Looking Past the USGBC Plaque to Make Buildings Greener

Leslie Guevarra
Editor
GreenBiz

Editor's Note: In the runup to the VERGE DC conference, Chris Pyke, the U.S. Green Building Council's research guru, talks about the need for market transformation and the strategy that can make it happen.

Today, more than 1.8 billion square feet of commercial property is certified under the U.S. Green Building Council's Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design standards.

And for many, obtaining the shining LEED plaque that attests to green building achievement is a major goal. That's great, say green building advocates, but efforts shouldn't stop there. To transform the built environment in a generation in order to avoid catastrophic damage from climate change lots more needs to happen, and quickly.

To do that, says Chris Pyke, the USGBC's vice president for research, it's necessary to "unpack the plaque" -- to tap into the wellspring of data that's available from buildings themselves about how they are performing.

Every Penny Counts: Tracking Building Performance to Save Money and Resources

Lauren Riggs, LEED AP
Manager, LEED Performance
U.S. Green Building Council

This post originally appeared on FacilitesNet.

In today's economy, every penny counts. And as building owners and facility managers know all too well, every penny adds up. When the lights in your 30-story office building are left on an extra hour each day, or the brutal summer heat requires an extra blast of air conditioning, your energy consumption escalates and so does your utility bill. That's precisely why building owners and facility managers are starting to "listen" to their buildings to ensure optimal operations.

Inspired by these attentive facility managers, the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) launched its Building Performance Partnership (BPP) in 2009. The organization-wide initiative positions the optimization of building performance as a fundamental goal of the green building movement. BPP engages both owners and facility managers of LEED-certified commercial buildings through data collection, analysis and action. Participants receive annual performance reports, report cards and real-time data interfaces to aid in their building performance goals.

At the end of 2010, 132 LEED-certified facilities, mainly office buildings, had joined BPP. These facilities range in size from 2,000 to 2 million square feet. In 2011, the program grew to include nearly 350 partners, triple 2010's figures. The types of organizations and facilities have grown to include retailers, offices and other building types. These participants are demonstrating their commitment to energy efficiency monitoring and are leading among their peers by sharing their experiences and contributing to the market need for building performance education.

The first year participants represented high-performing buildings from every region of the country. Those buildings eligible for an Energy Star score had an overall average score of 87. Consistent with a high average Energy Star score, BPP participants had demonstrated Source Energy Use Intensity that is on average 41 percent lower than the national averages reported in EPA's Energy Star Portfolio Manager.

Each year will bring new enhancements to the program and offer increased connectivity to other USGBC programs. This year, all participants that share data through BPP will receive their performance report through an online interface, which will contain an analysis of their current performance, from the most recent 12 months of utility data provided, side-by-side with their benchmarks from LEED certification.

To support the increased interest in building performance, USGBC is implementing automation solutions for data collection and transfer, including establishing an automatic data input and output relationship with EPA's Energy Star Portfolio Manager, and will begin work to automate additional benchmarking solutions.

The goal is for the annual performance reports to act as a helpful reminder to facility managers that their building's performance matters and benefits the bottom line. Armed with comprehensive green building performance data, BPP will enable standardization of reporting metrics and analytics and establish new performance benchmarks, ultimately transforming the way the world views building operations and maintenance.

For more information about BPP, visit usgbc.org/bpp.

Code Guidance for Greener Homes: One Last Shot for the 2012-IGCC

Jeremy Sigmon, LEED® AP BD+C
Manager, Building Codes Advocacy
U.S. Green Building Council

If you’ve followed the development of the International Green Construction Code, you’d know that the code’s coverage of low-rise residential buildings has been knocked around like a punching bag. First it was in. But since it was incorporated by reference and the development committee couldn’t touch it, the residential content meshed neither with the new code’s intent nor with its technical elements. Then it was pulled out. Then, most recently, it was not voted back in… and with this current, last round of opportunity, there’s one final chance to put it back in, and do it right.

For state and local governments that are looking for a code to provide oversight of minimum greener building measures and practices in their jurisdiction, it’s been a shame not to have an answer for low-rise residential. Neither the IGCC nor the Standard 189.1 compliance alternative covers these residential occupancies. Certainly our current environmental, economic and human health challenges demand that we provide such an answer for jurisdictions that want to extend the benefits of healthier, safer and more efficient buildings to the structures where we live, sleep and play.

