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Green Building News
Wednesday, December 06, 2006
Should green buildings be mandated?
According to an article in today’s Washington Post, the Washington, DC, City Council will require private developers of more than 50,000 sq.ft. of new buildings and major renovations to meet the LEED certification standard by 2012. The Council rejected a request to also include the Green Globes standard in the requirement. According to the Post, the city of Pasadena, California, and Montgomery County, Maryland, have adopted similar standards. This raises a question: should green buildings, implying superior environmental performance beyond building code requirements, be mandated by government, or left to the private sector to decide when and where to build green? Is the specter of global warming significant enough to begin requiring all buildings to improve energy and environmental performance dramatically, no matter what the marketplace says? Or, in attempting to do the “right” thing, are local governments prone to overreact? What happens to a building that doesn’t get LEED registered or LEED certified? Does it not get a building permit to start construction, or at the completion of construction, does it not get a “certificate of occupancy”? These are great questions for lawyers to sort out. What do you think?
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World’s Largest LEED Platinum (to be) building opens in Portland
How about a green building that uses 60% less energy and 50% less water than a conventional building, yet is built on a conventional budget? A new building that opened in Portland last week raises the bar for all other green buildings. See the story in the Portland Oregonian, from Sunday, December 3rd. The project team really used an integrated design process and took a lot of calculated risks in providing mechanical and electrical systems that came in 15% below the contractor’s original budget. The project’s developer, Gerding/Edlen Development of Portland, has some 30 LEED registered projects to its credit, mostly speculative office buildings, high-rise apartments and condo towers.
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Saturday, December 02, 2006
LEED vs. Green Globes, Part Two
As much as LEED dominates the commercial and institutional green building certification arena, the opposite is true for the residential green home certification market, which is currently dominated by utilities in some metro areas and local homebuilder associations (HBAs) in others. There are “Built Green” HBA programs licensed in seven states, as well as a strong following for the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) voluntary certification guidelines. Independent programs, such as Build It Green in California are also well established. By one insider count, there are at least 65 green building certification programs around the country. A product of the Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI), Green Globes has formed a close association with the NAHB and must be considered a formidable competitor for the USGBC’s LEED for Homes program, a butterfly that has yet to emerge from the protective cocoon of the current pilot program. When LEED entered the market in 2000, there were no other building certification competitors, so it had an open field to make mistakes and mature as the widely accepted certification it is today. The same will not be true for LEED for Homes when it rolls out a version 2.0 sometime in 2007. It will face an uphill battle for industry acceptance, which it may decide not to fight, in favor of going straight to the home buyer with a coalition of environmental and consumer groups (this is just speculation on my part, but is a strategy that may be adopted in some degree by USGBC.) Insider tip: Look for green home certifications to be a major new battleground for the green building movement over the next 24 months.
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Friday, December 01, 2006
LEED vs. Green Globes, Part One
Recent conversations and developments seem to make it clear that, in comparison with the dominant LEED standard, the Green Globes rating system is going to be primarily a niche player in the commercial and institutional markets. The GSA report to Congress on September 15th, made it clear that the federal government was going to be and remain a strong supporter of LEED certification for its own projects. The addition of nearly 8,000 LEED Accredited Professionals over the last few months, to bring the total to more than 33,000, gives LEED an insurmountable marketing advantage in those hundreds of project meetings that take place each week to discuss project certification goals. After spending nearly $1,000 on workshops, publications and test costs, to say nothing of untold hours of study to pass the exam, most professionals have an emotional commitment to the LEED system and process. This is not to minimize the energetic support for Green Globes in certain quarters, such as Building Design & Construction magazine. Finally, recent activities by the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) to add a “Portfolio management” section to LEED for organizations that build dozens or hundreds of copies of a single prototype each year, have brought the Home Depots, PNC Banks and a host of other retailers into the LEED camp.
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