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"Super Green" Milford Building Aims To Be A Model For Others

Ann Thompson
/
WVXU
At bottom left, you can see just a small part where Melink will build a super green 30,000-square ft building, the second on its campus.

Friday the sustainable Melink Corporation will break ground on the second of two buildings on its Milford campus, this one even greener than the first. The company hopes it will be a model for energy efficient buildings nationwide.

CEO Steve Melink says the original building is LEED platinum zero energy. "So you might say, how can you improve on this, the building we are already in?" asks Melink. "We are going to even further insulate the envelope. So, we are going to have even better insulated walls; roof. We're going to have a better glazing system for windows and doors."

Other improvements include more natural lighting and a hybrid geo-thermal heating and cooling system.

"What we're trying to show is that anyone can go zero energy at an incremental cost of 10-20 percent over and above a conventional low-cost building and anybody can finance that."

Melink is doing it with PACE (Property Assessed Clean Energy) administered locally by the Greater Cincinnati Energy Alliance and The Port.

Zero energy is when energy used equals the amount of renewable energy.

When the new building is finished in October 2019, Melink invites contractors and architects to see it and estimates by sometime beginning 2020 or 2030 all homes and businesses will be designed as zero energy. "But we want to show it can be done in 2018. We don't have to wait for some silver bullet to be invented and that the financing solutions already exist."

Melink, is a provider of clean energy solutions and has national customers like Walmart, Target and McDonalds.

Ann Thompson has decades of journalism experience in the Greater Cincinnati market and brings a wealth of knowledge and expertise to her reporting.