I’m from Missouri – “Show Me” Superior Green Building Performance

Well, actually I’m from Philadelphia – the home of good cheesesteaks and good lawyers (good engineers too!).  But for the sake of this article, I join a growing segment of design and construction industry experts who are figuratively from Missouri when it comes to building performance. Missouri is known as the “Show Me” state.  This means that you can’t just ‘talk the talk’ about some grand scheme or claim, you’ve got to ‘walk the walk’ – you’ve got to show me and prove it.  “Show me” is becoming the de jour response to claims of superior “performance” by green or high-performance buildings.  Owners, operators, tenants and even the design/construction community are looking for hard data and reliable metrics to verify claims of superior energy performance, low resource use, good indoor environmental quality and occupant comfort and satisfaction.  This is a good thing.

Rating Systems, Design Guidance and Performance Measurement/Verification
Concomitant to the development of green building ratings systems such as LEED¹  (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) and Green Globes² , there has been a growth in both design guidance and performance measurement and verification of green building metrics so that buildings might be more readily ‘compared’ in terms of energy and resource use as described above.  There are also other comparative tools that are not related to any specific rating system but comparing your building to industry norms for similar building types.

The leading engineering technical society for energy efficient building design and indoor environments is ASHRAE³ . To address the growing issues associated with the quantitative design challenges presented by green buildings, ASHRAE in conjunction with the US Green Building Council (US GBC) and IES, has developed Standard 189 – Standard for the Design of High Performance, Green Buildings.  What Std. 189 does is take the analytical approach to energy efficient building design first presented in ASHRAE Std. 90.1 (Energy Standard for Buildings Except Low-Rise Residential Buildings) and applied it (generally) to the categories defined in the USGBC’s LEED Program.  So where both LEED and Green Globes are largely “aspirational” in nature (they set a goal but offer no method to get there), Std. 189 attempts to offer the technical guidance necessary to achieve those “aspirations.”  ASHRAE Std. 189 gives you a map to help you reach your goals.
Coupled with the development of Std. 189, ASHRAE has taken a page from the Eurpean Union (EU) and developed a ‘building Energy Quotient’ or bEQ.  The bEQ is intended to provide an easy to understand tool for grading a building and comparing Building A to Building B using simple letter grades.  The EU began this process of labeling buildings for resource use and energy efficiency in the early 2000s.

 
Is your high performance building highly performing?
So with the design guidance of Std. 189, the goal setting aspects of LEED or Green Globes and the energy based grading process of ASHRAE bEQ, there remains a missing link.  How do you know if the building you’ve designed and built is actually performing in accordance with the objectives you’ve set?  A growing need to “trust but verify” has given birth to the Measurement and Verification (M &V) regimen for green building projects.

 
The large question looms – “How do you verify over time that your high performance building is highly performing?”  To that end ASHRAE along with the US Green Building Council (US GBC) and CIBSE⁴  has developed the “Performance Measurement Protocols for Commercial Buildings.”  The aim of the “PMPs” is to develop standardized methodologies for measuring and reporting building performance metrics so that when evaluating a building’s performance we can be sure that we are comparing “apples to apples.”

 
The Performance Measurement Protocols for Commercial Buildings (PMPs) have been developed to offer a user three levels of performance measurement options with three levels of intensity of analysis, data required and effort expended…and of course, time and cost.  The three levels are:

• Basic – Annual, “whole building” data; the results are indicative but not specific; includes energy and water use

• Intermediate – Monthly data; by major system; the results are “diagnostic’ and include thermal comfort and IAQ along with energy and water use;

• Advanced – Weekly/Daily/Hourly data analysis; system and equipment operational data; included lighting/daylighting and acoustics/vibration conditions.

 
Amongst the key elements in the successful use of the PMPs and the resultant performance assessments and evaluations is the identification of the proper metrics and proper benchmarks.  Selecting the wrong data measurement points relative to the issue you wish to monitor and address can send you down the wrong path and result in little improvement in performance or possibly result in degradations in performance.  You wouldn’t want to control the heater in your house by looking across the street to see if your neighbor is wearing a sweater in his house would you?

Selecting the appropriate benchmarks is also key. The benchmarks are what you will compare your performance too and will inform the improvement objectives that you set.  Targets that are too low will leave “money on the table” in that your facility might be capable of significantly better performance but since the bar is set so low, the operations team isn’t challenged to improve beyond that. Too high a benchmark will lead to a frustrating outcome as you find it nearly impossible to meet the goals. It can also cause you to allocate capital for improvements inefficiently as you unknowingly attempt to ‘overshoot’ what is ‘reasonable’ for your building. Selecting good benchmarks can be challenging but there are several independent databases that have aggregated energy and water use for a wide number of buildings and system types for both North America and the European Union.

The upside of better buildings
So what’s the upside of all of this?  The upside is that the quest for and expectation of “better buildings” has spurred a focus on performance.  This has fostered a surge in the development of alternative design approaches, construction techniques, building materials and equipment to achieve the desired performance. It has also put a spotlight on how a project is put together – how its systems work collectively, and/or how those systems are operated and maintained.  The results should be more efficient, more comfortable and more reliable buildings which are a more valuable asset.

The downside of better buildings
So what are the downsides? The downsides are that as we begin to focus on performance outcomes, we quickly realize two things. The first is that overall performance is dependent on many things; some of which are within control of the design and construction team, some of which are not.  That can create a murky picture about why or how the performance is where it is and who touched it last.  Suddenly operations and maintenance – aka “ownership” – has a measurable role in determining the ‘success’ of a project.  And then there are things like weather which is a serious ‘externality’ (imagine the comparison of cooling energy use models done 2 years ago compared to actual cooling energy used this summer).  The second issue is that most contract forms have no provisions to deal with “performance,” especially from a ‘design’ perspective and most certainly not ‘over time’ which is fundamental to sustainability or ‘green.’

So we will need the proper tools to assess the impact of operations and maintenance on overall sustainability; to observe, advise and alert operations when critical control parameters are heading out of bounds and to properly manage the business relationships that keep capital projects rolling in a way that achieves the objectives without crushing the participants.

Performance measurement and verification is here to stay
Performance measurement and verification is here to stay and will only become more stringent and the reporting more universally required and more easily understood.

So what will we get? At the end of the day, we get better buildings: better in terms of resources, reliability, occupant satisfaction and long-term realized value. To get there we will find projects being done in a more collaborative manner, and this collaboration will blur some of the edges that have defined design and construction and operation for many years.  And that blurring may create a different framework in which to view a “good job” and a “bad job,” who was to take care of what and to what standard should they be held.

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¹ LEED = Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design.  It is a green building rating system developed by The US Green Building Council.

² Green Globes = a green building rating system managed by the Green Building Initiative.

³ ASHRAE = The American Society of Heating, Refrigeration and Air-Conditioning Engineers

⁴ CIBSE = Chartered Institute of Building Services Engineers (UK Technical association)