cooling goes out the window. Alpen’s quad-pane windows, which consist of four panes in an insulated fiberglass frame, save 24 percent more energy on average than conventional double-pane windows, the testing found. In fact, they save so much energy that the research found they pay for themselves within an average of 22 months.

The company’s windows are now used in many more places than Building 40 at the Denver Federal Center. They include college campuses, museums, affordable housing units, McDonalds’ PlayPlaces and the Empire State Building.

Advertisement

In Houston, the windows were installed in a federal building before a damaging deep freeze plagued the state in February 2021, killing at least 246 people and leaving more than 13 million residents under boil-water advisories. The building was able to maintain a comfortable temperature, and none of its pipes froze.

By demonstrating that these windows and other technologies work, the GSA has given the private sector more confidence to adopt them, said Victor Olgyay, a principal architect at the energy-focused think tank RMI.

“The private sector in general is a little risk-averse,” Olgyay said. “So having the GSA pilot these technologies is definitely de-risking them for the larger real estate community.”

During her visit to Alpen in August, Carnahan took a tour of the manufacturing facility, where workers in hard hats bent over whirring machinery. After the tour, dozens of employees gathered to hear her deliver a short speech. An interpreter also repeated each line in Spanish.

“We’re going through a big transition, not just in the United States, but around the world, in how we use energy and how that impacts the climate,” Carnahan said.

Una gran transición. Several workers nodded in agreement.

Public service across generations

Carnahan was 12 years old when she realized she wanted to go into public service. It started with a swimming pool.

Growing up in an “itty-bitty town” in southern Missouri, Carnahan recalled, the municipal pool was “really lousy.” The paint was chipped, and the concrete was cracked. During a trip to a wealthier neighboring town, however, Carnahan noticed that its sparkling blue pool was perfectly maintained.

When she got home, she asked her parents about the disparity. Mel and Jean Carnahan explained that wealthy donors had contributed to the upkeep of the pool and the surrounding park. This arrangement struck their daughter as profoundly unfair.

So when the November ballot included a bond proposal to pay for a new pool in her town, she and her friends went door to door, urging neighbors to vote yes. The proposal passed, and a few years later, Carnahan and her friends got a new pool.

Mel Carnahan went on to become governor of Missouri, and in 2000, he ran for the U.S. Senate in a hotly contested race. But tragedy struck in the final weeks of the campaign, when he died in a plane crash on his way to a campaign event. He was elected posthumously, and his widow, Jean, served in the seat for a year until a special election was held.

Advertisement

Robin Carnahan, after losing her own Senate contest a decade later, worked for the global strategy firm Albright Stonebridge Group and the University of Chicago Institute of Politics before joining the GSA. Her first stint at the agency stretched from February 2016 to January 2020, spanning the Obama and Trump administrations.

Today, Carnahan still spends her spare time foraging for wild mushrooms at the family farm near her hometown, showing iPhone photos of golden chanterelles to anyone who will admire them. She also still has the same philosophy about politics.

“My view of politics and being in government is about, ‘How do you make a difference in the community? How do you do things that leave the place better off than you found it?’” she said in an interview.

A push to green the government

Back in Washington, Biden’s push to green the government has garnered some conservative critics. Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), the top Republican on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, has slammed the president’s executive order on federal sustainability, saying it could kill jobs in the fossil fuel industry.

“With this action, he’s telling millions of Americans who provide most of the energy we use every day that he thinks they should be thrown out of work,” Barrasso said in a 2021 statement on the executive order. “What’s worse, he wants to use the power of the federal government to do it.”

Not far from Capitol Hill, a transformation is underway at the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center. At 3.1 million square feet, it’s the fourth-largest federal building in the country and the second-largest in the D.C. area after the Pentagon.

Advertisement

When the building opened its doors nearly three decades ago, it was largely powered by fossil fuels. Now, the GSA is spending up to $13.5 million to electrify the entire facility, which serves as the headquarters for the U.S. Agency for International Development and Customs and Border Protection.

The GSA plans to replace a district steam system — in which gas-fired turbines produce steam for heating and hot water — with electric heat pumps and electric boilers. Johnson Controls, the contractor for the project, also plans to install 57,000 more efficient LED bulbs, 519 high-efficiency electrical transformers, and a new reverse osmosis groundwater recovery system.

The groundwater system alone is projected to save 35 million gallons of water annually. The entire project is expected to reduce the building’s energy use by 40 percent and cut its energy costs by $6.3 million per year, according to the GSA.

On a recent September morning, federal employees shuffled into the lobby of the Reagan building as the smell of bacon wafted up from the cafeteria. On their way out of the parking garage, few stopped to notice a door that led to a dimly lit room, where the building’s transformation was taking shape.

There, massive chillers — the cooling part of air conditioners — made a loud humming sound. The machines were busy generating chilled water that would be piped throughout the building, helping to maintain a comfortable temperature.

The GSA is replacing three of these chillers with much more efficient versions. And Carnahan is betting that they’ll be there for a while.

“We’ve gone thousands of years as a civilization burning stuff for fuel, and we’re now in the middle of this massive transition,” she said. “And it’s going to take some time to happen. But it’s not like it’s going to move backwards.”

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7uK3SoaCnn6Sku7G70q1lnKedZLCttcyaq55lo6S5tsDIqKWsZ2Jlf3R7kGlmampfm7KlsdGao2aapZ65pbXNoKpmmpmZsq95wqWgppmkmnqktMCnnp5n