The Green Building Committee of the Campus Sustainability Coalition at UNC-Chapel Hill is considering adopting the LEED Rating System to evaluate our campus buildings. Our combined heat and power (CHP) co-generation plant provides campus with roughly a third of our annual electricity consumption, utilizes clean-coal technology with fluidized bed boilers, and is notably efficient in that only 25% of the BTU content of the fuel is lost (since 15% goes to electricity and 60% goes to steam for various campus uses). We would like to fax a simple two-page description for your review, that indicates the amounts of various pollutants that are NOT emmitted by utilizing this CHP co-gen system. We feel that, although coal is not a renewable fuel, some sort of credit is appropriate regarding the efficiency and relative cleanliness of this system, and that an appropriate credit should be developed to recognize and promote such energy systems.
This approach meets the intent of several credits including the heat recovery credit and indirectly the energy efficiency credit. Version 2.0 has clarified the intent of these credits, and made an innovation credit path available. Both of these changes should help you capture credits.