Technical Updates

Archive for the ‘Green Build Risks’ Category

Calculating ventilation rates just became a little easier with a new iPhone application designed specifically for ASHRAE Standard 62.1-2007, Ventilation for Acceptable Indoor Air Quality.

The Standard has been used for years as the measuring stick for indoor air quality ventilation for the building industry. Typically, a “62MZCalc.xls” Excel spreadsheet accompanies the Standard and is used for calculations. With the new app, engineers can make comprehensive minimum ventilation calculations using either I-P or SI units right in the field using their mobile device, without having to return to the office.  

In addition, they can create and store multi-system projects, instantly see updated results as input values are changed, and email results and spreadsheet back to the office for further analysis.

“The ASHRAE 62.1 app can also be used to determine 62.1 compliance of simple ventilation systems (single zone, 100 percent outdoor-air and changeover-bypass VAV) as well as more complex ventilation systems (single-path, multiplezone recirculating) and can operate in both IP and metric units.”

ASHRAE is pleased to be able to utilize the latest smart phone technology. The application works with the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad and can be purchased for $19.99 through Apple’s online iPhone App Store.

Click here for more details.

We just read a very telling line in a recent article about selling green products or services in a difficult economy.

The author quotes the CEO of an entrepreneurial company as saying that “for customers in today’s economy, it’s either the bottom line or environmental stewardship…and they don’t necessarily go hand in hand.”

It’s always interesting to see how the “green factor” is tempered with long-term sustainability concerns and with people’s purse strings.

As the article’s author explains,”Green startups are finding it difficult to turn profits these days. Those selling green products or services face the extra hurdles of introducing something new that people have to get used to and typically costs more upfront.”

He goes on to say that during the current economic downturn, ”entrepreneurs are changing their business models, switching target customers, or in some cases, putting the company on hold.”

In some cases, this has meant switching over from selling to leasing products. In other scenarios, it has meant alternating marketing strategies: instead of promoting the product or service directly, the entrepreneurs have begun educating the public on the product’s return on investment within a few years’ time.

Still, the road for green companies is tough, as they must fight against bottom line considerations that often take precedence over environmental stewardship.

For the full article, click here.

In an economic climate where everyone is looking to save money and minimize expenses, sustainable buildings have taken off in popularity and demand. The proliferation of green building design reflects a rapidly developing fan base.

According to a U.S. Green Building Council official, “The green building market has basically tripled for the last two years, which is a good sign that it’s flourishing. Developers and owners are seeing the value in green building as a competitive differentiator. The bottom-line decisions are becoming paramount in terms of lowering operating costs.”

According to USGBC findings, green buildings, on average, use 40 percent less water; spend 30 percent less energy; and reduce carbon emissions and solid waste by 35 percent and 70 percent, respectively. These bottom-line savings are causing building owners to be willing to spend more money upfront in order to recognize significant savings down the road.

In many cases, building owners who have been racked by recession woes are turning to green retrofits of existing structures in an effort to remain competitive. Part of the issue is that tenants are considering building performance as one of their top factors when choosing where to rent. Energy-efficient buildings tend to maintain higher occupancy levels and bring in higher rents as a result.

Click here to read the full report and to learn about developments, individuals, campaigns, councils, companies, and services who have chosen the sustainability path.

Obama’s new green requirements for federal buildings will likely catch on up in Canada in the near future, says a Canadian journalist in a recent article called “U.S. green wave is moving north”.

Ottawa-based Korky Koroluk advises fellow Canadians that those within their construction industry should be aware of an executive order signed by U.S. President Barack Obama last October “setting out numerous green requirements for the U.S. federal government and requiring various government agencies to meet a number of energy, water, and waste-reduction goals.”

Although for now, these requirements only apply to federal buildings, he argues that “government construction is a trend-setter” and that it is only a matter of time (once private sectors begin demanding what they see being successfully implemented at the federal sector) before the rest of the construction industry is impacted.

Some of the new ”green” requirements include:

• the need for a 26% improvement in water efficiency by 2020;
• a new emphasis placed on sustainability requirements;
• a net-zero-energy requirement for all federal building projects by 2030.

Koroluk asserts that “by encouraging the promotion of green public-private partnerships, the government is using a powerful lever on the way to sustainable buildings”… and says that “given the Canadian tendency to look southward for innovation, it seems likely that many of the things that are just beginning to happen in the U.S. will slowly find their way into Canadian practice.”

Click here to read the article in its entirety.

