Weston Corporate Center Deep Water Source Cooling System

See how we took advantage of the natural resources at Weston Corporate Center to create a state-of-the-art deep water cooling system.

BXP has designed a sustainable chilled water system using an abandoned quarry as a renewable source of chilled water for Weston Corporate Center, an office campus located in Weston, Massachusetts. This project has been certified as a USGBC LEED® Platinum property.

Completed in the summer of 2010, Weston Corporate Center’s deep water source cooling system is an example of our Development Team working to design a building that will be energy efficient and environmentally friendly. Previous developers who controlled the property viewed the onsite quarries as a significant site constraint leading to proposals that included the re-filling of the abandoned mining quarries. But when BXP acquired the site, we identified the potential to employ the quarries as a renewable resource. The quarries cover 20 acres of the site and contain approximately one billion gallons of natural ground water reaching depths of 400 feet. Water temperature towards the bottom of each quarry is at a consistent 40 to 45 degrees—the perfect temperature for chilled water usage. The challenge came in designing a system that could reach the deep water while safely negotiating the dangerous side walls of the quarry. BXP came up with an innovation we call the “bent straw.” The system is designed to pump chilled quarry water to heat exchangers in the building and then return the water to the quarry. Meanwhile, a circulation system pumps chilled water from the heat exchangers to rooftop air handling units that cool the building. We are able to take a significant site constraint and turn it into a one-of-a-kind sustainability feature that will help save thousands of dollars per year in energy costs and reduce carbon dioxide emissions by an estimated 475,000 pounds per year.