The subject building is an airline company head office located within airport territory. In order to be efficient, 2 parts of the structure were built contiguously to produce a single building:
- The head office building, 10 000 sq. meters on 3 floors, where offices are located.
- The airplane hangar, 7 000 sq. meters, 25 meters high, on 1 floor, can hold 3 aircrafts simultaneously (one A-330 and two A-310). The hangar is for aircraft maintenance, repair and preparation purposes, and it is accessible directly from the runways.
The only link between the 2 parts of the building is a ground floor circulation corridor party wall and the demising wall of higher level floors. At the moment, both parts of the building share a joint energy (electricity and gas) bill. The hangar is equipped with its own HVAC and lighting systems, and it is governed by very strict safety regulations (relative to workers' health and safety and work processes). Operations performed in the hangar are all related to aircraft maintenance and repair.
We wish to limit the LEED-EB OM certification to the office part of the building as the hangar is an area dedicated to the airline's processes which is it governed by very strict health, safety and airport regulations that reduce our potential for greening the operations. As in CIR 2/24/2005 : It is permissible to set the LEED project boundary to exclude portions of the site as is reasonable in complicated scenarios, (.), providing that the same boundary and scope are used for all credits. For that reason, we will measure each of the two components' energy consumption, to establish the consumption level of the office part of the building. Is this acceptable?
The project team is inquiring about the circumstances under which contiguously built spaces can be considered separate projects under LEED. Parsing the office portion of the building into a distinct LEED-EB OM project is allowed only under the following conditions:1. Physically distinct - the building\'s core structure, lighting, HVAC, plumbing, and other mechanical systems must be separate from any adjoining buildings, i.e., LEED project boundary lines that divide buildings must not pass through any core MEP service infrastructure. Exception: buildings served by a common or shared chiller plant or heating water, or steam supply pipes (i.e., not air ducts), and only if the thermal energy serving the structure to be separated is submetered.2. There is no horizontal separation - it is prohibited to form separate LEED projects using horizontal dividing lines (from an elevation perspective) within a single building. Only vertical dividing lines through walls are permitted to form separate LEED projects. Applicable internationally.