I am vice president of BuildingGreen, Inc., editor of Environmental Building News, and coeditor of the GreenSpec product directory. I also work with McGraw-Hill Construction on GreenSource magazine, which has earned me a spot on the masthead as executive editor. For the past 5 years I've chaired the Materials and Resources Technical Advisory Group (MR-TAG) for the LEED Rating System. I'm a LEED Faculty Member, which means that I get tapped to lead workshops on LEED (mostly LEED for New Construction and Major Renovations — LEED-NC — but occasionally others). Back in the 1990s I was a principal author of the Applications Reports for the AIA's Environmental Resource Guide that compares the environmental value of different building materials in various applications. I do some consulting and lecturing on sustainable design, with a particular focus on green materials. In addition to running LEED training workshops, I've taught seminars for various USGBC chapters, CSI chapters, state AIA chapters, and private architecture firms. I also serve on the U.S. team for Green Building Challenge, oversee BuildingGreen's management of the U.S. Department of Energy's High Performance Buildings Database project, and generally lead the content development team for Web and software resources at BuildingGreen.com.
Recent Entries by this Author
Energy modeling Q&A: first some answers on cost, and then it's your turn to ask (or answer) some questions.
Chris Schaffner
There is so much confusion about energy modeling--what it should cost, what benefits it offers, how to approach it--that clear statements addressing these questions are like a breath of fresh air.
When I was privy to a private email exchange that included a short treatise on this topic from Chris Schaffner, principal of The Green Engineer in Concord, Massachusetts, I got his permission to share it.
First, the question:
I've often heard that energy modeling generally becomes cost-effective on projects that exceed 50,000 square feet. Do you agree, or is there a better threshold?
And Chris's reply:
Dear friends,
We know that the economic climate in 2011 has continued to be challenging, so we're all the more grateful and flattered that so many of you continue to rely on our tools and resources for insight, guidance, and community.
We're especially honored by the growth we've seen in enterprise licenses to firms and universities, illustrating the value of BuildingGreen Suite for bringing designers and students up to speed on core green building knowledge.
This past year was both challenging and exciting. Our efforts to serve you are continuing on many fronts, including our newly redesigned GreenSpec website, ongoing exploration of the latest topics in Environmental Building News, and steady growth of the amazing LEEDuser community (check out how much help people are getting and giving each other on the forums--it's free!).
With Alex Wilson on sabbatical for eight months, we proved that our team is robust enough to continue producing great resources through his absence. And we're excited to have him back, energized by the break from daily deadlines and motivated to reengage with our various initiatives, including an exploration of resilient design. Our collaboration with the Healthy Building Network extended beyond Pharos; we also joined them in launching the new Health Product Declaration--an open standard for reporting on product ingredients and health hazards.
I called Pete Samaras, Senior Electrical Estimator at DPR Construction, to ask him about job-site lighting practices for our product review on LED jobsite lighting (see LED Systems Provide Huge Energy Savings for Jobsite Lighting, EBN Aug. 2011 and our GreenSpec listing of the Flex SLS system). To make sure he had the latest information, he surveyed four electrical subcontractors via email. Their responses offer a good window into the shifting technologies used to illuminate jobsites--at least those on the scale of the commercial and institutional projects that DPR builds.
Everyone Pete asked responded quickly and gave us permission to share their responses (thank you!) They were: James Goetz, Vice President of Morrow- Meadows Corp., Albert Rutten, Project Executive for Schetter Electric Inc., Richard deButts, Preconstruction Manager for Redwood City Electric, and Robert Valderrama, electrician for Sprig Electric.
1. Has DPR furnished the temp lights for you on the past couple of projects, or did you provide your own temp lighting?
The electrical subs provide temporary lighting, except on some small jobs, for which DPR provides it.
2. Are the lights typically the hung HIDs (high-intensity discharge), or string lights, or tripod mounted floodlights? Where do you typically use each type and why?
A tour of rebuilding in the Ninth Ward of NOLA, with green homes designed by some of the world's leading architects
KieranTimberlake's Special House #9 was one of the first Make It Right homes built. From KT's website: "The basic structure and organization of the house is comparable to the chassis of an automobile fitted with optional components and assemblies that vary the specifics of its function and its appearance."
A highlight of my time in New Orleans for AIA Convention last week was a tour of rebuilding efforts in the Lower Ninth Ward with the staff of BNIM Architects and a few invited guests. BNIM had a large contingent in town to receive their AIA Firm of the Year award, and took the opportunity to show this project to the rest of their team. Bob Berkebile (the “B” in BNIM and an Environmental Building News advisory board member) has been instrumental in these rebuilding efforts since just days after Katrina hit in August 2005.
