Britain’s Greenest Building

The Enterprise Centre (TEC) is one of the UK’s most sustainable buildings, a centre for student entrepreneurship, and a regional hub for innovators and businesses that are committed to a low carbon future.

The Project

At its earliest stage, the Enterprise Centre was an academic exercise. What would Britain’s greenest commercial building look like? How could this idea be delivered, given location and cost restraints? What new skills and materials could add to the project’s targeted minimal-carbon usage, could this project be used to kick start or improve local trades and businesses?

The Enterprise Centre project inception started in 2007, with InCrops. Funding was secured in 2011, the ground breaking ceremony took place in November 2013, and the low carbon concrete base was poured in July 2014. The building demonstrates the use of different materials, low carbon materials in construction, and the potential for localism in the Norfolk and East Anglian region. For example, why do we bring glulam timber from Norway, Sweden and Austria when there is potential in neighbouring forests?

The Enterprise Centre was developed and built to the Passivhaus standard, which is recognised as the most stringent low ‘energy in use’ standard. It moves beyond UEA’s previous low carbon buildings through improved insulation, an improvement in air tightness and there are strong controls on the energy used within the building. The triple-glazed windows and the building’s orientation will maximise natural light and minimise heat loss. It has also achieved BREEAM Outstanding with a score of 93, a challenging, holistic measure of a building’s attention to sustainable measures.

How Jade helped

Jade Solutions designed, installed and provided all the necessary COMMSCOPE Connectivity and Infrastructure Cabling to ensure a world class warranted infrastructure solution within building.

The structured cabling solution consisted of COMMSCOPE copper horizontal cabling throughout the building to user, WiFi, CCTV, security access control locations and general BMS locations. A COMMSCOPE OM4 in building and OS2 campus connection fibre optic backbone was deployed for connection to the UEA network prior to the building opening.

Jade also provided and installed the Brocade Network Core and Edge Switching in conjunction with the Juniper WiFi Access Point requirement to guarantee full network performance to students, staff and the UEA’s onsite business partners on ‘go live’ day.

The Enterprise Centre is acknowledged as the UK’s greenest building – Jade Solutions ensured that the network solution secondary containment and fixing method was timber friendly and met the exacting ascetic and green parameters.

Jade Solutions is an accredited COMMSCOPE Business Partner, the implementation of the COMMSCOPE solution ensures a state of the art solution that keeps the customer ahead of the technology curve and guarantees increased uptime and increased network reliability. This helps the client deploy faster, improve network performance, minimize costs and enjoy superior warranty protection. The building has a 25 year COMMSCOPE component and applications warranty.

Drop us an email