USA's largest “carbon neutral” office set for San Diego

USA's largest “carbon neutral” office set for San Diego:

Rendering of LPL Financial at La Jolla Commons

A tower block destined for San Diego will be the largest carbon-neutral office building in the United States, according to a press release put out in December by Hines, the project's developer.
Offices use energy more intensively than houses or schools, which are more typical candidates for carbon neutrality, so a carbon neutral office is ambitious in itself. But it's the size of the office block that sets this project apart. Named LPL Financial at La Jolla Commons after its eventual tenant, it joins existing Hines-developed offices at the La Jolla Commons campus in San Diego. The building will host 415,000 ft² of office space, spread over 13 stories. As office blocks go, that's not enormous—New York’s 52-story 7 World Trade Center contains 1.7 million ft² of premium office real estate—but it's a tall order as far as carbon neutrality is concerned.
Hines' claim is a straightforward one: the building will, averaged over the course of each year, produce more energy than it consumes. This basically matches the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s definition of a Zero-Energy Building, provided that the energy is produced on site and comes from a non-polluting renewable source. But because LPL@LJC (to shorten the office block's name) uses natural gas as its sole source of energy, some have questioned, and even dismissed, Hines' net zero claims—despite the fact that the natural gas isn't actually combusted.

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