LEED Data Set - Energy Use Way Too High!

J. Yudelson

President

Green Building Initiative

LEEDuser Basic Member

8 thumbs up

December 4, 2013

If you were to break out new buildings, especially offices, and compare them to the "best achievable" results in common practice today, i.e., below 40 kBTU/sq.ft./year, you would find the average number of 158 kBTU quoted above to be laughably inefficient. Instead of averages, use a median number, which takes care of the data centers and healthcare facilities, which in any case are not numerous, to get at a more realistic figure. Still, any way you look at it, energy use is WAY TOO HIGH in the LEED buildings, as indicated in this data set.

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Michele Helou

Principal

Sage Design & Consulting

LEEDuser Basic Member

55 thumbs up

Thu, 12/05/2013 - 17:02

article states: 'According to the report, 1,861 LEED-certified projects were compliant with LEED’s mandatory energy reporting requirement (Minimum Program Requirement #6, or MPR6) during the reporting period, but only 450 provided an EUI through Energy Star’s Portfolio Manager.' The data points have already been self selected by the 450 teams already working towards low energy use. The real question is the distribution points of all the LEED projects and how many outliers there are and how far they are away from the Energy Star targets (or however you define 'good'). If I were a building owner who paid to pursue LEED in order to get an energy efficient building, I would be pretty pissed if I got an outlier. And I mean pissed in a 'legal' way. The reasons LEED buildings can use more energy is because of the way EAc1 points are scored (against a ficticious, sometimes awful baseline) and because of competing goals in other categories such as high mechanical ventilation standards and high thermal comfort standards - defined by ASHRAE with the obvious intent of solving all problems mechanically. We have been saying this for years and years and the USGBC is still intent on misrepresenting the data instead of addressing the real problems by doing the hard hard work of changing and raising the bar.