On the Meter

IMAGE COURTESY OF THE NATIONAL BUILDING INSTITUTE

A quarter of sampled LEED-rated buildings were found to perform significantly below original design projections, according to a National Building Institute study.

As noted, metering and submetering technology will play a significant role in v4-rated buildings.

Emphasizing the very key role that metering plays in indicating if a building is actually performing in line with projections, Chakraborty points to an eye-opening New Buildings Institute study, “Energy Performance of LEED for New Construction Buildings,” conducted back in 2008 and commissioned by the USGBC with help from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).¹

In charting the measured versus modeled energy use intensity (EUI) of LEED-certified buildings, NBI discovered that LEEDcertified buildings were performing 25 to 30 percent better than the national average. But on the other hand, a decent percentage of certified buildings were not performing at the level to which they were designed.

In particular, measured EUIs for a quarter of the sampled projects were significantly worse than design projections with a number of those buildings even coming in below the energy code baseline. With v4 buildings being held much more accountable for measured energy consumption, plug loads are going to become much more of an issue. In fact, according to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, plugged-in equipment such as computers and copy machines can account for as much as 30 percent of the building’s total energy use. Consequently, any technology or best practice that helps reduce plug loads is sure to gain traction.

Another significant change to v4 is the promotion of Demand Response from a pilot program to a full-fledged credit. To earn this credit, a project must shed at least 10 percent of its estimated peak electricity demand through a DR program. And now that building automation systems and submetering technology has matured to a certain point, there are much fewer technological hurdles to reckon with.

Although DR has become fairly common for industrial and manufacturing facilities to help relieve electrical grid demand during peak hours, it has yet to be widely adopted by commercial buildings in dense urban settings. In addition, the utility company still holds many of the cards in determining whether a particular facility qualifies for its program and whether it’s willing to offer any incentives for enrolling.

“In my opinion, it is a credit which needs careful research and study, and a mandatory consultation with the respective utility company before pursuing,” says Chakraborty.

Although Chakraborty anticipates that enrolling in DR programs will not be without hiccups, particularly in smaller cities, he applauds the new credit and is hopeful that it will drive DR programs. To better inform specifiers and end-users about DR, the Demand Response Partnership Program between the USGBC and Environmental Defense Fund can be very helpful.²

A Look at Lighting

Clements also explains that the majority of ASHRAE 90.1-2010 energy savings, as compared to 2007, are centered around lighting. In particular, a 17 percent reduction in lighting power density will be required in tandem with increased implementation of lighting controls. Furthermore, bi-level switching—where alternate rows, fixtures or lamps are separately circuited and independently controlled— has also become a new LEED requirement.

“There will have to be more emphasis on building siting, orientation and its effect on lighting systems,” says Saad. “Lighting uses a lot of energy and also creates waste heat which drives HVAC sizing and use, so design teams will have to be innovative at communicating the synergistic effects of daylighting—such as reduced heating load and improved indoor environment—whose value is not always readily apparent in value engineering discussions.”

Another noted change is an updated daylighting credit prioritizing spatial daylight autonomy (sDA), which reflects advancements in daylighting modeling. Although the more simplistic illuminance calculations for specific points within a year-long cycle can still be applied, designs which utilize sDA will be in a position to receive more points. Defined as the percentage of the work plane that is higher than 300 lux, or 28 footcandles, at least 50 percent of occupied hours, sDA is considered to be a more accurate assessment of quality daylighting. That being said, the metric does have a tendency to encourage overglazing, so to counter this, v4 also requires glare simulations.

In the Light Pollution category, v4 has an updated performance-based option drawing from the International Dark Sky Association’s Model Lighting Ordinance in addition to a new Illuminating Engineering Society of North America Backlight, Uplight, and Glare (BUG) rating and calculation method. For v4’s new prescriptive option, specifiers can match the BUG ratings for assorted fixtures with the needs of their lighting zone.

Every Drop Counts

IMAGE COURTESY OF USGBC

The introduction of new LEED credits can be directly linked to the availability of products to fulfill those requirements. As shown here, a spike in green cleaning products occurred shortly following the release of LEED-EB v2008, which made green cleaning a prerequisite to certification.

