"Site energy" usage for a multiple building project

The storage building is not pursuing certification and is attached from the building so it should not be part of the benchmark but you must decide whether or not it will be in the boundary. You should refer to the LEED MPRs for guidance on multiple buildings. As for the heaters, they do not serve the building function or mechanical systems so my suggestion is that they are not included. my suggestion is to stick to the guidance offered by Energy Star in bench marking these to buildings appropriately. Hope this helps!

So I'll leave the MPR question to folks better qualified than myself to answer, but on the headbolt heater question I would agree that the energy used by those heaters should be included in your PM energy analysis just as you would parking lot lights. I have no idea how common or rare those are in Alaska, but theoretically PM Tool's climate normalization should be comparing your building to building's in a similar climate, and therefore dealing with a similar issue of getting cars to start. That being said, Alaska is likely the extreme end of that climate zone and I'm not confident there would be many buildings in Fairbanks in the CBECS data set. So if your Energy Star Rating seemed off, I'd take a second look at it with the headbolt heaters pulled out and consider requesting an interpretation from GBCI if that situation seemed more accurate. Tough one! Hope that helps, Dan

Unlike the rest of the MPRs, MPR 5 (re: min FTE) is not a make-it-or-break-it requirement for LEED eligibility, which often leads to confusion. If a building has less than 1 annualized FTE, it simply means that building is not eligible for any IEQ credit points, not that it is "non-LEED-certifiable". Usually, a building is only truly "non-LEED-certifiable" if it has less than 1,000 sf of gross floor area (and, thus, cannot meet MPR 4). That said, in some cases there are structures that solely support the normal operations of the main LEED project building that also happen to contain 1,000 sf or more of gross floor area. In that case it is not always clear-cut whether these should be treated as separate buildings or extensions of the main project building. These are project-specific, special circumstances which are best addressed in advance of the certification review via the formal inquiry process (https://www.leedonline.com/irj/go/km/docs/documents/usgbc/leed/config/common/LOv3Help/formal_inquiries1.htm). It would be the project team's option whether to submit these issues as CIRs or LIs. It seems like the topics could be framed in such a way as to have broad-enough applicability that they would be appropriate to either type of inquiry. USGBC will refund the LI portion of a formal inquiry fee if they deem the inquiry too project specific and, therefore, are unwilling to issue a public LI ruling on the matter. Please refer to the LI FAQ for more guidance (https://www.usgbc.org/ShowFile.aspx?DocumentID=8858).