Buildings LEED The Way To Energy Savings

By Martha Mathewson

Tucson Green Times – November 2009

The U.S. Green Building Council has chosen to address global warming by creating a new pathway to progress – the LEED system for green buildings.

LEED, which stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, is “about certifying that buildings are built to green standards,” says Stefanie Gerstle, chair of the Arizona chapter of the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC).

“You can buy an 89-cent box of animal crackers and can tell what’s in it,” she says, alluding to the mandatory ingredients list. “When you buy an 89 million dollar building, there must be some way to quantify the materials.”

The program measures energy savings, water efficiency and reductions of carbon dioxide emissions, among other environmental impacts of buildings.

Why focus on buildings? Buildings are responsible for 38 percent of the nation’s total carbon emissions, including 68 percent of electricity consumption, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

“Sustainable building and sustainable energy use are inexorably bound together,” says Jason Laros, a governing council member of the USGBC Southern Arizona branch.

“Obviously, that’s an area that needs to be addressed strategically,” agrees Ron Proctor, a coordinator for Sustainable Tucson, a non-profit citizen group that launched an initiative in 2009 to reduce Tucson’s dependence on carbon-producing fuels such as oil and gas.

The City of Tucson adopted a law in 2006 that requires all city-owned buildings larger than 5,000 square feet to be built to LEED silver standards. This law also applies to renovations.

Higher standards

The LEED system grades a building on efficiency of energy use, material use, and resource and waste management. For example, a building powered primarily by solar energy will receive significantly higher points than a structure run on standard electric power tapped from the city power supply. The silver is phase two of a four-level system.

The public interest in energy savings is one of the top motivators behind many builder’s choices to follow the LEED standards.

Those energy savings often don’t start paying back for up to a decade or more after the building is finished, says Bill Adler, a member of the Oro Valley Planning Commission. This might deter some who otherwise might have embraced the LEED standards for their project, he adds.

Last year, Adler invited a LEED architect to visit the Oro Valley Planning Commission and Town Council to discuss the impact of energy use and sustainable building methods on their community.

The meeting resulted in a resolution being passed stating that Oro Valley public buildings “will strive to achieve” LEED standards at the silver level. However, residential construction was not addressed in the resolution.

“We’re actually quite a distance from requiring homeowners to build to LEED standards,” says Adler.

As for commercial buildings, incentives given to LEED builders to encourage construction “are not so substantial as to make it that attractive yet,” says Adler. He notes that the current economic recession adds to the challenge.

“Even in normal times,” he says, “people get quite keen on being thrifty.”

Counting the cost

Indeed, the desire by the construction industry to build as inexpensively as possible is often a roadblock when it comes to commercial and residential structures. However, this apparent roadblock may be simply because they haven’t yet mastered the LEED process, according to Gerstle, a LEED Accredited Professional.

Certifying a LEED building may cost only an additional one to two percent, Gerstle says, adding that it depends on the project type and the level of certification the builder is seeking.

She points out that a recent Tucson project – a LEED-certified firehouse – came under the original budget while following energy-saving techniques that would save them money in the long run.

In a July 2007 study, international construction consulting firm Davis Langdon reported, “There is such a wide variation in cost per square foot between buildings on a regular basis, even without taking sustainable design into account,” that it’s challenging to make accurate cost comparisons. Even so, the group found “no significant difference in average cost for green buildings as compared to non-green buildings.”

Laros agrees that cost is not the main deterrent – availability of the technology, he says, is more of an issue at this time.

“Right now, efficient housing is still unique,” says Laros. “Since there are still relatively few buildings being created this way, even when one is built inexpensively the prices immediately go up because there is high demand, and little supply of such a product.”

Laros, co-author of the book Inside the Civano Project – a profile of a green community in Tucson – hopes for a different future with the LEED system and the communities that adopt it.

The more serious problems lie not in the practical obstacles, says Laros, but with individual thinking: “The real question becomes, can we change our behavior, thus intrinsically changing the types of technologies we will build and deploy?”

Author: Martha Mathewson is a journalism student at the University of Arizona.