Charlotte, North Carolina, is a city primed for the future, with a population boom registering it as the fifth-fastest-growing major U.S. metro area between July 1, 2021, and July 1, 2022, according to United States Census Bureau.
The Queen City is also looking toward the future when it comes to its meetings and conventions product, investing in major sustainability initiatives and gearing up to welcome a new cutting-edge life sciences district scheduled for a June 2025 completion.
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Convention Center Sustainability
A particular point of pride at the LEED Gold Charlotte Convention Center is its use of an underground aquifer following its October 2021 expansion for cooling towers that evaporate the water to cool the facility’s air, lessening the impact both on the city’s water system and providing an efficient air-conditioning option.
The convention center earned LEED Gold in the O&M (Operations and Maintenance) certification, which is bestowed on existing facilities—typically a harder-to-achieve credential than for new-builds.
“We have LEED O&M for the entire building, but what that enabled us to do with that expansion was replace the entire central plant, so the cooling tower, chillers, boilers, which made a huge impact in our energy use,” said Bryan Miller, general manager of the Charlotte Convention Center. “And we just commissioned a company to do a dashboard for us on energy usage, so what it’s doing is they can backdate it to 2018 and look at our energy usage then and then how it is over the years—what are we trending toward? We’re actually down since then, and a big part of that was the central plant.
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“This dashboard enables us to look at it based on activity levels and not just total usage,” he continued, “and at some point, we’ll be able to benchmark it against ourselves.”
Ned Blair, sales director for Visit Charlotte, noted that the improvement in energy efficiency is particularly impressive in light of the expansion.
“That was 2018,” he said of the initial results, “and in the current time, we’re trending down, but we didn’t have that 50,000 square feet of new meeting space in 2018.”
Miller said the convention center intends to offer the brand-new dashboard to meeting and convention planners in the near future so they can track sustainability metrics in their events.
“This dashboard is a step in the direction of being able to give them an audit report afterwards saying, ‘This what we were able to offset or recycle’ for their event,” Miller said.
Another point of sustainability pride isn’t related to the environment. Instead, it’s about the impact on the local community.
“From March 2020 through mid-last-year, we’ve donated over 42,000 pounds of food to local shelters—a pound of food is counted as one meal,” Miller said. “So, that’s 42,240 meals that we were able to supply to local shelters through this food donation program, and we’re going to try to increase that. We’re going to add a new freezer that’s dedicated just to that. This extra freezer is going to enable us to save more and more food for them and they can come pick it up whenever they need to—they’re not dependent on our schedule.”
- Charlotte Convention Center sustainability highlights include the following:
Achieved LEED Gold O+M for Existing Buildings in 2023 (LEED’s Operations and Maintenance program vs. New Construction). The LEED score is based on items such as energy use, water conservation, waste diversion, transportation, indoor air quality, supplier diversity goals and a workforce development program. - Upgraded the entire central plant with more efficient components such as a chiller, boiler and cooling tower.
- 100% compliant with green cleaning products and material purchases.
The addition of a composting cooler designated only for the composting program at the loading dock in order to prevent the smell of rotting food while awaiting pickup. - Water reclamation from the aquifer underground to supply water in the HVAC cooling towers.
The convention center recently launched a dashboard to track energy usage in relation to building use in order to benchmark against previous years, with a future goal being to create dashboards to give meeting planners an after-event sustainability report.
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Charlotte’s New Life Sciences District
Charlotte—the largest city in a state that has one of the most impressive healthcare industry segments in the U.S.—is also developing an innovation district that will focus on research but will also draw life-sciences meetings segment clients to the Queen City.
The Pearl District will be a mixed-use development featuring educational facilities, retail, housing, a hotel and open community space that can be used for meetings and events.
Located in a Midtown Charlotte neighborhood formerly known as Brooklyn, The Pearl will be the future home to a Charlotte campus of Wake Forest University School of Medicine and be the North American headquarters of IRCAD, a surgical training center with an emphasis on robotics, medical virtual and augmented reality, surgical artificial intelligence and simulation training.
The development, which broke ground in late 2023 and is targeting a phase one June 2024 opening, and completion in June 2025, is a partnership between Atrium Health, Wexford Science & Technology and local governments and the local community, with Charlotte and Mecklenburg County approving significant public investment that will be augmented by an additional $1.5 billion in private investments.
Wexford is also the developer of Winston-Salem, North Carolina’s Innovation Quarter, which further strengthens its ties both to Atrium Health and the Wake Forest School of Medicine.
“If you go into any Wexford Innovation District, each one is very unique and different, but a lot of the things that you will see in common is that there are one or two floors in each one of the buildings that are very open to the public,” said Hillary Crittendon, AVP, head of innovation district operations and strategy for Atrium Health, which is the southeast regional care delivery brand for Advocate Health. “They’re intentionally welcoming. They want folks to convene, whether they have an interest in healthcare or entrepreneurship or just being part of the ecosystem of what might be happening in a community that has a lens toward bettering the human condition because we are doing healthcare research.”
According to Crittendon, The Pearl will offer a number of spaces that can be utilized for meetings and events.
“The Center for Education has a large Forum area that is going to have a two-story, 250-person auditorium that is open for events and will host guest lectures in that space,” she said. “The three main spaces that have an indoor [events] component are the Forum, the auditorium and then an indoor/outdoor assembly connector with roll-up doors to an outdoor patio.
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“We are also building an outdoor plaza in order to have programming and events out there,” she added. “So, there will be green spaces, seating elements and flat, hardscaped areas that are meant to accommodate things like small-business Saturday events, yoga in the park, bands, sessions, food trucks. It’s meant to be kind of like an activated community space.”
Crittendon said the developers are planning to include a conference center hotel with a possible opening date in mid-2027.
Another highlight of the project will be a programmed, activated outdoor space that is an architectural journey that tells the story of the Brooklyn neighborhood, a former African-American enclave that was erased by an urban renewal program in the 1960s and ’70s.
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