We are looking at an existing 300,000 s.f. hotel highrise in a downtown location that is currently on a citywide district steam utility. There are extensive interior architectural changes and a moderate amount of mechanical, so we are pursuing LEED NC. The thought is to install gas-fired boilers within the building, removing it from the (greatly inefficient) district system. Can this be modeled as an Option 1 DES in the baseline case, and an appropriate gas-fired boiler plant in the proposed? "Treatment of District or Campus Thermal Energy in LEED V2" does not seem to address this situation.
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Christopher Schaffner
CEO & FounderThe Green Engineer
LEEDuser Expert
963 thumbs up
April 28, 2014 - 2:51 pm
You model HVAC equipment against a code compliant baseline, not existing conditions. So, if your proposed case is not DES, neither is your baseline. You can't take credit for disconnecting from the DES any more than you can take credit for replacing an old piece of equipment.
For what it's worth, you'd be penalized for the inefficient district system if you stayed connected to it. So you got that going for you, which is nice.