Moving on to updated water conservation requirements, Chakraborty relates, “I am particularly impressed with the new water efficiency requirements in LEED v4, especially mandating outdoor water use reduction, whole-building level water metering and sharing the data with USGBC for five years, as well as the inclusion of cooling tower process water savings within the indoor water use prerequisite.”

Chakraborty likes the fact that the Cooling Tower credit encourages projects to perform a chemical analysis of the blowdown water and maximize water cycles to the cooling tower. By analyzing and cycling back blowdown water below certain chemical levels, as opposed to immediately draining it from the cooling tower, he says that thousands of gallons of water can be saved.

Expanding way beyond low-flow fixtures, which incidentally will have to be Water- Sense labeled, v4 also takes into account process water use from other equipment such as dishwashers, washing machines, commercial kitchen equipment, and laboratory and medical equipment.

By evaluating a project’s overall water budget, Lorenz anticipates that this will require more of a more holistic design strategy in place of point chasing.

As with energy, water metering will play a key role as a new prerequisite. “Building occupants and facilities management are rarely connected with the water impacts of their actions and management,” says Lorenz. “When the reality is ‘what gets measured gets managed,’ this prerequisite will arm building users and managers with the information they need to reduce their water use.”

Another interesting semantic change is the fact that the term stormwater has been replaced with rainwater. As Schaffner explains in USGBC’s webinar, “rainwater is viewed more as a resource, whereas stormwater connotes something dirty that one must get rid of.”

Although Baum is encouraged by the water efficiency updates, she is concerned that some of the changes won’t be favorable to healthcare facilities. “My primary criticism is that there are five points available for domestic plumbing fixture water reduction in hospitals, but healthcare projects today typically can achieve no more than two to three of those points, based on code requirements and plumbing fixtures available on the market. I would have liked to have seen those extra points be put to something more worthwhile.”

Full Disclosure

“The topic that has the entire building materials industry shaken,” as Chakraborty describes it, is unprecedented Building Product Disclosure and Optimization credits, essentially requiring building product manufacturers to tell all.

While project teams are very pleased about the prospect of knowing exactly what kinds of substances they are potentially putting into their buildings, manufacturers and suppliers have traditionally been hesitant about furnishing such information.

“The reality in our marketplace is that most construction products are not patented or patentable, so most manufacturers live in a world of trade secrets,” explains Lucas Hamilton, manager, building science applications, CertainTeed, Philadelphia. “It’s hard to open up your books to LEED and trust that they will guard the secrets of where the product comes from, who your suppliers are, how the product is made and how far it had to travel.”

Recognizing this quandary, the USGBC made a big effort to work together with the manufacturing community to come up with a mutually agreeable approach to transparency. The answer, says Hamilton, is the idea of using independent, trusted, third-party organizations to perform the product evaluations and report the results in a way that provides the necessary information while protecting manufacturers’ privacy.

Because this new EPD requirement is a groundbreaking move toward driving product disclosure, the USGBC felt it necessary to reward the specification of building products with EPDs, regardless of what those EPDs reveal. In other words, the credit does not judge the actual material and chemical make-up of a building product and therefore, many are concerned that this may spur greenwashing.

Clarifying the credit’s intent, USGBC Media Associate Jacob Kriss explains, “The purpose of this is to accelerate the availability of environmental impact data in the market for consumers to use when selecting products.”

Kriss also points out that a second option within the EPD credit does award an additional point for specifying products that have a demonstrated an environmental impact below industry average for that particular product type.

Another industry concern has been the lack of standardization amongst the assorted industry standards and tools available for product transparency reporting. To address this, the USGBC recently sponsored a task force to harmonize the different tools and assessment systems, drawing funds from a $3 million Google grant.

“Their work is already helping to sort out the relationships between several organizations in this space whose work is very complementary,” reports Perry. “From where I sit, it looks like the industry is rallying around transparency as an idea whose time has come.”

While many in the building products industry are still grumbling about this daunting task—which involves things like assembling detailed product ingredient data, reporting material extraction information and assessing the environmental impacts of all aspects of product manufacturing and transport from cradle to grave—others are encouraging.

