GreenBuild Blog

Saturday, February 28, 2009

NAIOP Study Claims Green Buildings Can’t Be Energy Efficient

NAIOP’s report, done by energy consultant Consol, attempts to take a standard 95,000 sq.ft., four-story suburban office building, add features to save energy and then compute the “payback,” the time it takes to return extra upfront cost with energy savings. This study demonstrates only that if you ask the wrong question, you’ll get the obvious (and wrong) answer. The point of my recent book, Green Building through Integrated Design (McGraw-Hill, 2008) is that you have to design buildings differently if you want high levels of energy efficiency. You have to “build it in, not bolt it on,” meaning that if you take a conventional building and attempt to add energy-savings features to standard design, it’s always going to be less and less cost-effective to go beyond, saving 15% more savings. The key is a wholesale redesign of the conventional office building, starting with the facade design and working inwards. For example, I was in Holland, Michigan, this week visiting with a leading architect/engineering firm. We discussed adding triple-pane windows to office buildings in Michigan’s cold climate. The extra cost for one building was more than paid for because this measure allows the designers to eliminate perimeter (window) heating systems, while increasing user comfort. It’s all about integrated design; that’s why NAIOP’s study is plain wrong as a general rule. As illustrated in the book Natural Capitalism (1999), in a great phrase, “tunneling through the cost barrier,” as you start to set stretch goals for energy efficiency, you’ll find a whole host of design measures that allow you to decrease energy use 50% or more while SAVING money. In what is currently the world’s largest LEED Platinum building, the Center for Health and Healing in Portland, Oregon, engineers and architects were able to find savings measures that led to a 60% decrease in energy costs while spending 10% less overall money; this is not some computer-based study, it’s a realized project that was occupied in 2006. That’s why NAIOP’s study won’t add anything to the current debate about how to get new buildings toward “net zero” energy use as fast as possible.

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Monday, February 23, 2009

Carbon Dioxide Regulation Inches Closer

The Journal’s report that EPA will soon begin rule-making on carbon emissions should be enough to spur Congress into action. This effort will be the mother of all environmental battles and one with huge economic outcomes (and they’re not good) if the legislators get it wrong. Watch for carbon-dioxide legislation to emerge over the next year as the key battle for a green future, one likely to become a major political issue in the 2010 mid-term elections. Means and methods count huge in the carbon regulation business and there’s no real agreement on them at this time.

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Sunday, February 22, 2009

Time for Frugal Green?

Last fall, McGraw-Hill published my book, Green Building Through Integrated Design. The essential lesson and argument for the book is that design and construction professionals have to learn how to “get green done” on a conventional budget, or we’re just wasting our time. Clients of all kinds: developers, building owners, universities, local governments, etc., aren’t going to give us significantly more budget money to do green or high-performance buildings. So how do we do it? In my book, I talk about how many design teams are approaching integrated design, but the key lesson is that it’s all about “cost transfer,” taking money out of the wasteful part of the budget (which usually means mechanical, electrical and plumbing systems) and putting it into green features, products and systems. The second big lesson is to look for all the costs in a project that can be reduced by adopting green measures. One example: a project in Boston found out that by reducing water use through specifying water-conserving fixtures, they could reduce the size of the required water meter for a new building, which saved them enough money (from charges by the local water utility) to more than pay for the extra cost of all the efficient toilets, urinals and other fixtures! These examples abound, and it’s up to building design and construction professionals to find them for every project, so that the green building revolution can go forward in the new era of “Frugal Green”.

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Sunday, February 08, 2009

NAHB Green Homes Certification Program Shows Progress

The NAHB announcement amounted to a clean sweep of both homebuilder associations and well respected independent certifiers such as EarthCraft Homes in Atlanta, sounding a death knell certainly to the feeble attempts by the Green Globes folks to become the alternative housing standard to LEED. NAHB also announced that its Certified Green Professional� educational designation, had been earned by more than 2,000 builders, remodelers and other industry members. The National Multi-Housing Council has endorsed this standard for its apartment builder members. Will LEED for Homes continue to remain the “gold” standard for residential green home certifications, or will it take a permanent back seat to the powerful NAHB’s standard? One would think that It’s time for the U.S. Green Building Council to decide how serious it is about maintaining LEED for Homes as an alternative to the NAHB standard and to back it with more organizational muscle.

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