News Nugget

LEED Leaders Seeking to Close ‘Gaps’ In the Program

By Courtney Lowery, 9-09-09

	The Northern Plains Resource Council building in Billings is one of Montana's higher profile LEED buildings. Photo by David Nolt.

The overseers of the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, or LEED, program are hoping new data collecting guidelines can help seal up some of the gaps in the certification process by better measuring a structure’s total environmental performance, instead of just going by piecemeal benchmarks.

The U.S. Green Building Council, which parents the LEED program, announced the changes two weeks ago, mentioning in a press release that the, “initiative complements the announcement earlier this year that will require ongoing performance data from buildings as part of their certification under the latest version of LEED and beyond.” (Click here for the full press release as a PDF.)

In the New York Times Green Inc. blog this week, Mary Ann Lazarus, the director of sustainable design for HOK, a global architectural firm says the new data collection standards showcases that LEED is an always-evolving program that will bend and flex as it grows up. She says, “So many holes — such as earning points for basically cosmetic touches — have already been closed,” Ms. Lazarus said. “This should result in the closing of even more gaps, more holes.”

LEED has always been the target of some criticism and is often at the center of the debate about what is “green” in architecture. (Our discussions at both NewWest.Net’s Real Estate and Development in the Northern Rockies and Designing the New West almost always find their way to the ups and downs of LEED.)

USGBC LEED Senior Vice President, Scot Horst acknowledged the criticism in the announcement, which reads:

Numerous things affect the ability of a building to deliver high performance, including energy modeling tools, properly timed energy models, quality building commissioning, proper goal setting/benchmarking, and coordination between design and operation. The biggest issue by far is how the people use the building day to day: Do they forget to turn out the lights when they leave the room? Leave the water running in the sink? Do the facility managers have protocols for checking automatic controls? Do they know when those controls are malfunctioning?

“Plenty of people are content to simply point to these longstanding issues without offering a constructive way to address them. We’re going to take them on and engage practitioners and thought leaders alike in
establishing a national roadmap to optimize building performance,” Horst said.

For a little background, read Richard Martin’s story from New West last year on the many shades of LEED and more recently, a good piece in the New York Times about how in some cases, LEED buildings are not as airtight as they should be.

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