Special Report: 1.1.2009

Posted by Web Master on Thursday, January 01, 2009

Green: Take A Flying LEEP!

By Joe Salimando

In December, I attended pieces of EcoBuild Fall, an annual event held in D.C. (there’s another in May in the West).

Unfortunately, deadline pressure was crushing me at the time, so I didn’t cover the complete event. Here’s a report on one of two interesting slices (more next week):

A Mystery to Architects

Kevin Kampschroer is acting director of the Office of High-Performance Green Buildings (a unit of the Public Buildings Service in the U.S. General Services Administration). GSA, a federal agency, is the nation’s biggest landlord!

Kampschroer’s lunchtime speech on Dec. 9 was one of four keynotes. I found myself agreeing with him on down the line, to the point where he added perspective to things I had already been thinking.

This requires explanation.

In 1979, at the tender age of 25, I left a job in Manhattan (with a magazine that no longer exists) to work for NECA in Maryland as senior editor of Electrical Contractor. My job: Travel 20% of the time. I was to see electrical contractors (NECA members) at their offices, including visits to jobsites, and write feature stories.

What ensued was an education in the construction industry. I came out of it with a serious dislike of architects. I learned that architects knew nothing about electrical work (and yet sometimes pretended that they did).

Who taught me disrespect for architects? Not the people at NECA! It didn’t come from my family either. No, it was NECA contractors who created that impression in me.

Fast-forward to the past few years. I’ve been watching the green construction movement and the U.S. Green Buildings Council. Unfortunately, electrical people did not get in on the ground floor of green, USGBC, or the LEED program. From what I’ve seen, much of green construction is (so far) about architecture.

• Example: I saw no electrical exhibitors at the EcoBuild Fall show in D.C. (last year, Leviton had a booth with a daylighting product).
• Example: I have the 114-page November/December issue of Eco-Structure magazine in front of me. There’s not a word about electrical. No ads, either.

Your reaction might be: “Hey, Joe: Isn’t green about saving energy?” Uh, well; no. Had you looked recently through the USGBC’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) program, you saw something that relegated the energy-consuming “active” systems in a building (electrical/mechanical) to one-sixth of its concerns.

USGBC has revamped LEED with the 2009 version, and I understand criticisms such as the above were among the drivers to re-do the thing. Let’s deal some other time with the new LEED. The old LEED looked as if it had been written by architects. The message to the world, in my eyes, was:

• Forget the need for energy savings.
• Forget the goal of reducing emissions, and that buildings are the leading producer of emissions.
• Forget everything, in fact, other than neat stuff that architects wanna do!

Shunning Existing Buildings

Go one step further. The commercial building stock in our country uses a lot of energy. In fact, buildings are responsible for maybe 40% of greenhouse gas emissions (more than vehicles).

At best, NEW construction adds 2% annually to the nation’s “fleet” of commercial buildings. Anyone who is serious about GREEN ANYTHING would target existing buildings first.

Why? Existing buildings waste energy (everyone knows this; studies prove it). There are many more existing buildings, and there always will be! Anyone who wants to make the nation’s buildings “more green” will need 50 years to do it with new construction only.

USGBC has had a LEED-EB (EB = existing buildings) program, too. It’s been almost invisible. Why? Go back to my previous slamming of architects. Reasons to give retrofit the short shrift:

1. Retrofitting buildings is harder than building new. It is NOT really neat, fun work.
2. Architects typically don’t get heavily involved in retrofits.
3. Retrofits don’t provide the same payday for architects as do new buildings.
4. Hey, let’s get to the bottom line: Retrofits are work, new building design is FUN!

You won’t be surprised to hear that LEED-EB is VERY insignificant in the scheme of things. I’ve recently learned that there are some 1,000-plus buildings registered for LEED-EB certification.

Don’t celebrate. That’s from a national inventory of 4.4 million non-residential buildings. Let’s avoid percentages here: That’s one out of every 4,400 existing buildings proposed for LEED-EB.

As we used to say in Brooklyn (after “fuhgedaboutit!”): Ugotahbekiddin.

