This is not complicated, just green. And it's time for an installment of Common Sense for Better Construction. We're bridging the information gap to help you reach a brighter future in the built world. Today's episode is sponsored by Creative Interface Architecture and Interiors. Making sustainable construction practically impactful.

Check us out at www.creativeinterface.design Welcome friends, I'm James your host and today I'm speaking with Sarah King with Kilroy Realty, a real estate investment trust or REIT. Kilroy partners with world class architects, designers, and artists who share their passion for inspiring tenants and communities to create and manage over 15 million square feet in a portfolio of commercial office space, multi family properties, and life science facilities.

They are committed to providing sustainable communities that protect and maintain the health and well being of residents and visitors. Please enjoy. So I read that you are the first REIT to achieve carbon neutral operations in carbon neutrality. Calbright has a long standing commitment to sustainability and for the last two years we achieved carbon neutral operations through energy efficiency, onsite renewables, offsite renewables.

We need to press early steps today about just sitting six megawatts of solar installed in all of our sites, 13 of our buildings. On site solar doesn't make sense at every building, parking garage, the ideally even like to have the top level shaded, you know, a solar canopy will be, I'm proud of. How Calgary hence proactively sought out these opportunities to install solar in me, install it.

So it's behind the meter. So the energy that generated its use, I'm saying that reducing the overall electricity road that the building's demanding, it ends up being a very good financial platform and a benefit to our tenants and people like to see solar. And so. I think that the more we can see that, I think that there are some kinds of misconceptions that you need to be like in California or Florida for it to really make sense.

But I think even in a lot of other markets, even if you have so many cloudy days every year, uh, solar is really a great tool in our whole life. I was recently in Chicago and got to go up the viewing level of the formerly Sears Tower, now Willis Tower. And of course you look down and you see lots of really cool rooftop amenities, top gardens and rooftop restaurants.

But then I was struck by the vast number of empty rooftops. There's such an opportunity to make such a huge impact. It wouldn't create any change in the appearance of that building. It wouldn't require any change in the function of the way that that building operates or is used. Warehouses, shopping centers, they're perfectly suited.

They take up such a huge amount of real estate. The number of rooftop amenities outnumbered the rooftop. Yeah. And I think, you know, in those dense downtown ball building environments. You know, the, the level of effort to put some solar on top, it's going to just like some very small amount. There is some really cool work going on to integrate solar and building inside.

So I know we're excited about that. It's a future thing that I hope that we'll explore where, you know, the leasing on the exterior of the building, they also have solar built into it. So that didn't say anything. And then it's exciting to, it's like flying to different cities, look out the window and yeah, it does feel like this.

A ton of additional and unturned stones, lots of opportunities to do that. For sure. Yeah. And then thinking and getting excited about what's next for the next 10 years, which I see as a really critical decade, it's for sustainability, real estate. So from that energy use. That we use to heat and cool and cover those buildings.

And then kind of a more inverted topic. It's the embodied carbon of energy. So see the materials that we use to construct new buil