I think it all started back when I was attending university, pursuing my civil engineering degree. There were many field trips to observe engineering in action that were required for graduation. One of the field trips was to tour the Passive Solar House, a research facility on the foothills campus of Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colorado, rny alma mater. My recollection is that the house was both beautiful and functional, elegant and energy-efficient.

I’d never seen anything like it before: the house looked like a condominium from the mountains of Aspen or Vail on the outside, but inside it was mostly instrumentation. The passive house was angled to capture the maximum energy from the sun, heat the house during the day, and keep it warm throughout the night. It was close to “net zero,” although that term had likely not yet been coined. As a 19-year-old engineering student, I made myself a promise that if I had the opportunity to ever build my own building, I would make it both beautiful and energy-efficient. I filed that thought away and continued my studies.

After graduating with a bachelor’s in civil engineering and later a master’s in the Geotechnical Program, I began my first job in Florida, working for a company called Bromwell and Carrier Inc. (which later became BCI Engineers and Scientists, now Atkins AMEC). I worked there for eight years, gaining competency and experience both technically and managerially; and in 1992 started Madrid Engineering Group Inc. Starting and running your own company brings incredible challenges, but also incredible opportunities. I started out in a tiny office on S. Dale Mabry St. in Tampa, and soon realized that I needed to be closer to home, which was Mulberry, Florida. I moved the office to Bartow during the second year, sharing an office with another engineer in the downtown area. This office was in an historic building called the Record Building, so named for the newspaper business that originally ran out of that office. I was also told that the law firm of Holland and Knight was located in that building for a short time. The building, built in 1922 was 3300 sq ft, and had very few upgrades. With the growth of my company, I was able to purchase the Record Building and make improvements, adding office space upstairs to provide room for my growing staff. The air conditioner, for instance, worked overtime to keep up with cooling the building during the summer, My electric bills averaged $1,200 per month! Once or twice each summer, the air conditioner would freeze up and we had to call a technician to get it working again. There would be several days each week where I would leave the office early in the afternoon and go to the public library to study and review reports, because out of everyone in the building, it seemed that I was most sensitive to the heat and humidity of the Florida summers.

As the company continued to grow. I looked for a larger office space. I wanted to stay in Bartow, but there were no available office/warehouse facilities that were suitable for my geotechnical practice. I began to look at land that I could develop and put buildings on. I found a beautiful three-acre parcel on State Route 60 where I had already been renting warehouses for storing the drill rig and soil samples, and it became the property where I would build the next office for Madrid Engineering Group. Based on the space available and the projected size of the company, I settled on a main building office of 4400 sq ft. I also added a warehouse/laboratory combination building so that soil samples could be dropped off right to the laboratory from the drill rigs and processed immediately. Everything was planned for efficiency in the site layout.

Since I now had the opportunity to construct my own buildings, I took the opportunity to do preliminary designs myself, turning it over to an architect and designer for the final touches and permitting. That’s when it hit me: the promise I had made to myself more than 20 years ago, to build an energy‑efficient building. At that time the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) had started the program called LEED (Leadership in Engineering and Environmental Development). Neither I nor my designer knew much more than that it existed and could be a guide for the design of my building. He told me that he had designed a few Energy Star houses, but never anything from the USGRC, and he was eager to learn how. He bought a book and we began educating ourselves.

We registered the project with the Green Building Council and worked on the design. We went with a high SEER rating for our air-conditioning unit, extra insulation in the walls and attic space, and low E windows. Since my entire career had been in geotechnical engineering-soil, rock, and sinkholes, this was completely new to me, We moved into the building in 2008, and over the next three years recorded the amount of energy use and costs for the electric bill. Although the building was about 30% larger than the previous office space, my average energy bill was only $425 per month. Even better than that, the new building was more efficiently designed, and could accommodate a larger staff. We have about 20 employees in that building so the cost per employee is substantially less than half of what it was before.

In 2011, I realized that the opportunity to put solar panels on the roof was going away due to the sunsetting of the state of Florida’s rebate program of four dollars per watt. I purchased 113 solar panels at a cost of $175,000, and had them installed over the roof of one of the original warehouses. The first and biggest discount I received was the federal rebate for renewable energy. The state of Florida was supposed to rebate four dollars per watt, but it ran out of money and was only able to give me $.60 on the dollar for its rebate. I was thankful for that, though, as it amounted to $60,000 and the check was signed by none other than Adam Putnam, commissioner of Agriculture. With those discounts, I calculate the system will pay for itself in six years.

With the addition of our 26 kW photovoltaic system, Madrid Engineering Group’s main office building became a net zero energy building. It’s energy efficient and very beautiful. I have to wonder if my interest in things green somehow began when I was a child. My family would call me Larry Dean, when I got into trouble (first and middle name), except for my uncle Frank. He called me Larry Green. I wonder if he knew something?

Published in Journal of Florida Engineering Society, September 2013 Issue