MIT’s Building 46 houses the Brain and Cognitive Sciences Complex: a dynamic group of departments, labs, and institutes dedicated to answering important questions about the function of the human brain. Every day, the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, the McGovern Institute for Brain Research, the Picower Institute for Learning, and the Simons Center for the Social Brain are conducting groundbreaking research in state-of-the-art lab facilities.
It's no surprise, then, that Building 46 uses a lot of power to keep these facilities up and running—and by “a lot” we mean it accounts for 8 percent of MIT’s total energy usage in a year.
With such a significant impact on MIT’s energy consumption, it only made sense that Building 46 would become an optimal test bed for MIT’s sustainability-focused work around energy efficiency.
An energy audit identified several opportunities to update the mechanical systems infrastructure in Building 46, including optimization of the room-by-room ventilation rates. These updates would create an estimated 35 percent reduction of energy use, which would in turn lower MIT’s total greenhouse gas emissions by an estimated 2 percent.
Jessica Parks, senior project manager, systems performance and turnover in Campus Construction says, “There were definitely some concerns as we headed into the renovation process that we might create hurdles for our researchers. By taking a room-by-room approach to touching all 1,254 spaces in the building, we could achieve our goals, and enable each lab to continue their work uninterrupted.”
The research-driven response
The work on Building 46 was inspired in part by a 2019 modeling effort of the entire MIT campus by doctorate student Shreshth Nagpal PhD ‘19, undergraduate researcher Jared Hanson ‘19, and Professor Christoph Reinhart which identified the building to have the highest carbon reduction potential on campus.
The easiest way to make a building efficient, ultimately, is to take away the user’s ability to control their own environment. But that kind of umbrella control simply won’t work when the users are conducting the myriad types of research that happen in the Brain and Cognitive Sciences Complex.
As the project launched, Parks said, “It was important for us to be able to reassure each lab that they would be able to continue their work while our efforts progressed.”
The actual work of the renovation centered on a few key shifts to how energy was being used lab-by-lab: creating custom ventilation and temperature settings for unoccupied labs, optimizing for the required ventilation rates of each lab, and converting fume hoods from constant volume to variable volume.
“We start to see savings as we move through the building, and we expect to fully realize all of our projected savings a year after completion,” says Siobhan Carr, energy efficiency program manager, who was part of the team overseeing the energy audit and lab ventilation performance assessment in the building, noting that the length of time is required for a year-over-year perspective to see the full reduction in energy use.
There were many lessons learned along the way that helped inform the work being done in each subsequent lab—and with work expanding on energy efficiency measures for more high-energy users on campus, those lessons continue to be critical to the team’s success.
With just a few items left on Building 46’s punch list before the project is complete, Parks is thrilled with how the building’s teams have greeted their renovations—and delighted to hear that they’re paving the way for the work to come by sharing their positive experiences with the teams at Building 76.
To learn more about MIT’s Fast Forward commitments, start here. To learn about MIT’s Campus Climate Action-specific efforts, head here. To view the MIT News version of this story, visit here.
