The project is located in Germany and is built according to german standards and regulations. Leed Online asks us for a document identifying how the local standard used is equivalent to the US standards mentioned. The issue is, in Germany there is no such thing as “prime farmland”, nor do we have an equivalent standard to wetlands. Usually the local urban administration declares certain areas for agricultural or otherwise use in an urban development plan. How could we provide the required proof to fulfil this credit, since we are quite sure that we meet the requirements?

Hello,
We are working on a LEED NC 2009 project in Germany with DES which the thermal plants consist 5 boilers and a cogenerator.

We are thinking to follow the Scandinavian DES protocol to replace Option 2 in the DES v2 guidance. According to 4.1-Equation 1:
PEFdh = ∑Ef,hob(i)*PEFhob(i)+ ∑αh,i*Ef,chp(i)*PEFchp(i) / ∑Qdel,j
The energy inputs in fuel and the delivered heating energy are requested to calculate the total primary energy factor.

The question is, are the energy inputs in fuel (Ef,hob(i), Ef,chp(i)) and the delivered heating energy (∑Qdel,j) the total annual amount or can I take the specific value in kW as planned. So far the DES does not yet exist so we don’t have the annual amounts.

If the total annual amounts shall be used here, then what is the difference between this alternative and the Option 2 in the DES v2, in which the annual energy consumption and the generated energy are also requested to calculate the average heating efficiency.

Any advice is appreciated. Thank you in advance.

Hi,
in every LEED Project we do struggle in obtaining the material costs as many companies refuse to split their invoices in those for material and those for labour.
Question is whether the assumption of 45% default material cost in the total invoice of a contractor would be compliant with credits´ requirements.

We recently had this credit denied based on the fact that our contract did not explicitly state that the 10 month follow-up review is included in the activities of EAc3, even though we provided a confirmation letter that was signed by both parties and stated that we were contracted for both Fundamental and Enhanced Commissioning, including post-construction commissioning activities.
This appears to go above and beyond any requirement I know. If you follow the logic of the reviewer, the contract would have to explicitly name each commissioning task in order to count towards the credit. However, that was not requested, just the 10-month review.
We are now appealing this decision by providing the actual post-construction commissioning report with a timeline that shows that the review was carried out within the 10 months.
No real question here but just sharing our experience and inviting comments.