Google Bay View

Of the 42-acre site, there are 20 acres of  open space, two office buildings, a 1,000-person event space, and 240 short-term employee accommodation units. Bay View is the largest LEED BD+C v4 NC Platinum-certified project in the world and is expected to be the largest facility to attain the International Living Future  Institute (ILFI) Living Building Challenge (LBC) Water Petal certification. Bay View's immediate adjacency to the San Francisco Bay makes water an important focus for this project. Bay View will meet the LBC's definition of net positive water, and all of the site’s non-potable water demands will be met using the recycled water we generate onsite. We’ve also engineered stormwater management ponds, where the water can be drawn down, treated, and combined with treated wastewater to create a sustainable, onsite source of non-potable water. 

When it comes to electricity, Bay View is a 100% electric building where even the kitchens are electric to decrease carbon emissions. Bay View will be powered in part by a first-of-its-kind dragonscale solar skin, which has the capacity to generate 40% of its annual electricity.  Combined with power from nearby wind farms, Bay View will be one of Google’s first campuses to operate on 90% carbon-free energy. Bay View also houses the largest geothermal pile system in North America to heat and cool the buildings, which is estimated to reduce carbon emissions by 48% and water used for cooling by 90%. 

"Bay View has been a ten-year partnership—the largest, longest-running project in our firm’s history. It epitomizes the growth we’ve experienced, not just in size but in capability, talent, and teamwork. As we like to say, the  best ideas often come from the trades—and not just the engineers, but the pipefitters, sheet metal specialists, and those pulling wires. The  collaborative and open-minded approach to the project was supported by a sense of radical ownership—as Sares Regis COO Yayu Lin would often say, ‘It’s up to us to deliver. Each of us.’" Eric Solrain 

Geothermal System 
For years, Google has been experimenting with ways to leverage the Earth’s natural thermal mass to heat their buildings and their water supplies. By leveraging geo-energy feasibility studies for its districts, piloted ground-source heat pumps, and other natural heat recovery and thermal storage systems, Google was enabled to move away from using fossil fuels to heat its buildings. 

At Bay View, research was taken a step further, selecting a versatile, drilled, cast-in-place foundation, which allows us to incorporate an energy recycling system that uses the geothermal properties of the soil to help heat and cool the buildings. The result: the largest geothermal pile system in North America, with pipes totaling nearly 100 miles in length and covering a surface area equal to 12 American football fields. 

Where typical buildings are cooled via evaporation in massive towers filled with water, Bay View’s geothermal system removes heat from the air and transfers it to the ground. Using 90% less water to cool the buildings than a traditional cooling tower system. 

Dragonscale Solar 
Bay View’s buildings feature a first-of-its-kind dragonscale solar roof equipped with a total of  90,000 silver solar panels across all four buildings that use the latest building-integrated  photovoltaic (BIPV) technology. Combined, the solar roofs give Charleston East and Bay View  7 megawatts of installed renewable power – providing roughly 40% of their annual energy needs. 

Coupled with the canopy’s pavilion-like rooflines, the panels let us capture the power of the sun from multiple angles. Unlike a flat roof, which generates peak power at the same time of the day, its dragonscale solar skin generates power during an extended amount of daylight hours. This will limit Google’s contribution to California’s notorious duck curve, which tracks the difference between energy demand and available solar energy throughout the day. 

Circular Resources 
Many chemicals in these common construction products have been linked to health conditions and can leach into the environment to endanger the long-term health of ecosystems and communities. At Bay View, thousands of materials were vetted against the Living Building Challenge (LBC) Red List to ensure Bay View would be one of the healthiest spaces possible. 

Circular design aims to keep materials in use as long as possible, decreasing the demand for finite natural resources. With a flexible workspace environment featuring partition walls that can be easily adjusted, Bay View is designed to reduce the need for new materials as workforce needs evolve. 

Healthy Workplaces 
Indoor environmental quality (IEQ) in Google’s workspace was also a significant consideration. In addition to a high level of particle filtration, carbon filters were used to remove gas phase contaminants like ozone and volatile organic compounds (VOCs). Ventilation rates provided are far beyond industry standards since there are linkages between higher outside air rates and improved cognitive performance. 

Bay View eliminated entirely the need to recirculate air. The large-volume second level uses an underfloor air system bringing in cool, tempered fresh air at lower velocity, cooling just the portion of the space people occupy and allowing warmer used air to rise toward the ceiling where it is exhausted from the top of the canopy. This approach means that the fresh air for ventilation also goes right to where people breathe rather than mixing within the whole volume of the space. At Bay View, an overhead displacement ventilation system was used on the first level, using a similar lower-velocity air distribution.

The Bay View system uses 100% outside air – whereas typical HVAC systems reduce outside air to 20-30% to conserve energy when the outside air is significantly warmer or colder than what is needed to condition the interior spaces.

Sustainability

• LEED BD+C NC v4.0 Platinum Certified  

• Living Building Challenge (LBC) Water Petal Target 

Project Highlights 

• All-electric campus totaling 1.1 million ft² with the largest all-electric kitchen in  Google’s portfolio. Combined with power from nearby wind farms, operates on 90% carbon-free energy. 

• 50,000 Dragonscale solar panels with the capacity to generate 4 megawatts and 40% of the building’s annual energy use. 

• Largest geothermal pile system in North America used to heat buildings in winter and cool them in summer. Estimated to reduce carbon emissions by 48% and water used for cooling by 90%. 

• Aims to divert more than 85% of construction waste from the landfill, including 1.5 million pounds of drywall scraps to be reused by a local wallboard manufacturer. 

• Engineered stormwater collection and management ponds mimic natural hydrological patterns where water can be drawn down, treated, and combined with treated wastewater to generate more non-potable water than the site needs (i.e. being water positive). 

Images Credit: Iwan Baan