Numerous organizations have been involved in different aspects of the rebuilding, and their work has intersected in many ways. Leading our tour, along with Bob Berkebile, were representatives of several of those organizations and John Williams, a New Orleans architect whose firm was wiped out in the chaos that followed the storm. Williams has since rebuilt his practice around the rebuilding efforts, including an (unfortunately necessary) specialty in navigating the bureaucratic maze of government processes for claiming meager rebuilding funds.
Crowd-sourced commentary enriches proposed rules for eating building well.
I'm not sure if it was the topic or the all-star panel that drew a crowd to a session entitled "Beyond the Red List" at the recent Living Future conference in Vancouver. Along with other great panelists, Tom Lent of the Healthy Building Network teamed up with Robin Guenther from Perkins+Will to share a strong call to action on toxicity in building materials.
Tom and Robin had brainstormed a list of "Materials Rules" in the manner of Michael Pollan's Food Rules. The rules were posted on the wall, where they enriched the conversation that I facilitated after the presentations (with help from design consultant Mary Davidge and International Living Future Institute VP Eden Brukman). With about 130 people in the room, it was helpful that people could contribute to the conversation in multiple ways. In one mode, people speaking got into an animated debate about whether transparency and better information will be enough to bring about a sea-change in the toxicity of our building materials.
Lots of big news from the 2011 Living Future event in Vancouver, including the winners of the Living City competition.
The 2011 Living Future "unconference" in Vancouver is a hopping, high-energy event. As usual, CEO, host, and MC Jason McLennan has set a high bar with his passion and willingness to push boundaries. Except Jason, all the keynote speakers this year are women, making it a little anticlimactic that the theme of next year's conference is the role of women in green building.
Here's some of the exciting news coming out of the Living Future conference.
Living City contest winners
First, the winners of the Living City design competition have been announced, with Daniel Zelinski and Maximillian Zelinski's reinvention of Paris taking the top prize and $75,000 in prize money (see the photo for some of their concepts). This U.K. firm wowed the judges with their concepts and their graphic presentation, making them a clear choice, according to juror Bill Reed.
We've just released a neat new report on what it costs to achieve specific LEED credits. Based on the current LEED-NC 2009 rating system, "The Cost of LEED" draws on the experience of veteran cost estimators to provide prices for specific measures a project team would consider. The report helps a team understand the implications of LEED on the cost of its own particular project, with lists of "standard" approaches compared to "high performance" options, along with cost premiums for those options.
Over the years we've reported in Environmental Building News and on BuildingGreen.com about various attempts to measure what it costs to get a building LEED certified. Notable among these were:
- The seminal 2003 report by Greg Kats and his team, based on a set of California projects (updated in 2007 with a set of Massachusetts schools, and in 2010 for the book Greening Our Built World);
- The 2004 report "Costing Green" from Davis Langdon, updated in 2007 as "The Cost of Green Revisited" with guidelines and tips on individual credits based on LEED-NC 2.2; and
- A detailed 2004 study by John Amatruda for the U.S. General Services Administration analyzing the cost required to take two prototypical GSA buildings to a LEED-Silver level.
Here's a tool that tries to connect the best available science directly to the international climate change negotiations and commitments, and the politicians are using it!
Perhaps that, in itself, is progress.
"How Does It Work? In the run-up to COP-15, we are scanning UNFCCC submissions and news sources from around the world to collect a list of what we call 'current proposals' — possible scenarios for greenhouse gas emissions by UNFCCC parties. We share our compilation and use the C-ROADS-CP climate simulation to calculate the expected long-term impacts (in terms of GHG concentration, temperature increase, and sea level rise) if those proposals were to be fully implemented." For more info, see the Climate Interactive website.
Rob Watson recently published "Green Building Market & Impact Report," his second annual report on the impact LEED is having in addressing environmental problems. The report highlights the continuing remarkable expansion of LEED: 2009 registrations for new design and construction projects in the U.S. may actually exceed total new construction starts! (This is possible because projects don't typically register when they start construction, and a flurry of projects were registered just before the requirement to use LEED 2009 kicked in, to keep their options open.)
Watson takes note of the shift from whole building construction to Commercial Interior tenant fit-outs (CI) and Existing Buildings: Operations & Maintenance (EBOM) registration and certification. And he compares 2009 certifications to registration numbers from 2006 and 2007 to see what fraction of projects are making it through the system. (In this analysis he assumes a three-year registration-to-certification timeframe for all except LEED-CI projects, for which he assumes two years. I would have given EBOM projects a shorter turn-around as well — in our market analysis for LEEDuser we assumed 18 months.)
Analyzing certification and registration trends is not Watson's main point, however. His focus is on the environmental benefits that follow. And that focus is what really caught my attention. I'm thankful he's taken that on, because it's so easy to forget what LEED was created for in the first place.
So, how is LEED doing at achieving its original goal? Watson explores this question category by category, looking at numbers of projects in each of the various rating systems that have achieved certain credits.
