Center not equipped to meet design
Site lacks funding to make it ‘net-zero energy’ building
Tennessee’s newest Welcome Center in Memphis is designed — but not equipped — to use less energy than it generates when it opens in mid-spring.
The Welcome Center, perched off the northbound Interstate 55 lanes in Whitehaven, is nearly ready to offer travelers entering Tennessee from Mississippi a break as well as the usual information on things to do and see in Memphis and Tennessee.
Construction crews are down to the small, punch-list chores in completing the $2.1 million building.
But one item not on the to-do list: Installing enough solar panels to allow the building to generate as much or more electricity than it consumes. Such buildings are also known as “net-zero energy” structures.
As built, the Welcome Center’s photo voltaic solar array appears to cover less than half the south-facing rooftop. The panels are enough to generate 22 percent of the power needed for a net-zero building.
“We didn’t have additional funds available,” Nichole Lawrence, spokeswoman for the Tennessee Department of Transportation, said in an email. “The state may be able to add additional pan-
els through an ‘Energy Grant’ as ‘Federal’ and/or ‘State’ programs are implemented and/or reauthorized.”
If and when that money becomes available, expanding the solar array will be easy, said architect Matt Seltzer of archimania.
Archimania designed the building to provide plenty of space to enlarge the solar-panel system “in a plug-and-play sort of manner until you either replaced or exceeded the amount of energy needed to keep this thing running over the course of a year,” Seltzer said.
“There’s also a lot of things we (did) in terms of saving energy: The ‘jacket’ and the ‘diet’ that are extremely expensive to go back and change later on in the project,” he said. “So we built those into the project up front. The adding of the solar panels is the easiest and least expensive thing to do to keep generating electricity.”
The building’s energy-efficient “jacket” includes a thick, continuous layer of insulation, a moisture barrier to keep the elements out and sun shades that prevent southwest sunlight from heating up windows.
The building’s “diet” includes extremely efficient air-conditioning systems, LED lighting, occupancy sensors that turn lights off and on, an air-recovery ventilator that recycles air which the building already has heated or cooled, and light monitors or dormers on the backside that illuminate the bathrooms and brochure room with natural light.
Archimania designed the center and a storage building as long, narrow structures, about one room deep. The design creates more exposure for the solar panels, easy access to natural light to illuminate more space, and a way to separate the parking areas for cars and trucks. The narrow building also meant less trees had to be removed.
An interstate welcome center is more challenging than, say, an office building to design as a net-zero-energy building, Seltzer said.
“The purpose of this welcome center is to remain open 24/7 and be welcoming to anybody any time of day,” Seltzer said. An office building is typically closed at night, when the lights can be turned off and the air conditioning can be turned down in the winter and up in the summer.
The old welcome center on the same 14-acre site was demolished in spring 2012. The project was delayed in 2013 when bids came in over budget, forcing the state to redesign and rebid the work.