I have also voted as a qualified YES. While I have serious concerns over some of the changes made in the commissioning prerequisite and credits, overall those items related to MEP are improvements. While I understand the concerns and controversy over the MR credits, it has surprised me that one of the major changes in v4, and one that in my opinion will have significant impact on the standard, is the change to ASHRAE 90.1-2010.

Everyone sees this as a normal and appropriate change in the standard, which it is, but few understand how fundamental this is going to change our thinking to both meet and exceed the energy performance. As part of a presentation we are preparing for GreenBuild this year, we have been looking at a v2.2 project that we did the energy modeling on, and will be seeing the changes as we move to v2009 and finally to v4. Our initial work while not surprising, is enlightening. We will have a lot of work to do to “recover” the energy savings that many projects have been able to achieve.