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.
Posted by Jerry on 02/28/2009 at 05:55 AM
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