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12/22/2006 11:04 AM
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What's New on the Horizon for Green Buildings Page 1 |
Acknowledging that buildings are responsible for a large proportion of greenhouse gas emissions, both U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) leadership and many of the 13,000 USGBC members and other attendees at USGBC's November 2006 Greenbuild conference in Denver expressed a clear and urgent intention to mitigate that contribution. With several announcements, USGBC signaled that it would use its LEED Rating System to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, by tightening LEED requirements and by increasing the number of buildings designed to LEED standards.
LEED and Carbon ReductionsFigures released by USGBC divide U.S. carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels into three sectors, with buildings topping the list at 38% of all contributions, compared with transportation (33%) and industry (29%). USGBC also projects that carbon dioxide emissions from buildings will grow faster than other sectors - 1.8% a year through 2030. Buildings can also be a source of carbon reductions. Building half of new commercial buildings to use 50% less energy would save over six million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions annually, or the equivalent of emissions from one million cars, says the USGBC.
At the opening plenary session of Greenbuild, USGBC CEO Rick Fedrizzi reported that LEED-certified buildings reduce carbon emissions by about 40% compared with conventional buildings. "But even that's not enough," he said. "We need to build more of them, we need to operate them properly, and we need to renovate the ones we have already built, because most of them are energy hogs of the first order." Fedrizzi added, "Time, unfortunately, is not on our side."
Following his call for action, Fedrizzi announced two new minimum requirements for future LEED projects.
USGBC's first proposal is a 50% CO2 emissions reduction. All new commercial LEED projects would be required to reduce emissions by 50% compared to current emissions levels. That requirement will use a holistic accounting of a building's "carbon footprint," including contributions from energy and water use, transportation, and materials.
The second new requirement effectively raises the minimum energy performance prerequisite for LEED by requiring that all projects achieve at least two out of a possible ten points under Energy and Atmosphere (EA) Credit 1: Energy Optimization.
This requirement is not insignificant - a recent analysis by the New Buildings Institute of the 420 LEED buildings certified under LEED for New Construction (LEED-NC) version 2 by the end of July 2005 reveals that 17% of those projects achieved less than two Energy Optimization points.
"Getting LEED buildings to go 50% beyond current practice - that's really exciting," said Scot Horst, chair of the LEED Steering Committee and President of Horst, Inc. "We still have to work out exactly how we're going to calculate that. The two additional prerequisite points in energy probably get buildings closer to 40% beyond typical practice," but given the desire to look at the whole carbon footprint of a building we need to start to quantify the carbon points relative to other credits. We think we can lead teams to achieving the requirement with a "carbon overlay" of other credits, leading teams to align carbon with their other goals for the project."
Endorsing the 2030 ChallengeArchitect Ed Mazria, whose tireless campaigning and "2030 Challenge" have pushed the design community to adopt aggressive energy reduction goals, participated in a post-conference meeting with leaders from USGBC, The American Institute of Architects (AIA), and the American Society for Heating, Refrigeration, and Air-conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE). The meeting was called to bring alignment between the organizations in terms of their energy efficiency goals and the means of measuring achievement against those goals.
The group signed onto Mazria's goals of 50% reductions in operating energy for all new buildings, with further reductions leading to carbon-neutral buildings by 2030. They also agreed to use average site energy use by existing buildings, reported by the U.S. Department of Energy's 2003 Commercial Buildings Energy Consumption Survey (CBECS), as the baseline.
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