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What's Happening from Environmental Building News

August 1, 2007

Report Says Green Still Doesn't Drive Building Cost

This graph from “Cost of Green Revisited” shows the cost per square foot of 60 academic buildings—classrooms, computer labs, and faculty offices on higher education campuses across the country. The 17 LEED projects that are either certified or pursuing certification are distributed widely in the mix.

Having updated their influential 2004 study of the cost of green building [see EBN Vol. 13, No. 8] with new data, Lisa Fay Matthiessen and Peter Morris of Davis Langdon still come to the same conclusion. There are so many huge cost factors in construction that it is not possible to detect any statistically significant difference between the cost of green and non-green buildings, they report in “Cost of Green Revisited,” released in July 2007. Based on an analysis of the budgets for 221 projects, of which 86 were pursuing some level of LEED certification, the report concludes that “buildings cannot be budgeted based on averages,” leaving open the question of whether, for any given building, a green agenda affects its cost.

To reduce the potential variables involved, the authors adjusted building cost figures to eliminate the effects of timing (changing prices based on market factors) and location. Within the set of green buildings that they analyzed, the authors found that how green goals were achieved had a bigger impact on cost than the ultimate level of performance. For example, they encountered a number of LEED Silver buildings that cost more than comparable LEED Gold buildings, largely because the Silver-rated buildings were more likely to use expensive technologies such as photovoltaics to achieve energy points. A greater concern for climate-change impacts, however, is the finding that many of the projects minimized their investment in energy-conserving strategies and failed to exceed the minimum energy performance requirement, in spite of the evidence that, with integrated design, good energy performance is achievable within a conventional budget.

Also included in the reports is a credit-by-credit analysis of the feasibility and costs associated with achieving LEED points, including descriptions of the design approaches and technologies most often employed for each credit. This analysis was updated to reflect changes instituted with LEED for New Construction version 2.2. The report concludes with a short section on how to budget for green buildings; not surprisingly, it advocates a comprehensive budget model from the earliest design phases. This section fleshes out the philosophy embodied in these tidbits: “The key point to remember is that sustainability is a program issue rather than an added requirement. … The first question in budgeting should not be ‘How much more will it cost?’ but ‘How will we do this?’“

– Nadav Malin

For more information:

Lisa Matthiessen
Davis Langdon
www.davislangdon.com/USA/Research/ResearchFinder/2007-The-Cost-of-Green-Revisited/

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