Dear All,

I found this forum and it was directly related to my concerns. I live and work in Caracas, Venezuela, in which I'm currently supporting the LEED CI-v4 application for a 16,000 sq ft office (a whole floor) for a financial international firm in a commercial building. In this case, for the EAp2 pre-requisite, we are aiming for option 2. I ran the Target Finder and I also get an "N/A" when ticking the "I don't have an energy estimate" box. Since we are in a design phase, we could estimate the annual energy use, but we have a tremendous problem with the energy rate (tariff).  Energy generation, transmission and distribution (electricity) is managed by the government, and it is 100% subsidized. Due to the chaos related to political and economic situation, currently it is impossible to know the price of a kWh, in fact, some times the agency is billing users and sometimes not. We could benchmark a price estimate with information from other commercial offices of similar energy consumption in the area, would this be correct? I must also explain, since it is subsidized, the cost of energy is really...insignificant when converted to USD, and we could always obtain a "N/A" when running the tool.

I believe the question remains...How can we attain this pre-requisite in these conditions? Should we explain that we may not be able to run the Target Finder tool properly in "special circumstances" box, and uploading the performance results sheet?  

Thank you very much for your time and advise.

Carlos