Sustainable Communities

ConSol’s Consulting Department collaborates with SCHWEITZER + ASSOCIATES, Peter Schwartz & Associates, CalRecovery, and StrateGen to provides the expertise to assess and evaluate environmental benefits and barriers for the large community developers who are required or inspired to build sustainable communities.

ConSol and its partners provide three phases of work towards sustainable development:

Project Design

Assessing the opportunities for sustainable practices in:

Residential;
Non-residential, including retail, office, and others;
Energy efficiency and renewable energy at the community scale;
Demand-response technologies in conjunction with Energy Efficiency, Renewable Energy, and a smart grids;
Transportation, including NEVs and deployment of V2G;
Community scale waste reduction, water conservation, and energy storage;
Community layout and construction materials employed;
State-of-the-art of sustainable community modeling and analyses.

Assessments would include costs, impacts (energy, water, waste, greenhouse gases, etc.), potential barriers and solutions, and changed/improved business models for developers, builders, utilities. Successful sustainable practices could be documented in case studies for each impacted market segment.

Project Construction

Monitoring and evaluating a project during construction will allow analyses and practical implementation of the sustainable practices, identification of unforeseen barriers, and possible resolution of such barriers. This phase will allow clear evaluation of builder and developer costs of implementing the sustainable practices, lessons learned, the consumer acceptance at sales, and next generation opportunities. All of this information is key to substantiation and/or revision of the new business models developed in Phase 1, as well as updated case studies based on the actual results.

Post Occupancy

Once the homes and other buildings are built, sold, and occupied, the buildings and the communities with their incorporated sustainable features will be available for thorough evaluations of the impacts, lessons learned, and improved business practices that can be a model for future sustainable developments. Post occupancy evaluations of energy and other resource savings can be ascertained, along with consumer satisfaction of their sustainable homes and neighborhoods.

These phases provide distinct opportunities to understand and influence the business cases for each sustainable practice; to follow the progress; and to evaluate the barriers during design and construction. The phases also provide the opportunity to evaluate the final successes and failures that will lead to improved understanding of what is possible in terms of sustainable development; how to make the successes available and enticing to other developers; and how sustainable development can be enhanced and improved in future projects.

ConSol and its partners provide a unique opportunity to research how to design and build large projects sustainability, and to quickly and effectively evaluate the success of that research.

Current Project

Rancho Mission Viejo (RMV)

Development: The Ranch
Location: Orange County, CA
Size: 23,000 acre Master Plan
Climate: Hot/Mixed Dry

ConSol, SCHWEITZER + ASSOCIATES, and Peter Schwartz & Associates are providing technical, market, and policy-related support for RMV’s Sustainable Ranch Program for The Ranch Plan, a 23,000 acre legacy property and master planned community development in south Orange County, California. Overall efforts will be focused on optimizing the value-added of the sustainability program through integrated community-based solutions that have multiple benefits and economies of scale (economic, environmental and social), focused on the three main stakeholders: master developer, neighborhood builder and homeowners.

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