I have to admit, as a LEED AP, I’ve been pretty lazy about keeping up to date with changes in the United States Green Building Council’s flagship rating system. A lot of fuss was made about LEED 2009, which supposedly helped rebalance the way points were awarded. True, the 2009 revision did place renewed emphasis on the Energy and Atmosphere category (and de-emphasized things like bike racks, which have come to symbolize what many viewed as a fairly Byzantine rating system), which as a mechanical engineer and energy geek, I’m completely for.
However, it didn’t do much to alleviate one of LEED’s biggest flaws: a lack of performance monitoring. LEED has rightly come under harsh criticism for this, because you can effectively build a platinum building, achieving every point possible on the LEED scale, and then go operate your building with reckless abandon, running up enormous energy bills. In fact, several years back, a study by the New Building Institute showed that many LEED buildings were performing no differently from an energy perspective than code-built buildings (see below). The LEED building stock, on the whole, seems to have significantly lower energy intensity than our commercial building stock, but you can find plenty of cases where the energy use intensity of even LEED Gold certified buildings exceeds that of conventional buildings (again, see the figure below).
This chart, courtesy of the New Buildings Institute, shows the energy intensity of various LEED-certified buildings based on measured data. Note the wide spread in performance, with some LEED buildings even exceeding typical commercial building (CBECS) energy intensity values.
So USGBC has proposed that LEED 2012 will now include a requirement for building operators to share energy performance data with a network of other green building operators so that owners, operators and occupants can view and compare their performance in real time. Rather than just seeing the nice LEED plaque in the entryway of a LEED facility, you might see a heads up display showing how this office building compares to the one down the street. In addition, LEED will require buildings to rectify based on performance data, further emphasizing the crucial occupation/operations phase of a building’s lifecycle. A good synopsis of some of the proposed changes are provided in this article by Fast Company.
For anyone who has been following the LEED rating system at all, this is an enormous change in the way they do business. I sincerely hope that the LEED membership embraces these important additions to the system and ratifies the changes in 2012. As Fast Company correctly notes, it will give LEED much-needed teeth and added credibility, finally sheltering it from at least some of the critiques around gaming the system. It will mean that much more to earn the rating, and that’s good for the whole industry.
