Mountain View Electric Association, which provides electricity for Falcon area homes and businesses, held an open house in December to celebrate the completion of their new office building at the Falcon Operations Center on Woodmen Road.Construction created a connection between the new building and the association’s original building, bringing the total square footage to 86,000. Darryl Edwards, MVEA’s manager of member services, said warehouse space is included in the expansion.Part of the space – 6,000 square feet – was left unfinished for future needs.Edwards and other MVEA employees conducted guided tours of the new building, which was designed from the ground up to be energy efficient.”We felt we should provide a good example,” he said.Design features include a clerestory, which allows natural light to come through the center of the building from the second to the first floor, and solar tubes with reflectors facing south to guide more natural light into the building.Debbie Skillicorn of the member services department said she especially likes her office’s light-emitting diode task lighting.The LED lights use hardly any electricity but put out an exceptionally bright light, Edwards said.The offices are also wired with motion sensors that turn the high-efficiency overhead T5 fluorescent lights off and on.The overhead lights are computer controlled, so someone working at a desk can increase or decrease illumination using a control panel on his or her computer.The building’s geothermal heating and cooling system runs off of 80 wells. A 50-horsepower pump circulates a mixture of 80 percent water and 20 percent antifreeze through a closed loop of pipes between the building and the wells, Edwards said.In winter, the fluid absorbs warmth from the earth, and the system’s 54 heat pumps concentrate that warmth to heat the building.For cooling in the summer, the fluid takes up heat from the building and returns it to the wells where the earth absorbs it.The geothermal system is compact, too.”If this was a normal commercial building we’d have a boiler and a chiller that would occupy 10 times the space taken by the geothermal system, so you really save a lot in square footage, too,” Edwards said.On the roof, three energy exchange ventilators solve the problem of bringing fresh air into the building during winter without exhausting air that’s already been heated.”In that device, the hot air warms up the cool air before it comes in the building so you don’t lose all that energy,” Edwards said.Jeremy Gilbert uses a computer to manage the heating and cooling system, which includes at least one temperature sensor in every room, he said.”If someone says they’re too cold or too hot, I click on the (picture) of the heat pump and it tells me the (room) temperature, I can just click on and change it one or two degrees,” he said.The tour concluded with a reception held in one of the new building’s large meeting rooms. MVEA board members served hot apple cider and cookies.It’s a big improvement over the days when the association held employee meetings in the old warehouse, Edwards said.
