Poison pill pushed by illegal lobbyists, or exciting, bipartisan energy bill that could change everything? It could be up to you.

Meet the "strategic advocate" behind Green Globes. The president of this organization is also Green Buidling Initiative's vice president for federal outreach—and claims she doesn't need to register as a lobbyist. Screen capture from SAS website.We’ve been keeping an eye on the sweeping Energy Savings and Industrial Competitiveness Act (PDF), introduced by Senators Jeanne Shaheen (D–NH) and Rob Portman (R–Ohio).

The common-sense bill, likely to come to the Senate floor any day now, enjoys broad support across the political spectrum. It would boost the national model energy code for both homes and commercial buildings, support commercial retrofits with financing help, and develop training programs for green building jobs.

Turning waste into a unique architectural product, Coldspring and Jason F. McLennan have teamed up on a new dimensional stone product.

Photo: ColdspringAs the founder and CEO of the International Living Future Institute and its influential Living Building Challenge, Declare product database, and Living Future unConference, Jason F. McLennan has been busy setting a high bar for “green.” Now the former BNIM architect has crossed over into product design, as he is set to announce tomorrow the launch of a unique line of sustainable dimension stone products called Earth Measure, in a collaboration with Coldspring, one of the nation’s largest natural stone providers.

In a world in which green products are defined by recycled content and low VOCs, natural stone has arguably gotten short shrift, as we noted recently in Environmental Building News, in Stone, The Original Green Building Material. Stone is simply cut from the earth and processed., It emits no VOCs or hazardous airborne pollutants, it is water-resistant, will outlive most buildings, and can be reused after the structure is no longer usable. How can you build on that pedigree?

How about turning the relatively small amount of quarry waste produced by stone manufacturers into a valuable product? While working with Coldspring as a consultant, McLennan recognized that the offcuts from stone processing still had value beyond landscaping and aggregate, and with Cold Spring’s corporate goal of creating zero waste from processing, a partnership was born.

Cool your super-efficient jets, green building world. We still have no idea what GSA is going to do about LEED.

As GSA goes, so goes the federal government? Maybe...maybe not.
Photo Credit: Shalom Baranes Associates

It’s been a long and confusing year for people who track federal green building policies.

Between the military’s LEED battle and the loooong interagency review by the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA)—both of which are sure to be complicated by sequester and politics in ways we don’t yet understand—we’ve had newsroom motion sickness for months.

A Friday press release from the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), republished in Building Design + Construction and covered by Lloyd Alter at Treehugger, unfortunately hasn’t brought clarity to the conversation.

Whole-building LCA is about to get really big in LEED and elsewhere. It's a great tool, as long as you understand its limitations.

As part of its "Journey to Deep Green," international construction firm Skanska is tracking embodied carbon of the core-and-shell projects it builds for its real estate development arm. Rather than relying only on available LCA data, which are just estimates and averages, the group is tracking actual transportation miles of both materials and workers, measuring the amount of energy used for onsite equipment and lighting, and carefully calculating total waste generation and waste transport. That level of detail is not found in a typical LCA, and gathering the data is a lot of work.
Photo Credit: Skanska Commercial Development

Are you designing the world’s greenest building?

If so, have your model line up here with all the others that have laid claim to the title. That’s right: single-family homes to the left, everyone else to the right. Today we’re finally going to settle this!

As soon as the bell sounds, start entering all your building’s materials into this hand-held life-cycle assessment device. I hope you all remembered to bring your carefully tracked site-visit mileage and the spreadsheets showing carbon released from the soil during construction? Also your energy models and decommissioning plans? GO!

And the winner is…

OK, OK, this would never work: buildings are complex, and there are just too many variables and unknowns. Also, you could never fit all the “world’s greenest” building designs into one room.

Yet to hear some people talk about the hottest new sustainable design trend—life-cycle assessment, or LCA—you would think it was the one and only methodology we need to determine whether a building product or a whole building is sustainable.

That’s ridiculous, and we explore why—along with what LCA does really well—in this month’s EBN feature article, “Whole-Building Life-Cycle Assessment: Taking the Measure of a Green Building.”

Below are five things to keep in mind when using LCA in your practice.

Air-to-air heat pumps are getting more popular as a primary heat source in colder climates. Here’s how to get the most from your system.

[Editor's Note: This guest post comes to us courtesy of Peter Talmage, P.E., an energy and design consultant and an instructor in the Renewable Energy & Energy Efficiency program at Greenfield Community College.]

