My project is LEED NC version 2009, and consists of two buildings. One, the Lodge, is the building pursuing LEED Certification. The second building on our site is a parking garage, not pursuing certification, which will house the projects 250KW PV system.
Currently the project does not feed the energy produced from the PV system directly into the Lodge, but rather straight into the grid. The Lodge will most definitely be consuming more energy than is produced by our PV system, but since the energy isn't directly feeding our building can we count it towards EAc2 and EAc1?
The whole PV system is being funded by our project and is within our LEED Project Boundary. From my understanding, as long as you are not selling the power, produced from the onsite renewable energy source, back to the grid you are allowed to count the energy created by the PVs towards offsetting your building's overall energy load.
The amount of net energy used from the grid to power our building will be the same whether or not we route it through the Lodge or directly into the grid. But I need to know if the grid option precludes us from pursuing the EA credits 1 & 2.
Thanks for your help.
Marcus Sheffer
LEED Fellow7group / Energy Opportunities
LEEDuser Expert
5868 thumbs up
March 5, 2012 - 5:27 pm
There is a potentially big difference between a generator connected to the grid and a customer who happens to have some generation capabilities. The rules in most utility service territories are very different between a generator and a facility with net metering. The rules also vary widely across the country so maybe there is a good reason in your case.
Why would your project feed the power to the grid and not through the building? Is the power metered? How does your facility get credit from the utility? Grid connections raise many questions.
The primary issue is ownership of the renewable power. There are requirements for retaining RECs, etc. Feeding into the grid will raise considerably more questions than feeding into the building. As long as you have good explanations it might work. Check the LEED interpretations for some guidance too.
Sara Heppe
ArchitectPF&A Design
19 thumbs up
March 6, 2012 - 8:53 am
It is an interesting situation. The Lodge originally had solar hot water and a PV system located on top of the roof. But throughout the design process the team realized that only one of the two systems would fit on top of the Lodge roof. So it was decided to put the PVs on the parking garage. And of course, there was no extra money to run a cable and a duct bank from the parking garage to the Lodge to feed to power generated by the system directly into the facility.
I raised this as a concern I while ago saying that if we didn't feed the building with the power, it would be difficult to claim the onsite renewable energy for our building. This project is funding the construction of the system, and I am unsure if this has any affect on LEED. The Lodge will be the owner of the PV system, and responsible for its maintenance throughout its lifecycle. But the power from the PVs is being fed straight into the grid for the base. Which would obviously be offsetting any number of other buildings on base and not specifically our building.
A member of our project team has interpreted the LEED credit to mean that as long as the system is on our LEED project site, which it is, and we aren’t producing more energy than we are using, which we aren’t. Then according to the credit verbiage we should be able to count the energy from the PV system towards the energy reduction of our building.
Please advise, thanks for your help.
Marcus Sheffer
LEED Fellow7group / Energy Opportunities
LEEDuser Expert
5868 thumbs up
March 6, 2012 - 9:30 am
What I did not get from your original post was that the power is not feeding the utility grid, but a local campus grid. Extremely big difference there. That situation is fine. All you will need is a letter from the owner allocating the power to the lodge project.
There are interpretations that address this specific situation.