Greening the Mormon Empire
I taught two workshops for AIA and SMPS yesterday in Salt Lake City. Found out that the first LEED Gold building in Utah has just been completed. Talked with one leading architect about his experience with green building projects. The first three buildings, he said, cost 5% to 7% more. He expects the next three projects to have a 3% to 5% price premium. After that, costs of green buildings should fall back into the “noise” level. Part of this expected price drop is growth of a supply chain for green materials and technologies among established building materials suppliers and vendors, as well as the effect of competition for new business. This experience is typical for many architects and developers. There is a “learning curve,” after all, for most new technologies and new approaches. In manufacturing, this learning curve phenomenon is well known: the price per unit produced falls by a predictable amount, say 15%, for each doubling of cumulative production. A IPod that costs $60 to make (hypothetically) for the first five million units, will cost $51 for the next 5 million, about $44 for the next 10 million, etc.
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