I have heated my various homes with wood since 1975. It was always a love/hate relationship. The wood fuel was “free” off my land, but burning it was a very dirty business in many ways.

This Fujitsu 3/4-ton model 9RLS is in its third season as the primary heater for our 1,500 ft2 home in Northfield, Massachusetts. The interior unit is 18" off the floor, and certain creatures like that very much.
Photo Credit: Peter Talmage

Mini-splits in cold climates? Yes we can!

Three years ago, I installed a ¾-ton Fujitsu model air-source mini-split heat pump to heat my historic 1790 cape home here in Northfield, Massachusetts. It has been a great success.

During the winter of 2010–2011, the heater for my 1,500 ft² home consumed 1,757 kWh from October 2010 to June 2011. For the warmer winter of 2011–2012, the usage was only 1,247 kWh from September 2011 to April 2012.

So far this winter, from October 2012, to March 23, 2013, the usage has been 1,501 kWh. I have a 5.4 kW PV array that supplies about 200% of my electrical consumption, including that of the heat pump, so the heating system is very “green.” I have since installed mini-splits in two other houses.

Below are my suggestions for successful house-heating with a mini-split—even in a cold, Northern New England climate like mine.

A definitive guide to how the federal government builds green—and why its leadership matters.

This post is the second in a series on the federal government’s use of green building certifications. Coming soon: The Hidden Beltway Lobbyists Who Shape Green Building Policy.

 The U.S. Treasury Building, completed in 1869, is the oldest building to achieve the Gold level of LEED for Existing Buildings: Operations & Maintenance. Federal green building policies have a strong emphasis on the measured performance of existing buildings.
Photo Credit: Library of Congress,
LC-DIG-ppmsca-07312.

Anyone who has ever filed an income tax return knows how extravagantly fussy the U.S. federal government can seem. Your yearly struggles over tax deductions pale in comparison, though, with the workaday world of a federal civil servant.

Take green building requirements: there are a lot of them. Even if you’re not a government employee, you need to have a passing understanding of these requirements.

That’s because the future of LEED in the federal government is at a turning point, and forthcoming decisions could affect the future of LEED in the private sector—where many corporations are already trying to find ways to build green without seeking a plaque. Do you know your EISA from a hole in the ground? If not, you’ve come to the right place!

As DoD rethinks its green building needs, a recommendation to keep using LEED is just the tip of the iceberg.

This post is the first in a series on the federal government’s use of green building certifications. Part 2: Sustainable Federal Buildings: What's the Law?

This shows the first few megabytes of the Unified Facilities Criteria documents found on the Whole Building Design Guide. The list goes on...but the standard still includes LEED, for now.
Photo Credit: WBDG, screen capture

Special-interest groups have been fighting the LEED rating systems on multiple fronts ever since LEED got a foothold in government policymaking. These groups (primarily chemical manufacturers and timber interests) are making headway.

LEED still matters, for now

Despite these pressures, along with LEED’s weakness as a policymaking tool (like all voluntary rating systems, it really doesn’t work as a mandate unless the government is explicit about credits and energy performance targets that must be achieved), a recent report recommended that the Department of Defense should continue with its current certification policy: LEED Silver or equivalent.

DoD’s updated Unified Facilities Criteria (UFC), hot off the press, has stood by that recommendation for new construction:

In accordance with OUSD AT&L Memorandum, “Department of Defense Sustainable Buildings Policy”, DoD Components will design and build all new construction and major renovations projects: 1) in compliance with the Guiding Principles, 2) third-party certified to the US Green Building Council (USGBC) Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Silver level (or approved equivalent rating), and 3) achieve no fewer than 40% of the certification points related to energy and water conservation. In addition, all repair and renovations projects must conform to the Guiding Principles where they apply. [emphasis added]

How important is it for the military to keep using LEED? For the sake of public perception, it’s extremely important: if DoD thinks LEED is the best way to ensure green building design and construction quality, then a lot of other people will too.

On the other hand, LEED does not—and was never meant to—meet all of the military’s building needs. They’ve got a lot of other things going on, from carbon requirements to energy performance reporting to enhanced security needs, and their UFC documents are a great demonstration of the difference between building codes or standards (like the IgCC and ASHRAE 189.1—both of which USGBC helped develop) and building rating systems (like LEED).

