I have a ~500,000 building in NYC. Approximately 150,000 SF of this space is dedicated to a higher education city school. The remaining space split up between a small parking garage on in the basement, office space, and a photo printing center. The photo printing center uses an exorbitant amount of electricity in its printing.
In messing around with Target Finder I found that the range for an ESTAR Score is from 20-30 depending on the space type definitiions. Excluding the printing center and and school, the building is actually rather efficient.
Is there any way that this building could earn LEED EB without any energy efficient upgrades? Looking at the Case 2 calculator, it doesnt seem to give me the any options for the increased EUI use of the printing center. How would i go about doing comparable building benchmarking?
Jenny Carney
Vice PresidentWSP
LEEDuser Expert
657 thumbs up
October 15, 2010 - 8:49 pm
How large is the printing center, in terms of the percent of overall square footage? If it's less than 10% and separately metered, you may be allowed to excluded it from your EBOM efforts and energy benchmarking.
Kevin Kelly
42 thumbs up
October 15, 2010 - 9:25 pm
The printing center takes up about 20% of the building. I guess i cannot exclude it. If there was no printing center and 35% of the building was a college, would I still have to use the Case 2 calculator? How would you go about finding comparable building energy usage for the benchmarking?
Jenny Carney
Vice PresidentWSP
LEEDuser Expert
657 thumbs up
October 28, 2010 - 10:48 am
That's right, no exclusions if it's over 10%. Even if it didn't exist, and the split was 35/65 between university and office, you still wouldn't be able to get an Energy Star score and would be in Case 2.
As a Case 2, Option 2 project, you don't necessarily need comparables if you can show a reduction against a historic baseline. Have you investigate that approach?
Kevin Kelly
42 thumbs up
October 28, 2010 - 1:13 pm
We are investigating that option right now. We are running into difficulties getting the entire building's energy usage data for the past 6 years. As there are about 20 direct metered electricity accounts throughout the building. We created online accounts for each tenant's energy accounts, however these accounts only have approximately 2 years of usage data. It is also annoying that a few of our tenants have moved in within the past couple years. Will we be able to project their current usage into the historic baseline?
Jenny Carney
Vice PresidentWSP
LEEDuser Expert
657 thumbs up
November 16, 2010 - 2:51 pm
Generally projections are frowned upon, but occasionally in my experience there have been a few situations with extenuating circumstances where it might fly. This would happen through the CIR process for sure (I would not recommend trying this without advance clearance), and would generally entail a very conservative approach for the projections.
Also, to clarify, you wouldn't need 6 complete years, but rather 3 consecutive years within the last 6 (plus the 1 year performance period). So, four years total.
Finally, regarding tenants coming and going, you could potentially normalize for changing occupancy rates or types if you have a good handle when tenants came and went and the spaces they occupied.