I am participating in a Value Engineering (VE) exercise for a potential LEED project that is in its final stage of design. Since the current project is designed as ‘concrete reinforced (CR)’, one of the const efficient and sustainability measures that our team intends to use is ‘post tensioning (PT)’ (PT reduces surface, material use, operational costs etc.)’ However, while PT can be considered in terms of sustainability, the PT Institute notes that PT does not explicitly contribute to LEED rating due to the nature of the rating system to “overlook structural efficiency” ...
Still, considering sustainability features of PT, does anyone know whether the PT approach can be filed as an innovation in design? Does it make sense to do so?
Tristan Roberts
RepresentativeVermont House of Representatives
LEEDuser Expert
11475 thumbs up
May 20, 2011 - 2:26 am
Amar, I would say offhand that you could have a good argument for doing so. Check the innovation credit catalogue (see Resources above) to see if anything at all like this has been approved. Think about how it can be documented—keep in mind you need to pretty much write a LEED credit, so think in those terms. See the other advice on this page for people attempting novel ID credits.