Newsletter // GreenerBuildings News :: October 15, 2009 :: Blame Throwing, Spotlighting Modular Designs, Energy Report Cards and More

I came across a Tweet about "When LEED falls short," which linked me to a blog about the trials and tribulations of a building owner with some of its LEED buildings not performing as expected. My interest was more than a little piqued since the building owner in question was my alma mater Dartmouth College, where I was this summer for my 25th reunion.

According to the college's chief engineer, "[the LEED Certified buildings] are not performing as well as we would have hoped or expected based on energy modeling or design performance parameters that the design teams would have created during the design process."

What is striking about this comment and about the (albeit pained) tenor of the blog piece is that LEED is to blame! Forget the architect, forget the engineers, forget the contractors . . . LEED is to blame. I guess it's sort of like, "My bank account can't be overdrawn, I still have checks left!"

I'll let you in on a little secret: LEED lives in my basement. He's kind of ornery because there's not a lot of natural light down there. So when I let him out, he tends to cause mischief like messing with energy models to make them look better than they are and disconnecting designers' critical faculties as they think about what is actually going to happen in buildings going after certification. He's particularly nasty with subcontractors: making product and equipment substitutions in the middle of the night.

The other striking comment in the source article from The Dartmouth student newspaper (which, in an incredible scoop, blew LEED's nonprofit cover, exposing it as a "for profit accreditation organization") was that "We try to build high-performance buildings . . . We don't let LEED drive the decision process." Hmmm, I guess the high-performance building goal is why Dartmouth chose to only go for 4 energy points on its Silver projects. . . "LEED" must have escaped from the basement and convinced them not to go after 10 points.

Now in Dartmouth's case, and many of the buildings certified under versions 2.0 and 2.1, LEED (not my fictitious gremlin) does share some blame in the projects' failure to achieve better energy performance. Prior to version 2.2, LEED benchmarked energy savings to the ASHRAE-90.1-1999 standard, which was notoriously weak, but the best thing available at the time. The 2007 version of ASHRAE is 30 percent more energy saving than the 1999 standard, and LEED Version 3 requires projects to exceed this by at least 10 percent as a prerequisite.

The other area where LEED and ASHRAE didn't do very well in the early years was in plug loads, which were essentially excluded from the standards. We are now dealing with a modern campus that is totally wired with 17-inch plasma screens and energy-chewing high-def video games on top of the requisite ear-splitting stereo systems, etc. In all likelihood, none of this was taken into account in Dartmouth's energy modeling.

And let's be frank: Most (not all) energy modeling in the U.S. still sucks. The models themselves are not very good. No one has put much money into developing them or recalibrating the algorithms based on actual detailed building performance measurement.

And, until LEED was launched, the only place energy modeling was done regularly was in California because of the performance option in Title 24, but even there most projects opted for prescriptive code compliance. The modelers themselves tend to be junior engineers with relatively little experience, so they can't really tell when they're experiencing GIGO failure, mainly because most dynamic modeling still occurs after the building has been completed, which is exactly the wrong time to do it. Of course, if LEED mandated the smart way to do it (Hint: beginning with design development), people would complain it's "too prescriptive."

We've got a great lineup this week starting with the new National Grid program in Boston to compare buildings' energy use with its local market peers. In just the last year, a pilot peer-reporting project in California showed a 2.5 percent decrease in energy use. Wells Fargo also just announced that it would reduce its U.S. carbon footprint by 20 percent, but why stop in the U.S., Wells Fargo? You're No. 1 in your industry, go for the whole ball of dirt! Props to the state of California for certifying 25 LEED projects and, on the design front, to the winners of the Lifecycle Building Challenge for going to modular, precision-built designs. Definitely the way to go.

This week's Look-Grandpa-I-picked-up-the-$20-bill-you-said-was-fake-but-it's-real! award goes to the Climate Corps for saving over $50 million in energy in just one summer! I mean, heck, if MBAs can find this much energy savings, just think what people who actually know something about buildings can find . . . If only the damned MBAs in the head office would let them! 

Rob Watson
Executive Editor, GreenerBuildings.com
You can reach Rob at rob.watson@greenerworldmedia.com or follow him on Twitter @KilrWat.

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