How a company makes the leap into “green” can either lead to great success and an increased presence in this environmentally conscious marketplace, or to additional problems and more liability.

We’d like to recommend an excellent article called How to Avoid Litigation Risks from Greening Your Products by Nexus, a project of the The Green Roundtable. (Article was originally printed in GreenBiz on May 5, 2010.)

The authors argue that “it is essential to understand what it means to green your product and consider the risks of going green up front in order to avoid ending up in the courtroom down the road.”  They explain the criteria by which one can determine that a product is green, and describe the legislative landscape for green product manufacturers.

Colorful green litigation could result from not probing and asking important questions ahead of time – questions like: Does marketing a product as green create a warranty? Can a manufacturer be liable for failure to warn or for providing a product claimed to provide certain benefits that does not live up to these representations? What if a manufacturer is selling its product for use in a green building and represents it will obtain a certain certification, but is unable to do so? These types of questions typically end up getting resolved in the courtroom.

Click here to read the article in its entirety.

Here’s an interesting  green building-related story to follow: NYC condo unit owners file suit against LEED Gold-Hopeful  Riverhouse in Battery Park City.

This potentially high-profile NYC green building lawsuit (including celebrity purchasers Leonardo DiCaprio and Tyra Banks) is a result of a building being “marketed as being at the cutting edge of ‘green’ technology. It is supposedly a LEED Gold-rated building featuring fresh filtered air, filtered water, eco-friendly materials and is designed for low energy consumption. However, plaintiffs have consistently experienced cold drafts and insufficient heat in their Unit.”

Other allegations go on to describe “pipes that are not insulated, heating unit covers that are not sealed, and air filters that are clogged. The purchasers then allege that these failures constitute a breach of contract under the offering plan, and that the developer’s representations in the offering plan about the building and its units were false and therefore fraudulent.”

Click here to read the full story.

The inevitable is about to happen and most people don’t even know it is coming — green buildings are going to become, by codification, the law of the land. For some firms, this will just mean business as usual. For other firms, this change will be cataclysmic.

ASHRAE produces standards that are adopted by most model building codes, and the ASHRAE Draft Standard 189.1P is the new “Standard for the Design of High Performance Green Buildings Except Low-Rise Residential Buildings.”

This new ASHRAE Standard (currently in its final draft) is written in code language and will have the impact of mandating that all new buildings will be green buildings, thus eliminating the option of constructing anything less robust. Even if this standard is not adopted by all model codes, it will become the de facto standard of care. On the surface this sounds like a very good thing — mandating better-performing, more energy-efficient buildings – and it certainly has many redeeming aspects.

Here’s the downside:

• Lack of Experience Will Increase Design and Construction Deficiencies – Many of the optional aspects of the current USGBC LEED® guidelines will now be mandatory for designers and contractors. This means that, even if your designer or contractor doesn’t fully understand the key technical issues (e.g., envelope air barriers), they will still be required to use them. This practice of forcing designers and contractors to implement building features that they don’t fully understand creates a dilemma in the industry: either represent yourself as technically savvy, or face certain extinction. Given these as choices, building failures becomes more likely as firms design and construct buildings with components that they do not understand in an effort to keep the work coming in.

• Standard of Care Will Be Elevated – These new code requirements will automatically raise the required standard of care for the design and construction industry. This will increase the risk profile of their projects and may (at least initially) trigger some exclusion clauses in their current insurance policies. What are now considered “best practices” will soon be considered the minimum standard of care.  

• Regional Issues Not Addressed – The new standard mandates national green building requirements throughout the country with very little regard of the unique regions of the country where certain concepts may not be appropriate. This is almost always a problem when national standards are uniformly imposed on climates with unique requirements (e.g., hot and humid, very cold, or very rainy climates).

The inevitable result is that everyone will quickly morph into a green practitioner and the true marketplace differentiators (those with experience and unique technical expertise) will become difficult to discern. While codes can dictate that the industry follows certain standards, it cannot mandate that they get correctly implemented — with an increase in design and construction deficiencies and lawsuits being the inevitable result.   

Recognizing that this new standard (due to be issued in final form in 2010) could be a game-changer in the building marketplace, what’s the path forward?

• Review a copy of the current draft version of ASHRAE 189.1P and begin to understand the impact of the new requirements on your firm’s business, insurance, risk management, and technical expertise. (Note: This is available on line from www.ASHRAE.org)
•  Identify what requisite skills and knowledge your firm will need once this new standard is implemented.
• As this draft standard is finalized, expect more updates from Liberty Building Forensics Group with our analysis on its impact.

