Great concept, poor execution

As someone who was deeply involved while on USGBC staff with EBOM, Recertification, v4 and many other programs, but never with the Dynamic Plaque, I have a few thoughts I’d like to share. First, I think we can probably all agree that an online platform that streamlines the collection, analysis, display and certification of ongoing performance data is a fantastic idea. I long advocated for a “mint.com” for buildings and I think it should be one of USGBC’s top priorities. It should be a common entry point for all buildings that want to move toward certifying their performance, regardless of whether they’ve received an initial LEED certification. It’s important, though, to make a distinction between the technology platform and the LEED technical requirements. The Dynamic Plaque is trying to address both. It’s been said that the LDP does not create a new LEED rating system, which strikes me as somewhat disingenuous. If the LDP uses a set of criteria to provide a LEED certification (or recertification) to a building, it is a rating system. That’s simply the definition of a rating system. If the LDP has a different scope and different technical methodologies from the currently approved LEED rating systems, then it is a NEW LEED rating system. New LEED rating systems are required to be developed based on the Foundations of LEED (http://www.usgbc.org/sites/default/files/Foundations-of-LEED.pdf), a standard that was approved by the LEED Steering Committee while Scot Horst was chair. This document defines the consensus development and balloting process for LEED rating systems. No such process has been followed for the LDP. If the LDP included the exact same technical requirements as EBOM (or a consensus-developed revision to EBOM) I don’t think many of us would have significant concerns about it. But the LDP has a much reduced scope and very different technical methodologies compared to EBOM. As far as I can tell, the categories contained in the LDP would add up to about 60 points in the equivalent credits in EBOM. That means that about 40% of the rating system simply isn’t there. Site maintenance, cooling tower management, purchasing, cleaning, pest control, demand response, and innovation are nowhere to be found. The LDP includes some “base credits” that don’t require performance tracking, but many of these credits have very relevant performance tracking components. The LDP is often compared to the Fitbit given its ability to automatically track steps and sleep. But the Fitbit also allows you to enter what you had for lunch to track nutrition info. Entering the caloric content of your salad is more difficult than having the device automatically track your steps, but Fitbit recognizes that this is still valid, and someone wanting to get the full benefit of the device will do this. We shouldn’t ignore certain environmental and human health issues just because they’re more difficult to track. Finally, many of the technical approaches used in the LDP are problematic, like using a single waste audit to represent ongoing waste tracking. (The one technical innovation I really like in the LDP is weighting transit modes by carbon impact for the commute survey; this is something we unsuccessfully tried to add to v4.) The most troubling component is probably the energy score. It doesn’t use the industry-recognized ENERGY STAR, but rather a USGBC-generated score based on data from LEED buildings that have supplied their data via MPR #6 or otherwise. This is far from a statistically valid sample of all buildings. The methodology used to generate the energy score is outlined in this paper (http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~aothman/splines.pdf) which includes this troubling statement: "Scores are a product of the subjective input of domain experts and the only metric to gauge the validity of a scoring function is its acceptance by acclamation." This appears to mean that rather than using a regression analysis of objective building attributes, as ENERGY STAR does, the LDP says that the score is correct if some panel of experts thinks it is by looking at a few data points. So I think there’s a lot to like in the concept of the LEED Dynamic Plaque, but the LEED technical side has a lot of issues that should be resolved using the standard consensus process.