It seems that green building made it to primetime in 2009. Not only are individual projects embracing third party rating systems, the past few years has also seen a meteoric rise in popularity of codifying green as hundreds of cities and towns across the country adopted green elements into their building codes. And, just this January, California became the first state to mandate a state wide green building code.
Despite the hype about the use of sustainable building methods, actual systems performance of green buildings is sometimes neglected and often overlooked. This is because much of the energy and building systems post-occupancy performance evaluations are based on pre and mid construction modeling and calculations. People have finally seriously begun to ask the question: are green buildings meeting their performance expectations?
If a building does not perform as promised, it not only fails to deliver, it could lose its marketing edge, lose its tax or government incentives, and could even be faced with a lawsuit over these failed expectations. Thankfully, this was also the year that these concerns began to be concretely addressed. California’s Building Standards Commission (BSC), the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineer’s (ASHRAE), and the US Green Building Counsel (USGBC) all placed greater emphasis on building performance by including heightened commissioning and mandatory post-occupancy performance evaluations in their rating systems or mandates.
California’s new “CALGreen” building codes place emphasis on the typical areas such as site sustainability, water use efficiency, energy efficiency, indoor environmental quality, air pollution, and materials and resources, but also include the often under emphasized requirement of commissioning. Commissioning is added assurance that all the building’s subsystems for HVAC, plumbing, electrical, fire/life safety, and building security are operating as intended by the owner and as intended by the building architects and engineers. It is a key element in achieving reduced energy levels and ensuring a high performance green building. The BSC recognized this and included in the CALGreen building codes a requirement for a pre-construction commissioning plan as well as the mandatory preparation of a commissioning report recommending post occupancy commissioning and systems operation training.
Another major recent development is ASHRAE’s newly released Standard 189.1, published in conjunction with the Illuminating Engineering Society of North America and the USGBC. The ASHRAE standard was developed with the intention that it will be adopted and incorporated into building codes. Standard 189.1 increases energy savings over the prior commonly used Standard 90.1. It requires that measurement devices with remote communication capability be installed to collect energy consumption data. Energy subsystems like the building’s HVAC system, or elevators are also required to collect and store data if the subsystems collective load exceeds specified thresholds. Data must be collected daily with hourly energy use profiles and must be retained for at least 3 years. This will assist building owners and operators as well as local jurisdictions meet their sustainability targets and is intended to complement LEED and other existing green building rating standards.
Finally, the leading market based rating system developed by the USGBC, LEED, released a new version 3.0 last June which includes enhanced commissioning requirements placing further emphasis on building performance… Stay tuned for part II of this post for more information.
Steve Sacks
Sarah Grilli