If you’ve ever toured the Solar Decathlon – especially this year with its emphasis on affordability – you might even better appreciate that we deserve more from our homes.

A study released earlier this month reveals that buildings built to a building energy code saved energy (and thus money) compared to homes not built to such codes. This may come as no surprise, but it’s important validation that codes can do a good job of delivering minimum performance. Codes may never be the silver bullet approach to achieving truly sustainable buildings, but we do need them to keep pushing us all along (watch the webinar).

This need for code-intended guidance to govern greener low-rise residential buildings is a product of a a growing comfort with raising floor for minimum acceptable practice. Much like the history of greener commercial building codes, local governments have been pioneering home-grown programs and adopting rating tools like LEED for Homes, and are now increasingly looking for a code that will give them ownership and oversight over better, greener residential buildings. Some point to the National Green Building Standard (NGBS), but it’s a rating system, and not written for use as a mandatory, minimum code (even though it also carries a code-like nick-name, ICC-700). LEED for Homes demands a far more substantial minimum entry point beyond business-as-usual, but rating systems do not a useful, enforceable code make (see the USGBC policy brief).

Despite the way it may have appeared, the recent decisions at the IGCC hearings in May to disapprove proposals to reinsert residential into the scope of the code were not a vote against including low-rise residential in the IGCC. They were merely votes against a few proposals that were not perfect for inclusion as written. Clearly a new approach was needed.

After the hearings, I worked with the Green Builder Coalition and Chris Mathis (of Mathis Consulting Company) to convene a group of experts to devise a new plan. The comments we submitted were made public last week on the Council’s IGCC development web site (our comments are on pages 43-49, but be careful, it’s 1200+ pages).

I’ve extracted the comments here. We proposed that a short chapter be added to the code that would pull a handful of commonly-agreed-upon practices across all category areas from the existing language of the IGCC. These 20 items – a refreshing number contrasted with the code’s nearly 250 pages of code language for commercial buildings – can provide a reasonable and significant push for residential buildings.

It’s two comments, really. One to make the chapter elective to the adopting jurisdiction (more palatable to some), and one to include it in the core text of the code (preferred).

What do you think? I hope you’ll join us in Phoenix on November 2nd to fix this major shortcoming of the IGCC with a smart, compact, and remarkably significant solution.

New Fact Sheet Released: Energy Performance in the LEED Rating System

Lane Burt
Technical Policy Director
U.S. Green Building Council

Every building professional knows that green building is a process, not an event. As a tool for encouraging green building, LEED reflects that reality, providing recognition of leadership in each part of that process, from design and construction to operations and maintenance.

This is often overlooked when someone refers to a “LEED Certified” building: Where a building stands in the LEED process is an important distinction. A new fact sheet titled “Energy Performance in the LEED Rating System” explains how the LEED rating systems and requirements are supported by initiatives like the Building Performance Partnership to ensure that high performance green buildings live up to their energy potential.

And it is crucially important to understand the difference between potential and actual performance, because in many situations the concepts are conflated. Most folks think of LEED buildings as the shiny new building downtown. They say “It’s green!” or “It’s LEED!”, and it’s true that the building’s design and construction process has been subject to a rigorous evaluation over all categories of sustainability, and a certification level (Certified, Silver, Gold, or Platinum) has been determined. But that’s not the end of the story, as my colleague Lauren Riggs points out in her post. A building should live up to its potential, and it takes another type of building professional to drive the building into the next stage of the green building process.

The fact sheet details a crucially important tool in helping to realize a building’s performance in every aspect of sustainability: LEED for Existing Buildings: Operations & Maintenance. LEED buildings certified through EB:O&M are certified based upon their energy consumption in addition to the measures undertaken in the other credit categories covering water, indoor environmental quality, materials, and location. The amount of certified space under EB:O&M has grown by leaps and bounds in the last few years, surpassing the rate of certification for New Construction (see the graph in the fact sheet for exactly how much and how fast). We expect this growth to continue as the building industry (and even the President) focuses on improving existing buildings.

We hope that this focus on existing buildings’ performance will encourage folks to ask a follow up question about the new green building in the neighborhood: “Is it LEED EB:O&M?” A response of “Yes” to this question will mean that the building is a top performer not only in energy efficiency, but also in water efficiency, location and transportation efficiency, indoor environmental quality, etc.

Take a look at the fact sheet and feel free to post comments below. We hope it illuminates how all these initiatives are coordinated to help us reach our goal of transforming the built environment.