IFMA San Francisco Holiday Party at a Green Venue

2011 Holiday Party at the Intercontinental San Francisco

I want to thank Tammy Key, Programs and Education Chair of the San Francisco Chapter and the rest of the Board for choosing the InterContinental San Francisco Hotel for 2011’s holiday lunch. We appreciate your business and I enjoyed the opportunity to share our LEED EBOM story with you. 

In 2007, I wrote “Sustainability and The Triple Bottom Line,” a story for the Silicon Valley Chapter of IFMA. This was used as part of their World Workplace effort. It was a fun story to write and helped me focus on several aspects of the adventure of becoming LEED certified.

The reason I mention it in relation to my blog today is that through writing it, I realized how much of a community effort the process was and how all I really needed was willingness and commitment.

I am the beneficiary of the wisdom and enthusiasm I get from IFMA members like you reading this today and the wonderful community of professionals we all work with everyday. Of course I needed money and having support from PG&E, Lodging Savers, InterContinental Hotels and our local owners, Continental Development Corporation were fundamental. What I did was to join USGBC and attend meetings, make friends, go to IFMA meetings, make friends, and the apply those learning’s and relationships to the process that I was guided through by Jubilee Daniels LEED AP.

In the early going we worked with students from San Francisco State to winnow out the credits we could achieve from the ones that were not practical at that time. We established a “Green Team” in the hotel to assess, implement and educate on the various credits we pursued. I became infused with the pragmatism and practicality I found in the USGBC requirements. I was amazed at what I had been told was too expensive and dopey was really a return to many of the harmonies of the universe that had prevailed for so long before we were all enlightened by the industrial age and even the IT revolution. Not only did I get the religion of how sensible most measures were but I found that I could save money and improve profits along the way. The myth of the “Triple bottom line “was no myth at all and even I could realize the dream!

Harry Hobbs facilitating
a tour of the LEED Gold hotel

It is my sincerest hope that you will realize your “Green Dreams” too! 

Harry Hobbs, CFM

Director of Engineering

Intercontinental Hotels of San Francisco

SF IFMA Member

Benchmarking Your Building or Facilities



Competition is fun and what gets measured gets done. So I am a natural advocate for the Energy Star process. Of course this star aligned with our pursuit of LEED certification gave us extra impetus to pursue the threshold score of 69. San Francisco as a city also found enough merit in the program to require it as well with an ordinance implanted this year. So even if you aren’t as excited as we are, it is becoming a fundamental.
 
I found that establishing a baseline carefully gave context to the projects we did in a way that simple ROI or other financial measures were lacking. The database is probably not perfect, but it has been normalized and refined now for about fifteen years and continues to evolve. I had a chat with some non-believers the other day who were arguing its frailties. They had the opinion that the ISO process was more rigorous and better designed, and it may be, but it lacks the name recognition of one of the most widely known logos in the world. For my money I would rather help Energy Star evolve than put effort into a system that is not as widely accepted. By the way our IFMA organization supports it too. http://www.energystar.gov/index.cfm?fuseaction=buildingcontest.index 
http://www.ifma.org/resources/sustainability/energy-star-challenge.htm

Intercontinental Hotel San Francisco

So, today when I make my business case for energy saving projects I get to justify them with LEED, ROI, and Energy Star. We spent around a half million dollars on our way to 87 on the Energy Star scale and we are cash positive from the effort. Our competitors spend 3.5 to 4.5% of revenues on energy, we spend 1.8%. These are found profits that equal up to seven top line dollars in our business. If energy savings were dollars in this hotel I would have sold five million dollars of business while simply operating the facility more efficiently.

By the way we don’t make you sacrifice any luxury or comfort to achieve this either. Of course we invite you to join our efforts if you choose to but if you don’t that’s ok we do it anyway and have actually improved our guests satisfaction levels. So now we enjoy an 87 rating and are investing in technologies that our eQuest modeling tells us should get us into the low 90’s. These technologies have the longest ROI yet but because we have a track record for proof of savings the funding is there! I nearly forgot to mention that our employees rate our environmental achievements more highly that any other category in our opinion surveys. Is that a “Triple bottom line” or what?

Harry Hobbs, CFM

Harry Hobbs CFM
Director of Engineering
INTERCONTINENTAL HOTELS OF SAN FRANCISCO