Mandated Energy Benchmarking On the Rise

One of the best fiscal decisions a building manager can make is finding ways to ramp up energy efficiency and decrease operational costs.

Energy benchmarking is one useful tool to help you accomplish these goals. Benchmarking compares your building’s energy to other buildings, determines if your building is using an excessive amount of energy and helps set goals for energy management.

Earlier this summer, Philadelphia passed a law to begin mandating energy benchmarking for commercial buildings exceeding 50,000 square feet, as Greentech Media reports. According to the article benchmarking can equate to a 5% energy savings without any other changes, spurring government organizations to enact the requirement.

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Is LEED Working?

Remember LEED?  The U.S. Green Building Council’s “Leadership in Energy and Environmental and Design” program?  Of course you do.  So do we.  We write about LEED frequently.  We urge our readers to learn about it, qualify for it, and practice it.  We hope to help you in that endeavor, since LEED seems to be the green building program of the future, and we’re all for that.

But it always pays to keep your eyes and ears open, not to mention your mind, and that’s why we’re calling your attention to this: “The Green Façade.”   It’s a November 25 article in The Atlantic, America’s venerable magazine of literature, ideas, politics, and culture.  If you’re high on LEED, you might want to read this article for its nuanced analysis of what LEED is actually accomplishing and how the program might best move forward.  Because, to put it starkly, LEED in its current form may not be doing what it’s most prominently supposed to do: saving energy.

The article’s author, Atlantic senior editor Jennie Rothenberg Gritz, starts by noting the green movement’s epochal trajectory toward center stage in American culture and politics.  But then she sounds the note that signals it’s time to rein in our enthusiasm and pay attention to hard facts: two studies released in fall 2009 question the overall effectiveness of LEED as it’s currently being deployed and practiced.  And these studies come from within the official LEED community itself.

One of them comes from Rob Watson, who, in addition to editing GreenerBuildings.com, from which we ourselves have quoted numerous times, is the man who actually developed the LEED rating system.  Watson’s November report, says Gritz,

included impressive data on market trends, land impact, and water efficiency for LEED projects.  When it came to energy savings, though, the numbers were discouraging.  “Some LEED buildings are not performing as expected given their design and technology elements,” Watson stated bluntly.  “This is an area of controversy and a source of great attention by the U.S. Green Building Council.”

The other study came out in late October and was issued by the Chicago chapter of the USGBC and its partners, and its findings were nothing short of shocking. Again, Gritz summarizes:

The study looked at the median efficiency of LEED-certified buildings in Illinois and found that they were performing only 5 percent better than their non-LEED counterparts throughout the region.  Fewer than 30 percent of the buildings were eligible for the government’s ENERGY STAR label.  And the Platinum and Gold LEED buildings were no more efficient than those that had Silver or basic LEED certifications (emphasis added).

Does the expression “Whoops?” seem out of order here?

So, in light of these findings, what’s to do?  Gritz points out several salient facts, including the way the current LEED system may need a retooling, since it lets people in search of credits “reach for low-hanging fruit” in the form of modifications that don’t directly affect energy use or carbon emissions, and including the increasingly recognized truth that LEED for existing buildings, or LEED-EB, actually produces the best energy results.  (We ourselves recently noted the attention being paid to existing buildings as credible sources for energy savings, in “Not So Fast: Old Buildings — Not Just New Ones — Contribute Vitally to Clean Energy Economy.”)  This, ladies and gentlemen, shows promise.

We scour industry headlines and the news in general as we go about our task of bringing you this blog, and so we see the patterns that are currently lining up.  Right now, for instance, a story has just come across the transom from San Diego Business Journal that talks about new state standards in California for achieving LEED silver.  Oh, and here comes another one, this time from Automated Buildings.  It’s an interview with Nathan Rothman, founder and CEO of Optimum Energy LLC, in which he shares his experiences and overall impressions of this year’s Greenbuild show in Phoenix in November.  The title?  “Increasing Acceptance of LEED.”  Stories like this appear every day, sometimes by the dozens, and they are indeed important.  And yet here’s that Atlantic article and the two reports it talks about, telling us to hold on, get a grip, and be smart, because all may not be as it seems.

We’re listening, and we hope you are, too.

Matt Cardin
Goodway Blogging Team

Image Credit: PhotoXpress

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Missouri Engineer Achieves Ultra-Efficiency with Unique Geothermal System Design

Kirk Mescher, P.E., LEED AP, has said it often brings “efficiency gains that were well beyond our expectations.  He has also described it as “so simple it’s scary” and called it “the Holy Grail of engineering: less costly, simpler to understand, more efficient.  You never get all three together” (“Efficiency First,” Columbia Tribune, Aug. 22).

What he’s talking about is a one-pipe geothermal heating and cooling system that he designed about seven years ago, and that is delivering fairly amazing results to a wide variety of clients around the nation.

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HVLS Fans Save Money, Improve Comfort

If you’ve ever looked overhead in a factory, warehouse or other large open space, you’ve probably seen those enormous fans spinning slowly overhead.  Known as High Velocity Low Speed (HVLS) fans, they can save you substantial amounts of money, help make building occupants more comfortable and even help you achieve LEED certification. 

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Look at the “Big Picture” when Hiring a LEED Consultant

We’ll let FMLink do all — okay, most — of the talking for us today. Check this out:

“How to Hire a LEED Consultant” – FMLInk, July 22, 2009

Yep, it’s exactly what you think it is: an article about how to hire a LEED consultant. But it’s also much more than just a “how-to” guide, since along with the how-to stuff it provides a host of useful information about the way we all ought to think about the very LEED credentialing process itself: the reasons behind it, proper attitudes toward it, efficient ways to approach it, and so on.

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Who Should Set Green Building Standards?

It’s been a busy year for the people who create standards for green buildings.

For almost ten years, the only comprehensive set of green building standards in the U.S. has been the LEED program created by the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC).   In the spring of this year, they introduced LEED V3, the newest and most comprehensive version of  the LEED standards. There are already thousands of LEED buildings already in place and thousands more on the way.

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Madoff’s Only Green To Be His LEED-Certified Prison Cell

Now that’s what we call irony.

Bernie Madoff, best known for separating people from their green, will be spending the rest of his life in the country’s only “green” federal prison. His new home, the 864-cell Butner Federal Correctional Institution in North Carolina, is the first and only prison in the United States to hold a LEED certification.

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Starbucks Saves The Environment and Its Bottom Line

Starbucks Coffee has announced that starting in 2010 it will seek LEED certification for all of its new company-owned stores.   The company has set aggressive goals for those stores, including deriving 50% of their energy from alternative sources and reducing overall store energy consumption by 25 percent.

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World’s First LEED Platinum Supermarket Features Geothermal HVAC

Last month we brought you an interview with a Maine HVACR contractor who uses a unique business model to offer amazingly efficient coil cleaning services to a variety of commercial customers.

Matt Jacobs, owner of Northeast Coil, not only described his HVACR cleaning business but told us who some of his customers are. One of them is Hannaford, the major supermarket chain that reaches all the way from New York back to Maine and has 168 stores.

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Ten Things You Should Do to Become a LEED Accredited Professional

The U.S. Green Building Council, the organization which created and administers the LEED program has handed responsibility for administering professional credentials related to the LEED program to a new organization called the Green Building Certification Institute (GBCI).

With that handoff, the procedure for obtaining a credential has changed as well. New credentials have been created to better reflect both the increasing importance of certification for green buildings and the depth of experience many industry professionals possess.

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