Will the New List of LEED Innovation Points Lead to Greener Buildings — or Just More Points?

Innovation point for the Hearst Tower in New York: reduced steel in the structure.

One way that teams are getting more sophisticated is in knowing which innovation points are the best bet. It's now well established, for example, that certain specific activities — like entering a case study in DOE's Database — earn you a relatively easy innovation point for "occupant education." To find that information, however, you had to talk to someone in the know, or dig through the online database of credit interpretation requests (CIRs). The scorecard that USGBC publishes listing the points each project has achieved identifies the innovation points by name, but it doesn't provide any details on what was done to achieve those points.

For years, designers have been pleading for a more accessible list of previously approved innovations. Why force everyone to reinvent the wheel? If the point of LEED is to help the industry as a whole innovate its way to greener buildings, shouldn't USGBC be doing all it can to share that information?

As far as I know, no one at USGBC disagreed with that argument, but the perpetually over-extended information technology (IT) staff there had more urgent fish to fry. Well, it seems that they've finally come up with a way to share this information. It's not pretty or slick, but it does serve the purpose of getting the information out there. This 28-page PDF file lists about 200 innovation points achieved (or approved as CIRs), with summaries of what was done to achieve them. Presumably it will be updated over time.

As a long-overdue first effort, this file is certainly welcome. It would be more useful if it identified which rating system each innovation credit was achieved in — some of them only make sense from the perspective of an existing facility, so there is not point in teams working on new projects wasting time on them. And others just list actual credits, such as the LEED for Commercial Interiors credit 4.5 on low-emitting furniture, presumably because this credit earned an innovation point in some other version of LEED, where it isn't listed as a credit. But USGBC is trying to de-emphasize the different flavors of LEED as it moves towards it's One LEED vision, so we may be stuck with those confusing listings for now.

The main point is that teams now have a handy new resource to mine for possible innovations in their projects. Let's hope that those translate into more real, beneficial innovations and environmental benefits, and not just into more points.