The M Files

Last week I had the pleasure of presenting energy performance case histories at the Green Building Association Central Pennsylvania chapter annual technical seminar.

The keynote speaker was Marcus Sheffer of Energy Opportunities. Marcus is well known in U.S. Green Building Council circles as the chair of the USGBC’s Energy & Atmosphere Technical Advisory Group.

His presentation was striking in its lack of the usual LEED marketing spin. He didn’t dance around the problems faced by the USGBC in getting their LEED-certified buildings to exhibit exceptional energy performance.

In his words:”The intent of LEED is too often circumvented”  Meaning, it tends to turn into a chase for prescriptive based points at the expense of its goals of superior design and performance.

Marcus went on to paint a vision of the future, which includes a transition of the LEED-certification system from a prescriptive based to a performance based standard.

His words were music to an energy-performance-metric lover’s ears.

The issue of LEED and performance has been a topic of debate for several years to those at the center of the green building industry. Studies have been conducted and interpreted in every conceivable way.

Some deny that performance problems actually exist. Others cynically blame the design community. I’ve heard some in the design community blame building owners for not understanding what LEED certification actually means with the argument, “LEED certifies buildings, not consumer expectations.”

In my view, that’s a shame and a mistake. Consumers are our clients, and they’re paying good money for their green buildings. Energy high performance should be an expectation, not a bonus.

My personal experience has been for every good LEED energy performance outcome, there’s an equal and opposite bad outcome.

Two recent bad apples are illustrated below. Both of these facilities were designed and constructed under the green, high performance premise of LEED. Both look great on paper; no expenses were spared in ensuring full LEED scorecards. Both could conceivably be taken right out of the pages of GreenSource magazine.

The first example is exhibiting worse energy performance than an average building of its type as data-based in the 2003 Commercial Building Energy Consumption Survey (CBECS 2003) by the EIA. In other words, this brand-new green facility is performing worse than an average facility of similar occupancy built sometime prior to 2003.

The second chart illustrates a second building’s first four months of actual energy performance compared to what was expected during the design phase. It’s not even close. If it continues to trend in this fashion, it will also have first-year energy performance worse than the CBECS 2003 average.

Before we try to fix our broken green building standards, we first need to come to an industry-wide consensus that problems like these not only exist, but pervade the green building industry. As someone who’s been at the center of the building energy conversation for 20 years, that’s certainly been my personal experience.

What’s your reaction to the issue? Do you agree that we have a perception-versus-performance gap? If so, what should we do about it? I’d love to hear what you have to say.