I am working on a LEED project that was registered under LEED EB: O&M 2008 that is obtaining one LEED rating for the campus. The LEED site boundary includes the majority of buildings on campus, including a couple lodges, dining facility, offices, and educational facilities. Since multiple buildings cannot be benchmarked as a single facility under the Energy Star Portfolio Manager guidelines, would the best approach to achieving the minimum energy requirements be to apply the Case 2 Calculator Option 1 to each building separately on campus?

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Michael Opitz

Director of Sustainability

Iconergy

LEEDuser Basic Member

40 thumbs up

Fri, 05/27/2011 - 21:24

Hello S W: I can start by offering some basic guidance to this, and we can get more detailed if we need to. Let's break this down to the key issues: 1) Keep in mind that if a given building CAN be scored using Case 1, then it MUST be. Since you mentioned that some of your buildings are offices, they cannot use Case 2 as you're proposing. 2) More generally, I recommend scoring each distinct building in a campus project separately because that's the approach most likely to be approved in the LEED review. Some buildings will use Case 1 and others will use Case 2, just like if they were not on the same campus.

Erin Holdenried

Sustainability Architect

LEEDuser Basic Member

88 thumbs up

Thu, 06/02/2011 - 18:07

Thanks Mike, That makes sense. The campus is actually a training center so almost all the buildings are mixed use in some way, for example the office facilities also have educational classrooms so its almost at a 50/50 split. In this case do you think I can use the Case 2 calculator and break each building down into the space types that it includes? We are also having difficulty because there is no "Education-University Buildings" space type in the Case 2 calculator. I found a CIR from 7/31/2009 that states the Education K-12 School option can be used instead if the building can be justified as instructional space. So if possible, I would like to break down our Office/Education buildings into "Office" and "K-12 Education." So as long as each building within our LEED boundary meets the requirement, even if its through different options, it should still be acceptable right? So we will basically have separate documentation for each of our buildings on campus. Thanks so much!

Michael Opitz

Director of Sustainability

Iconergy

LEEDuser Basic Member

40 thumbs up

Wed, 06/08/2011 - 15:15

S W: This can get tricky, but you're almost on the right track. For each of your mixed-use buildings, think of whether each usage type itself is ratable in ENERGY STAR. The ratable types are listed at this site: http://www.energystar.gov/index.cfm?c=eligibility.bus_portfoliomanager_space_types#office In your example, both office and K-12 are ratable types, so that building can (and must) be scored using Case 1. Try that within Portfolio Manager and it should work; no need to use the USGBC's calculator. If that doesn't work then something else is going on here and you can check back in.

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