Donald Bren Hall
AT BREN HALL, SUSTAINABLE CONSTRUCTION, ENERGY MANAGEMENT AND SOUND ENVIRONMENTAL PRACTICES ARE FACTS OF LIFE
University Building Achieves LEED™ Platinum Rating for Environmental Design
The Donald Bren School of Environmental Science & Management was created to help fill California’s need for trained
environmental professionals, and what better way to educate them than to put them into a living example. The school’s advisory board
recommended that the building, as a top environmental school, should exemplify the school’s goals. As a result, Bren Hall was built using
the USGBC LEED guidelines, with the goal of exceeding the California Energy Code’s Title 24 standards for energy efficiency. In fact,
the building includes so many environmentally sound elements, it achieved a Platinum rating, the highest available under the U.S. Green
Building Council’s (USGBC) Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED)™ program.
It’s no surprise that the chiller selected for Bren Hall was an EarthWise CenTraVac™ from Trane. The high efficiency
350-=ton chiller, which uses r-123, a more environmentally friendly refrigerant, is now part of the chilled water loop that serves the
entire University of California at Santa Barbara campus. This innovative loop design allows the building with the most efficient chiller
for a given system load to be used to meet the cooling demand of any other building on the loop. The Bren Hall chiller plant also utilizes
a TRANE Tracer Summit™ chiller plant control system to enable continuous energy use monitoring. This allows operators to analyze and
optimize system efficiency to minimize demands on resources.
In addition to efficient cooling, Bren Hall features a wide variety of innovative green architectural elements that help
with energy management. They include a white-cap roof to reduce heat gain; natural ventilation design that takes advantage of Pacific
breezes, and an advanced lighting plan that uses as much daylight as possible and monitors lighting based on actual room usage.
Bren Hall has achieved a remarkably low annual energy use rate of only 1.1 kWh per square foot, which exceeds the California
Energy Code requirements by 31 percent. CenTraVac’s extremely low refrigerant leak rate—no refrigerant has been added to any of the total
of 3,800 tons of Trane chiller capacity on the campus in the past six years—means no environmental impact due to refrigerant emissions.
Trane’s high efficiency chillers also lower energy demands, reducing electric power plant emissions. All of which contributes to
Bren Hall’s status as an award-winning green building with the distinctive Platinum LEED certification. Trane’s CenTraVac is the environmentally
smart chiller for an environmentally advanced campus. Talk to us; we’ll help you create High Performance Buildings for Life.
Classrooms, research laboratories and offices.
Square Footage
84,672 sq. ft.
- University of California FacilitiesManagement Group
- Zimmer, Gunsul, Frasca architects
- Trane
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- TRANE Model CVHE centrifugal chiller
- TRANE Tracer Summit™ automation system
- Variable frequency drives on chilled water, condenser and cooling tower pumps
- Variable speed air handler and terminal box fans to optimize air supply and energy use
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UCSB, on the Pacific Coast north of the city, has nearly 20,000 students and a faculty of 1000. UCSB has a wide academic
offering, including the Bren School which opened in 1994. The School is housed in Bren Hall which opened in 2002 and includes classrooms,
research laboratories and offices. The building’s sawtooth design allows maximum view and natural light. Offices use natural, flow-through
transom ventilation. Many areas are shaded with a two-story, vine-covered trellis. Many materials are of environmentally compatible and
recycled materials, including concrete, wallboard, carpeting, partitions, countertops and furniture. Flooring and paneling are 100 percent
recycled/recyclable materials.
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