LEED

It’s an engineer’s dream: A 220,000 square-foot office space designed with performance as the ultimate priority. Most building projects start in the mind of an architect and are then passed off to engineers, who have to figure out how to make the building function well, but the new net-zero National Renewable Energy Lab office building, in Golden, Colo., started with the engineering.

So it is that the building is a rather unusual “H” shape, with the lobby area connecting two wings, because the project’s engineers determined that shape would maximize daylight and thus reduce energy needs.

The building is meant to be a national showcase and a teaching tool, in addition to serving its primary function as office space for NREL.

“The overarching goal is to demonstrate that highly energy efficient and marketable net zero buildings can be built using available technologies and techniques today,” Jeff Baker, director of the Office of Laboratory Operations for the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy’s (EERE) said during a webinar about the building’s technologies yesterday. 

California last week became the first state to integrate green building practices, largely based on the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Efficiency and Environmental Design (LEED) standards, into its statewide building codes.

It was a big, Governator-style move, but while the USGBC officially supports CalGreen, and most in the green building world see it as a net-positive step, not everyone is thrilled about it. In fact many architects, engineers and city planners that fully support the integration of green building practices in the building code are concerned about the challenges involved in implementing and enforcing that code — and those are the building professionals who are advocates of green building in the first place.

Economists predict the real estate market will begin to rebound sometime in 2010 as the economy turns. However, real estate experts say the next round will look markedly different from the last one, with the industry adopting practices aimed at creating a sustainable marketplace.

Unlike the last housing cycle when developers aimed higher and higher, ultimately pricing out middle-income workers, home products in a sustainable market would target a mix of incomes, suggests Henry Cisneros, the former secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and chairman of CityView, a national real estate investment and pension fund manager based in Los Angeles.

Cisneros notes that the majority of housing would be priced to attract the largest group of consumers, those earning about 150% of area median income.

Project success would be measured by the “triple bottom line,” its impact on society and the environment, as well as profitability.

By the middle of next year, the nine campuses that make up the nation's largest community college system plan to be completely energy self-sufficient.

It's a huge step, and it will begin saving money immediately.

The Los Angeles Community College District (LACCD) started down this path in 2001, the year voters approved the first part of $5.7 billion in bond funding to renovate the campuses.

The LACCD Board of Trustees was thinking about much-needed modernization work and its first new construction in 35 years, but it was also thinking ahead. It passed a sustainable building policy mandating that all new buildings that use 50% or more of bond funding be LEED certified. The board had previously developed a renewable energy plan that aimed for a minimum 10% renewable energy standard.

At the time, the trustees were afraid that anything beyond that would be too costly, says Larry Eisenberg, executive director of Facilities, Planning and Development for the LACCD.

The system's chancellor and the implementation team saw greater potential, though.

They looked at the campuses' energy costs – around $9 million a year, growing to $10 million by 2010 – and realized that ramping up renewable power would be a money-saving move. The chancellor at the time, Darroch “Rocky” Young, adopted the 100% renewable energy goal as a budgetary measure.

“What began as an environmental policy turned into a budget initiative,” Eisenberg says, “and that’s where it’s been ever since.”

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• Leslie Berliant's blog
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Rumor has it that the US Green Building Council (USGBC) is about to unclog its big backlog of LEED registration certificates. So reports the Huffington Post.

Good news for green developers because that backlog is crazy.

Take New York City. By the end of 2007 -- after four years in the program -- the USGBC had LEED-certified 15 buildings. Meanwhile, the number of projects waiting for approval had swelled to 294.

That’s a ratio of one certification for every 20 registrations -- just five percent. Pretty poor. Especially when you compare it with the UK’s equivalent green building program BREEAM, which boasts a ratio of one in five.

The reported fix?