By: RANDY UDALL, AUDEN SCHENDLER – Tuesday, August 9, 2005
Source: Snowmass sking, Aspen core

[The following excerpts are taken from the original article.]

It may be that LEED is terminally ill, that euthanasia should be considered so that it can be replaced with a more effective program.

An informal survey of LEED critics suggests that the U.S. Green Building Council has been less than receptive to criticism.

An avalanche of reports insist that green building—and LEED certification in particular—doesn’t cost more than conventional building. These reports are wrong. Last summer, for example, a report compared the costs of LEED and non-LEED buildings and found “no statistically significant difference.”1

It is true that other factors have more influence on building cost than whether one chooses to pursue LEED. But the fact remains that LEED certification costs extra. For example, a well-publicized study done for the U.S. General Services Administration (which requires LEED certification for its new buildings) failed to account for the costs associated with commissioning, which is a LEED prerequisite. That’s like getting a new car price quote without the engine. (This study also didn’t account for the cost of obtaining three other expensive credits, discounted because they were already required by the GSA.)

In the real world, LEED certification typically adds 1 to 5 to the budget. A [local] nonprofit group recently figured their added costs at $50,000 to certify a 10,000 square foot building. The myth that going green costs nothing is damaging to clients who discover the reality deep in the process. Instead of using fuzzy math to show that green building doesn’t add costs, let’s acknowledge that these buildings cost more and are worth it.

Green design substitutes intelligence and ingenuity for energy. But brainpower isn’t free; we routinely pay $125 to $200 an hour for it. LEED pancakes additional costs on the consultant fees. First, properly commissioning a new building to make sure its mechanical systems are performing as designed (a LEED requirement) costs on the order of $25,000… for a small building.

The program’s fatal flaw is that it lacks a learning curve. If wrestling with LEED once meant that future projects would be simpler, the initial cost in money, time, and brain damage might be acceptable. But certifying one building doesn’t make it any cheaper, easier, and quicker to certify the next one.

There are many ways to improve LEED: 1) make more of the key points mandatory to reduce point mongering and encourage integrated design, 2) simplify the energy modeling protocols, 3) substitute onsite ratings for paper shuffling at a distance. Ultimately, LEED is too committee-driven. Also, for smaller buildings, why not “LEED EZ,” like form 1040 EZ for taxpayers?

Where To From Here?

Not all innovations prosper. The bad ones fail, and some of the good ones do, too. The idea behind LEED is laudable. The execution, so far, has been disappointing. According to E Source, ” the system “is not a roadmap to the optimal cost-effective, energy- efficient building,” and “it doesn’t necessarily encourage integrated building design.”2

In the final analysis, the world needs green buildings a lot more than green buildings need LEED certification. The first is essential and inevitable. The second is optional. If LEED continues to cost too much in dollars, time, and effort, we are not going to stop building green projects- we’ll just stop certifying them.

The way things are, sometimes the LEED plaque isn’t worth the flack, and that’s not O.K. We need green building to triumph, to take over our culture like computers did. We need LEED—or something like it—to accelerate that transition. Let’s roll up our sleeves, get to work, and reinvent LEED.

Footnotes and Verifications

1. L. F. Matthiessen and P. Moris. 2004. “Costing Green: A Comprehensive Cost Database and Budgeting Methodology.” Published by Davis Langedon Adamson. Available online at http://www.davislangdon.com/USA/Research/ResearchFinder/2004-Examining-the-Cost-of-Green/ For details on these sorts of mistakes see Schendler, A. 2001. “The Rough Road to Sustainability in Aspen: How Failure Can be the Next Great Tool in Sustainable Business.” Elsevier Science, Inc. Corporate Environmental Strategy, Vol. 8 No. 4, pp. 293-299.

2. Stein, J. and R. Reiss. 2004. “LEED Scores Early Successes but Faces Big Challenges.” E Source. Paper ER-04-03 Tech. March, p. 1. That and other resources are available for purchase at http://greenbuildings.platts.com.

“The goal should never be to build the greenest building possible. The goal should be to design the best building possible and, in the process, to achieve a green building. To achieve a high-performance building you cannot ignore the lessons already learned from past building failures, nor can you ignore the known laws of physics and building science. Also, you certainly must address the key regional climate differences that might be ignored when you are following national guidance documents (such as the one produced by the USGBC).”

                                                                                                                                 - J. David Odom, ASHRAE