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The Oregon Sustainability Center was pitched by former Portland Mayor Sam Adams and former Gov. Ted Kulongoski as a way to advance the green reputation of the city and state. Instead, it became a reminder of the substantial “green” needed to pay for development of a net-zero commercial building.

Ultimately, the project fell apart as the Oregon Legislature voted not to approve $80 million in bonds.

“Maybe we were trying to do too much too fast,” said Steve Clem, vice president of preconstruction for Skanska USA Building, which was part of the project team. “People in other parts of the state feel like we always get center stage. It never got traction in the Legislature.”

Only two buildings in Oregon – the Hood River Middle School Music and Science Building and Pringle Creek’s Painters Hall in Salem – have received from Seattle-based International Living Future Institute. Nationally, 15 buildings – mostly educational institutions and other commercial structures – have been certified, according to the ILFI.

Certification accounts for multiple factors including energy performance and conservation, and requires buildings to generate at least as much energy as they consume on site. Buildings can qualify after one year of occupancy.

Economics are holding back more commercial net-zero projects from moving forward, Clem said.

“It’s got to make financial sense,” he said. “We can’t just keep doing experimental projects and hope that people continue to invest extra money for the sake of doing the right thing.”

Clem, who co-authored a looking at the costs and incentives of net-zero building development in Washington, D.C., says the status quo could improve via implementation of new policies that provide incentives.

“The story in Portland is that we don’t have a deep green building policy,” he said. “We don’t have a policy that would give incentives for people who want to outperform the sustainability metric.”

The city of Seattle, as part of the program, allows developers to request building code exemptions in exchange for meeting ILFI’s Living Building Challenge. In Portland, no such policy exists, Clem said.

“If you can build an extra floor or two, it becomes very economical when it comes to development,” he said. “The more you can stack on top, the more economical it becomes.”

The Energy Trust of Oregon offers for greater energy efficiency, but they focus more on low-cost efforts rather than design and construction of a net-zero building, said Oliver Kesting, commercial sector lead for the nonprofit. It administers incentive programs for utilities based on federal guidelines.

“As you push further and further into a (highly energy-efficient) building, there may be things that would save energy, but it would come at a cost too high to incentivize because of our cost targets,” he said. “We cannot incentivize it because it would not provide value to the ratepayer.”

The Energy Trust of Oregon rewards projects that exceed code by at least 30 percent; however, net-zero projects, which exceed code by 60 percent or more, are not fully compensated, Kesting said.

“As you get closer and closer to net zero, it’s going to get harder and harder to increase those percentage points,” he said. “As you get further and need to improve the envelope or install better windows – the deeper you get into net zero, the steeper the barriers.”

Some net-zero techniques may not immediately increase energy savings, but create long-term sustainability and should be encouraged through incentives, said Alex Boetzel, chief innovation officer at Green Hammer. He cited envelope glazing, which extends a building’s life span.

“It costs a lot of money, but saves little energy per their calculation,” he said. “This calculation that they’re using falls short. I have a strong belief that we should incentivize those more.”

House Bill 2801, which the Oregon Legislature passed in 2013, could help. The rules of a new program are still being formed, Kesting said, but developers could receive incentives for taking measures such as glazing when they are bundled with other measures that increase energy savings.

Power generation also is a significant hurdle holding back more development of net-zero commercial buildings, Clem said. As buildings increase in size, they need more photovoltaic panels to provide power and feed it back into the grid. Taller buildings are further challenged because one floor of photovoltaic panels feeds only five or six floors of energy usage, he said.

“You can’t really be net zero building by building,” he said. “Either you locate the panels elsewhere or you find a way to share (photovoltaics) between buildings, or it doesn’t work.”

The Hassalo on Eighth project in the Lloyd District is the best example of an integrated approach to water, waste, transportation and power usage connected among different buildings, Clem said.

Before the funding for the Oregon Sustainability Center vanished, the project team had scaled the building to eight stories and 130,000 square feet. The group also was prepared to rely on occupants to further decrease energy usage, said SERA Architects principal Clark Brockman, who worked on the project.

More than 50 percent of the building’s energy consumption would have come from tenants’ usage of computers, phones, heaters and coffee makers, he said.

“What was so interesting working on the OSC was that we met with tenants,” he said. “There is only so much (photovoltaic energy) that you could produce to be net zero. You couldn’t get there without engaging the occupants.”

To achieve net-zero energy usage, requirements were placed on the building’s owner and operator.

“Right now, there aren’t that many owners that are eager to do it,” Brockman said.