A gradual shift in the supply-and-demand balance for natural gas and increasing shipments of LNG will bring the prices back up, while the risks of fracking continue to be debated

Gas well in the shale country of Pennsylvania. Click to enlarge.
Photo Credit: Philly Workers Voice

In many parts of the country and for many applications, natural gas is considered a panacea to our energy challenges.

Comprised mostly of methane, natural gas is clean-burning, with just a tiny fraction of the particulates, nitrous oxides, and other pollutants that are emitted from burning coal or oil. Because the ratio of hydrogen to carbon is higher with natural gas than with longer-carbon-chain fossil fuels like coal and oil, less carbon dioxide is generated when it is burned. At the point of combustion, natural gas releases about 500 grams of CO2 per kilowatt hour (kWh), compared to about 900 grams for coal. That’s good news in terms of climate change.

And the dramatic upsurge in natural gas production made possible through hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, has cut prices dramatically over the past five years. These low prices have contributed to utility companies replacing some of the nation’s dirtiest coal-fired power plants with advanced, natural gas plants—and this has lead to rather significant reductions in our nation’s carbon dioxide emissions over the past few years.

Natural gas seems like a winner. What’s not to like about it?

In a long-awaited cost report, the National Research Council recommends LEED Silver or its equivalent as the preferred green building standard for the military.

This BBL-designed Air Force Reserve center at camp Withycombe was certified LEED Gold in September 2011, just weeks before the congressional ban on LEED spending took effect.
Photo Credit: BBL Architects

In the ongoing battle between industry lobbyists and LEED, chalk one up for LEED.

A long-awaited report from the National Research Council gives the nod to LEED Silver ratings "or equivalent" for military buildings. The report looked at a variety of methods of comparing costs and benefits and ultimately confirmed that LEED Silver certification is the preferred model for limiting costs and maximizing benefits.

Why this is important

The timber and plastics industries have been pressuring legislators and agency policymakers to shun LEED for years. (Lloyd Alter's fabulous ongoing coverage of that over at Treehugger is a must-read.)

What's new is that they've started succeeding at both the state and federal levels—most recently with a renewed congressional moratium on military LEED spending above the Siver level. (See Title XXVIII, Subtitle C—Energy Security.)

Takeaways from today's report

The LEED Gold ban may come to an end now that the Department of Defense (DoD) has provided Congress with the required cost-benefit analysis on green building rating systems and codes. Made public this morning, the report recommends continued certification to the LEED Silver level "or equivalent" as the baseline, according to a National Academy of Sciences press release:

The committee that wrote the report found that DOD's current policy is sound, although not every high-performance or green building will have significant energy and water savings -- even if it is certified at a LEED-Silver or equivalent rating. The research studies did not provide sufficient evidence to draw generalizations as to why, but building type as well as the specific technologies employed to reduce energy or water use were factors.

It is not yet clear, though, whether LEED Gold or LEED Platinum ratings will be encouraged or even allowed. It's also unclear what might constitute an "equivalent" to LEED Silver.

Other highlights:

• Flexibility to modify building standards should remain in place.
• There should be DoD policies related to measuring actual building performance.
• The report methodology should continue to be used by DoD to prioritize green building goals in terms of cost-effectiveness (using a cost-effectiveness analysis supported as needed by cost-benefit analysis).
• Facility managers need to be trained to ensure effective operation of high-performance buildings.
  

Rather than releasing its final report on LEED and other rating systems, the agency posts recommendations and asks for more feedback.

A victory for lobbyists? It should be easier to pitch the industry status quo to individual federal agencies that don't specialize in buildings.

Want to have a say in whether federal agencies keep using LEED? Here’s your chance.

Following up on a 2012 report, the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) is requesting public comments on its long-awaited recommendations about green building certification systems. Here’s our quick-and-dirty summary of the committee’s findings. You have sixty days to get back to GSA.

Green building ratings systems = good

The first finding is that green building rating systems are a good thing. They “maintain robust, integrated frameworks of performance metrics, standards and conformity assurance.” And using them saves taxpayers money “by eliminating the cost to Government of developing its own standards.”

Agencies should pick what works for them

The GSA isn’t going to tell you whether LEED, Green Globes, or the Living Building Challenge is the best rating system for each agency’s mission. But they want agencies to keep these things in mind:

• There should be specific guidance about which credits to pursue (we might call this the “bike rack clause”?).
• For efficiency, agencies should use one rating system across their portfolios.
• Each agency’s guidance should make it possible for the same rating system to be used for all building types.