Kevin Savages Everybody

You’ll be happy to hear that Kampschroer’s remarks from the podium tackled the architect/design focus from another angle (i.e., he doesn’t necessarily agree with what’s above).

He didn’t directly attack LEED, but he noted that there has been too much focus on “design intent” in the LEED program [my take: Yet another result of architects-as-prime-drivers].

Kampschroer made reference to the fact that buildings are designed to work one way by architects and engineers, but they are USED in quite another by their owners, the building managers and operators, and the people working in said buildings. Somehow, something is lost in translation from paper to real world.

As a result, Kampschroer said (and others have noted) that the PERFORMANCE of buildings designed to be energy efficient typically comes in significantly below the “design intent.” That is, New Building X is designed (on paper) to use 200 units of energy, and maybe even wins a LEED certification; but in the real world, it used 333 units of energy.

To boil it down: LEED = a trophy for a building’s design intent. But the building’s real-world performance is what counts. Hey, this is simple enough for even my limited understanding: If we’re trying to reduce energy use, we should try to reduce actual energy used, right?

Kampshroer’s solution (he said this from the podium): Forget design intent. Forget LEED. Focus on LEEP (which would be Leadership in Energy and Environmental Performance).

LEEP isn’t Here (Not Yet, Anyway)

I’ve told a few people about LEEP vs. LEED. They all ask me if LEEP actually exists. It’s a good point. Answer: No, it doesn’t; at least, not by that acronym.

But if one is serious about saving energy, energy independence, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and so forth, it’s impossible to argue with Kampschroer’s points. Design intent is so much vapor. Performance (as in, energy-efficient building operations) is where things should be headed.

Thinking about Kampschroer’s talk afterwards, several things struck me right between the temples:

1. His audience was not interrupting him with wild applause. Too many architects in the seats?
2. Everything he said is incredibly obvious. USGBC focused on low emissions by carpets, planting stuff on roofs, and recycling of construction debris for some reason. If the reason is not “driven by architects,” then what the heck is it?
3. Attacking USGBC feels wrong. The organization has been out there, speaking about green in the wilderness, for years. Now, some electrical industry writer is telling them they’ve missed the boat. Where the heck was he in 1996?
4. On the other hand: The incredible bottom line is that it actually does appear that the USGBC has taken full swings on energy efficiency and existing buildings, and missed. The 2009 LEED changes might put more effort into getting better building energy efficiency. But it’s hard to undo the focus on new construction and make a major turnabout (as is needed, I would argue) to shine the light entirely on existing commercial structures.

The Old Virtues

All the people I knew as a child were of Sicilian ancestry (or some other kind of Italian extraction). But I kept hearing about Ben Franklin and “Waste not, want not.” (And I was not raised in Philadelphia!)

In a meaningful way, the intersection of green and construction and our historical national waste of energy turns out to come down to what Ben said. It’s what Kampschroer was talking about.

It’s really as simple as this: If you can chip away at the costs of running a building (a building that’s perhaps even more comfortable for its occupants, after a retrofit), DO IT.

From the electrical industry’s perspective, retrofitting existing buildings to make them greener (especially in the energy-efficiency category) boils down to a simple question:

Can you provide enough illumination for workers inside the building to be healthy, thrive, and be productive, all at a reduced cost?

Green is that simple. As Kampschroer indicated, the key isn’t design intent; it’s the building’s real-world performance. The best part: I am fairly certain there are numerous electrical distributors who can help produce a loud “yes” answer to that question.

Which leads to the obvious next query: If the building owners can, why aren’t they doing so? If you can help them do that, why aren’t you telling them about it?

 

	Joe Salimando of EFJ Enterprises is a consultant, web content provider, and wordsmith based in Oakton, Va. To contact him, call 703-255-1428. See also The EleBlog.
Personal Disclaimer: The appearance of the ambling pachyderm is indicative of the writer’s obsession with elephants, not his political leanings.
IMPORTANT NOTE: THIS COLUMN REFLECTS ONLY THE OPINIONS OF ITS AUTHOR AND DOES NOT REFLECT THE OPINIONS OR POLICIES OF NAED, TED MAGAZINE, OR THE ADVERTISERS ON THE TEDMAG WEB SITE.