Spotlight on San Francisco's Extremely Green PUC Headquarters

In the midst of the 2012 recession, during a construction downturn, San Francisco's Public Utilities Commission made the somewhat unusual decision to build a brand new, state-of-the-art headquarters.

In doing so, it saved ratepayers $3.7 billion over the building’s 100-year lifespan—and provided a model for sustainable development in the city with pioneering approaches to earthquake resiliency, renewable energy, and water recycling.

The 13-story, 277,000-square-foot HQ is rated LEED Platinum. It's the first building in the city with an onsite recycling system for non-potable wastewater, and spurred the creation of a citywide permitting process for similar systems.

The Living Machine, as it's called, treats about 5,000 gallons of water per day, enough to supply the building’s low-flow toilets and urinals. In all, the building uses 60 percent less water than similarly sized buildings—and even harvests rainwater in a 25,000-gallon cistern.

An integrated hybrid solar array and wind turbine generates 227,000 kilowatts a year, or about seven percent of the building’s annual energy needs.

Smart solutions at every level worked to make sustainability and resilience affordable. An innovative approach to earthquake safety also worked to reduce the building height, in turn bringing down the total construction cost.

That approach was the now-common use of vertical, rather than horizontal, post-tension. In layman’s terms, "Our building acts like a tuning fork. It moves back and forth, and then it comes back into place after the shaking has stopped."

SFPUC's general manager Harlan Kelly explains more about the building, and what made it possible, in The Planning Report.