Question of the Week
Green Building and LEED Certification 2009
According to a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (“EPA”) study, buildings accounted for 39.4 percent of total U.S. energy consumption in 2002. Furthermore, buildings accounted for 67.9 percent of total U.S. electricity consumption in 2002. Buildings in the U.S. also contribute 38.1 percent of the nation’s total carbon dioxide emissions, while building occupants use 12.2 percent of the total water consumed per day. Additionally, on average, Americans spend ninety percent of their time indoors, where pollutants may be two to five times higher and occasionally more than one hundred times higher than outdoor levels. Sources of that indoor air pollution can be from building materials, cleaning supplies, maintenance, and central heating and cooling systems.
With the emerging issues of climate change and sustainability taking off all over the country, it is not surprising in light of the above statistics that one of the focuses is on Green Building. Green Building is the practice of designing buildings that are environmentally friendly and resource-efficient. That includes contemplating environmentally friendly and resource efficient approaches to everything from the selection of the building site, design, construction, operation, maintenance, renovation, and even demolition. The goal of Green Building is to reduce impacts not only to the environment, but also human health. To achieve those goals, Green Building focuses on efficiently using energy and water; protecting occupants’ health and improve productivity; and reducing waste, pollution, and environmental degradation.
Green Building really began to emerge in the U.S. in the 1990s. In 1993, the U.S. Green Building Council (“USGBC”) was founded. The USGBC is a non-profit organization that developed the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (“LEED”) in 1998 for certification of buildings as “green.” Currently, over 3.6 billion square feet of commercial building space is involved with the LEED Green Building certification system according to the USGBC with dozens more projects signing up each day. More than 1,500 buildings have received LEED certification and more than 11,000 are seeking such certification. It is estimated that by 2010 approximately ten percent of all commercial construction starts are expected to be green.
In order to maintain its relevance in the market place, the USGBC wants LEED to evolve. Thus, in keeping with that goal, the USGBC announced LEED 2009 and welcomed public comments until June 22, 2008. LEED 2009 is expected to debut in January 2009 and will reorganize the commercial rating systems by consolidating, aligning, and updating the ratings system into one system that’s “simpler and more elegant and committed to continuous improvement,” according to the USGBC. The LEED point system will be allocated differently and reweighed and the entire process will be flexible to adapt to changing technology, account for regional differences, and encourage innovation.
The first major change in LEED 2009 is the consolidation, alignment and updating of all eight existing LEED rating systems into the “most effective common denominator.” This new alignment across applicable rating systems provides a pool of prerequisite/credits for all LEED Ratings Systems. Where needed multiple versions of prerequisites/credits were retained in an effort to address market needs. A much needed scrubbing of the Credit Interpretation Rulings (“CIRs”) was also incorporated into LEED 2009.
LEED 2009 introduces a re-weighting of credits in the LEED Rating System. Re-weighting in the LEED context means the redistribution of the available points in LEED so that a given credit’s point value more accurately reflects its potential to mitigate the negative environmental impacts of a building or promote the positive impacts. This new weighting system will replace the previous point allocation system when it becomes effective in January 2009. The new weighting system also places a heavy emphasis on credits that reduce a building’s carbon footprint. As a result some credits have lower points than previously awarded and some credits have dropped to almost negligible value. The goal of the USGBC is to eventually phase out lower valued credits in favor of more effective credits. Regardless of these changes, the weighting system does not change the LEED language. Thus, those already familiar with the LEED credit system will not have to relearn an entirely new system language.
The next significant change for LEED 2009 is the regionalization of credits. The present form of LEED is uniformly applied across the country with all point values achievable across all regions in the U.S. In order to enhance the flexibility of LEED, the USGBC proposed that LEED 2009 would account for regional adaptations. To that end, LEED 2009 will incorporate Regional Bonus Credits to increase the value of credits that address environmental areas of concern in a particular project’s region. The local USGBC Chapters and Regional Councils will play a significant role in developing regionalized credits for LEED.
Finally, according to the USGBC, the goal of LEED 2009 is to move the LEED program into a continuous improvement cycle. While that does not mean that the USGBC will treat the LEED program as a building code, LEED will continue to develop in a cycle the more closely resembles a building code’s continuous improvement cycle that industry is accustomed to. Thus, LEED will evolve on a set-predictable schedule for the foreseeable future with the introduction of LEED 2009.
The current trends in state legislation and policy initiatives in climate change and sustainability are likely here to stay. Because of the statistics discussed early with regard to energy usage and the carbon footprint of buildings in the U.S., it is no surprise that Green Building is on the rise.
These trends are also likely to trickle down to local government initiatives with requirements in local building codes for sustainable development like Green Building. The USGBC is helping LEED the way into our Green Building future with LEED 2009.For more information, please contact Robert Malinoski.
