Last summer, the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) announced its Building Performance Partnership (BPP), a program to engage owners and managers of commercial and residential LEED-certified green buildings, optimizing the performance of buildings through data collection, analysis and action. Starting this summer, USGBC has opened the program to all current whole-building LEED-certified commercial and residential projects. BPP will further the efforts to understand how buildings perform from the moment of LEED certification and years beyond.
This partnership among USGBC and the thousands of LEED project owners will result in the population of a comprehensive green building performance database and enable standardization of reporting metrics and analytics to establish new building performance benchmarks.
“The significance of USGBC conducting this research is to inform future iterations of the LEED green building program,” said Scot Horst, senior vice president, LEED. “By providing a large and accurate data set critical to supporting the ongoing improvement of LEED and continuous optimization of LEED-certified projects, BPP will ensure LEED projects deliver on their extraordinary environmental and economic potential. BPP is the foundation of USGBC’s commitment to a meaningful demonstration of the value of building and operating green.”
Participation of current LEED-certified buildings is voluntary. The partnership is made up of owners, managers and occupants of buildings of all sizes and types that are committed to improving their own performance as well as helping drive the ongoing development of LEED. The LEED buildings that participate in the partnership will receive annual information on performance, specifically comparing predicted or actual performance at the time of certification with the project’s current performance.
Additionally, the report will show aggregated data of like buildings and certification levels, and will act as a case study of a project’s strong performance and/or significant improvement. Currently more than 120 projects are participating in Phase One, and these projects will receive a basic performance report in time for Greenbuild 2010 in Chicago this November.
“There is all too often a disconnect or predicted performance gap between energy modeling done during design and what actually happens during daily operation after the building has been constructed, due to occupant behavior and other factors,” Horst said. “In order to improve upon LEED and for projects that perform lower than anticipated, BPP will help projects meet operational sustainability goals sought originally during the design and construction process. The data will shed light on external issues such as occupant behavior or unanticipated building usage patterns.”
No building will be decertified for performance or a performance gap, rather this information will be used to inform and help projects achieve higher levels of performance.
