Green, but not green enough? First building at former TCAAP site misses efficiency targets.

The vision for development at Rice Creek Commons, the 427-acre site in Arden Hills that was once home to the Twin Cities Army Ammunition Plant, is ambitious: carbon-neutral, fully electric and highly efficient.

But the first building going up on the site falls short.

The groundbreaking amid cheers and hearty huzzahs earlier this month came after the board governing development of the long-debated site granted Ryan Company waivers on several environmental criteria. The exceptions, the officials and the developers say, were a matter of practicality and timing — not a precedent for what’s to come.

The site’s all-electric mandate is unusual for Minnesota, a place where wood stoves and gas furnaces typically heat buildings in the winter.

“Nobody has ever said that’s not ambitious,” said Tena Monson, an Arden Hills City Council member who also serves on the joint development authority overseeing the project. “The reason we wanted to do that is to try to reduce the amount of carbon emissions on the site. But we’re also practical people. We understand there are limitations.”

People involved with the project say some of the waivers might not have been necessary if the builder had more time. They note that the pioneering plans for Rice Creek Commons are bumping up against physics, the limitations of federal incentives, the steady but slow adoption of electric vehicles and some of the practical limitations of a building industry that usually turns to fossil fuels.

The development authority members also said they want to meet with the builder, Ryan Companies, sometime in the near future to discuss what worked, what didn’t and how the guidelines might be adapted to make them more effective.

The primary problem for Ryan Companies was that the specific guidelines for the new development were approved in January, just as the company presented its plans for the Micro Control Company headquarters building.

What ensued was a two-month scramble by Ryan Companies, engineers, key subcontractors, the developers and the county to rewrite the building’s blueprints so it could meet Rice Creek Commons’ energy requirements as much as possible.

The company needed an April groundbreaking, so time was short.

“Sustainability at this high level is complex and it just takes a little more time and thought to put those complex systems together,” said Kaitlin Veenstra, director of sustainability for Ryan Companies.

If the Ryan Companies building under construction at Rice Creek Commons were erected anywhere else, it would stand out for its energy efficiency.

It has geothermal cooling and heating, making the building about 90% electric, and a sturdy rooftop ready for a future solar array. Even the building’s parking lot will be built “EV-ready,” with conduit laid down before the pavement is installed so electric cables could easily be added someday to feed car chargers.

Still, the project needed four waivers. The first was for a LEED certification, mainly due to the cost and timing.

The second waiver substituted the 100% electrification goal for one that would allow the building to use natural gas for backup systems that might be required for the coldest winter days. The cost to power the building completely off of the geothermal wells was too expensive, Veenstra said.

The federal tax credits that push adoption of energy-efficient technologies aren’t available in this case because they require a building owner to hold onto the new structure for five years at a minimum. However, developers like Ryan Companies can’t always guarantee they’ll own the building that long.

“So we would get a heavily reduced version of that credit or get a bunch of red tape,” Veenstra said.

The third waiver delays implementation of the solar array that will help make the project carbon-neutral — again because of its high expense — until they find a partner to install and operate it.

The fourth and final waiver asked that the parking lot have 2% of its stalls equipped with electric vehicle chargers, rather than the 30% called for in the sustainability guidelines.

Veenstra said Ryan Companies knows what the tenant needs right now — it’s far less than 30% — and installing a lot of chargers would require a much larger cable from Xcel Energy to the parking lot. It didn’t make sense to invest in that now, she said, but the builder will make the parking lot “EV-ready.”

The carbon-neutral vision for Rice Creek Commons would make the development one of the first of its kind in the nation, said Rick Carter, an architect with Minneapolis-based LHB Corp.

“They’re ahead of the curve,” he said.

Ramsey County Commissioner Tara Jebens-Singh said the sustainability guidelines were examined by experts and deemed to be achievable, “but this was our very first project.”

Ella Mitchell, project manager for Ramsey County, said it’s been a learning process as Rice Creek Commons takes shape.

“We saw this first case as a test case for these sustainability guidelines,” she said.

Ryan Companies’ building is some 175,000 square feet. That’s a fraction of the expected 5 million square feet across the entire development, so the waivers granted for this first building won’t mean much in the larger context of the site, she added.

“This is going to be a development that happens over five, or 10 or 15 years,” she said. “We fully anticipate that there may be future technologies that come online that make this easier.”