Life cycle costing & analysis of two UBC research buildings : Earth Sciences Building vs. Pharmaceutical Sciences Building

UBC aims to provide an exceptional learning environment while exemplifying economic, environmental and social sustainability in its the built environment. One of its main goals is to enhance infrastructures to support leading edge research. In 2010, laboratory buildings accounted for almost ten percent of UBC core buildings but consumed disproportionately higher resources and contributed significantly to UBC’s financial investments. This project performed a life cycle cost analysis for two high-performance laboratory buildings on the campus of the University of British Columbia, the Earth Sciences Building (ESB) and the Pharmaceutical Sciences Building (PSB). The propose of this project was to test current assumptions about life cycle costs of new research buildings on campus and also to attempt to verify an observation that one building’s energy performance (ESB) was significantly better than the other (PSB), despite many similarities across the two buildings. Additionally, this initial life cycle costing was to provide a basis and platform for further analysis of data, testing of various assumptions and hypotheses, and opportunities to create recommendations for improving UBC’s LCC standards, with the larger goal of finding ways the University could increase its confidence in long-term performance from designs for future buildings. For a base-case LCC actual energy consumption data was used along with estimations for maintenance and repair costs to estimate operation costs for the two buildings. On a net present value basis, it was found that operation and maintenance costs account for approximately 40 percent of the total life cycle cost over 50 years for both buildings. When two industry standard cost estimation systems (Whitestone CostLab, and the Whitestone printed reference volumes) were used to refine this analysis, the operation and maintenance costs increased to between 50 percent and 60 percent of the total life cycle cost. The results of the industry reference tools indicate that a more detailed ...