Article: The next evolution of warehouses
Article posted on Canadian Consulting Engineer website on February 12, 2020. Read the full article here.
Steel features heavily in this warehouse project which set out to answer the question "Can heating bills reach $0?"
When you think about energy-efficient buildings, sprawling warehouses probably don’t come to mind. With the new Wilkinson Warehouses in Dartmouth, N.S., however, East Port Properties is using consulting engineering expertise to change that perception, to the financial benefit of its tenants.
As a third-party property developer and manager, East Port recently joined the Canada Green Building Council’s (CaGBC’s) Zero Carbon Building (ZCB) initiative to combine its own knowledge of and experience with efficient warehouse design with CaGBC’s new certification standard. There are 16 projects in the initiative, but the warehouse is the program’s only industrial building to date.
The Wilkinson development, still in progress, has been planned as a series of four to five multi-tenant warehouse buildings, totalling approximately 300,000 sf of space. The first of these, a 65,000-sf facility at 355 Wilkinson Avenue, is already up and running. It was designed in partnership with Efficiency Nova Scotia with a focus on keeping its tenants’ operating costs as low as possible. The effort also paid off by successfully earning CaGBC’s ZCB Design certification.
East Port’s project team, which has a history of working effectively together, included primary consulting engineer Gary Ruitenberg, P.Eng., mechanical engineer Barber Engineering Services, structural engineer Laurence Smith, electrical engineer MCW and builder Lindsay Construction.