“They had no idea their M&V report was telling them their building was a dog, “says Frankel. “There was no context.” Within a day, that building owner had their design team on the phone and they set about discovering what wasn’t operating properly. Within a few months, they had reduced their energy use by 30 percent. While just a single anecdote involving one participant in the study, it demonstrates the fundamental disconnect—between predicted and quantifiable performance—that still pervades the industry.
The USGBC is continuing the study with the NBI, seeking the reasons behind both over- and underperforming building sin the LEED program. “We’re trying to pin down specifics,” says Owens. “There are lessons both ways.” Loftness concludes, “There’s a major handoff problem between engineering excellence and construction, and management excellence.”
Pluses and Minuses
While only about half his firm’s clients choose to participate in LEED, Stephen Kieran, a partner of KieranTimberlake Associates in Philadelphia, finds that the decision increases their aspirations in a verifiable way. Two of the firm’s recent buildings?one for Sidwell Friends School in Washington, D.C., and the other for Yale University—achieved a platinum rating. “Yale wanted a silver building, but we were able to get it [to platinum] without a lot of extra money,” he says. But Kieran doesn’t applaud the additive nature of the LEED system. “You get points by adding additional features to the building,” he says, whereas KieranTimberlake prefers a holistic process, looking carefully at orientation, shading, and sophisticated envelopes. To achieve energy efficiency, “We build [it] into the form of the building without adding horsepower or material,” Kieran says.
Even Loftness, a USGBC board member, acknowledges that the current Version 2.2 of LEED allows certified buildings to skirt energy performance, since only 10 of the 69 credits are what she calls “hard-nosed energy credits.”
“Some poor performers have gone for other stuff—air quality, or land use, or transportation, or other good things,” she says. “They may be major contributors to our drive for environmental sustainability without having hit the energy checklist.” The next evolution—LEED 2009—addresses this issue by creating mandatory energy credits and increasing the percentage of energy credits within the overall framework of the rating system. (Under 2.2, 17 out of a possible 69 points are “Energy & Atmosphere” credits—that is, a little less than 25 percent. Under 2009, it’s 35 out of 110, or almost 32 percent.)
Building Performance Research
“Right now, there’s a lot of emphasis on high-performance design, but we don’t have a comprehensive feedback loop for evaluating that performance and learning from it,” says Kieran. And at the moment, we’re not on a sustainable path to change that.
“The federal investment in building science research is impoverished,” says Loftness, who notes that only 0.2 percent of the federal research budget even touches on issues like water, air, and energy as they affect the built environment. Science and medicine are funded by the federal government because they’re considered fundamental to the nation’s future. The USGBC maintains a $2 million research endowment, but primary research is not a goal of the organization, according to Owens. Still, it is trying to extend its reach by funding studies with matching on a greater than one-to-one basis for anything it supports.
Loftness points to another thorny problem. “We cannot baseline our buildings,” she says. “It’s a building science and an engineering problem.” EPAct, the Energy Policy Act, mandates all federal agencies to baseline their buildings, without establishing what that baseline is.
Because energy consumption in federal buildings is often a complex brew of electricity, steam, gas, and chilled water—generally metered in different ways, across multiple buildings and/or sites—establishing a simple metric for each is extraordinarily difficult. The NBI’s Frankel notes that contemporary building automation systems would seem to provide an answer, but the average system now creates as much data in 20 minutes as Shakespeare’s collected works. “When was the last time your building manager had enough time to sit down and read Shakespeare?” he asks.
The NBI is trying to establish key performance indicators. “What are the 10 or 20 data points that allow building operators on a daily basis to understand what’s going on?” asks Frankel. And, more importantly for the industry, how can architects understand what their input provided, and how tenant and owner activities affect building performance in real-world situations?