“It will be difficult for manufacturers initially, but it is achievable,” assures Ronald Collis, AIA, LEED AP, senior associate, KPS Group, Birmingham, Ala. “It wasn’t that long ago that reporting VOCs and recycled content was a big deal. In time, LCAs and EPDs will become the norm, and manufacturers will be using them to market their products; a few already do.”

In a similar vein, UL Environment Product Manager Paul Firth asserts that manufacturers have been researching their product life cycle and business supply chains for years, and should have the necessary data on hand to begin an LCA.

One of the initial steps of this process already underway is the development of Product Category Rules (PCR) for manufacturers within each building materials industry to adhere to as they develop EPDs. For example, the concrete industry has already gotten a jump start on this with the National Ready Mixed Concrete Association providing third-party validation services for various concrete related products.

Ultimately, Lorenz envisions a sink-or swim type of scenario where the companies adapting the most rapidly to meet growing market demand will thrive, while those who hesitate will be left behind.

Taking a look at how some manufacturers are handling this new reality, CertainTeed has benefitted from the experience of its parent company, Saint-Gobain, which is headquartered in Europe where EPDs are already much more established, according to Hamilton.

Meanwhile, Construction Specialties (C/S) has been actively working toward product transparency with McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry and an ISO 14001 certifier. Credited as the first building materials company to produce an on-product ingredient label, C/S has also been working with the Cradle-to-Cradle Products Innovation Institute for several years.

“I’m personally happy to see the needle in the materials category moving away from single attributes and toward both environmental and human health,” says Curt Fessler, LEED AP BD+C, marketing director, Construction Specialties, Muncy, Penn.

While product disclosure is a strong step in the right direction, Lorenz cautions that time, expense and effort required to develop LCAs and EPDs will likely trickle down to the price of production and require product changes across many companies and suppliers.

Architects and designers should also anticipate getting hit with a flood of information as manufacturers start releasing more detailed product data.

“Much education will be needed for the A&D community to understand the data that will be available to help specifiers not view it out of context,” explains Josh Jacobs, manager, UL Environment Technical Information and Public Affairs.

Integrated to Integrative

In promoting a higher level of building team collaboration during a project’s early stages, v4 has thoughtfully changed its language from “integrated” to “integrative” with a new Integrative Process Credit.

As Holley Henderson, LEED Fellow, founder of H2 Ecodesign and member of the LEED Steering Committee, explains in the “Key Concepts & Strategies” webinar, that “integrated” implies something has an end, whereas the idea of “integrative” connotes an iterative, ongoing process which continues all the way through to building occupancy.

As opposed to painfully value engineering things out of a project, v4 prefers the language, “continuous value optimization” to communicate the idea of optimizing the building design in a more positive light.

“This is a much needed change,” says Saad. “While IPD increases onsite commitment from multiple disciplines, it also helps reinforce the overall goal and success of the project.”

One of the ideas behind the integrative process is soliciting input from folks who actually use the building, not just the owner. In addition to building occupants, facility managers are often an untapped resource and can offer valuable post-occupancy insights to better inform the design and construction process.

However, the key is to bring all the players in early. “By applying the integrative process, it allows teams to make early decisions about the design of the project that affect not only the energy use, but how you site the building, orientation, massing, the envelope, the sun angles, etc.,” explains Simon in the USGBC webinar.

Ultimately, it’s all about shifting the way that design teams view building projects from a piece-meal type of approach toward a much more holistic view. It’s a matter of systems thinking and understanding how all the parts and pieces work together, says Schaffner.

Moving Forward

Despite the concerns that v4 is raising the bar too far and too fast, overall, the industry is applauding the USGBC’s bold upgrade of the rating system and commending the organization for its industry leadership.

“Each new version of LEED builds on the lessons learned from previous experience and uses those lessons to inform the next iteration and raise the bar. LEED v4 is no different and is the next step in the evolution of sustainable design,” observes Collis.

“Albeit, there will be some initial frustrations and drawbacks, but with time it will all prove to be worth the effort,” adds Chakroaborty. “We are in for some exciting times ahead.”

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