A Simpler Approach to Better Buildings

It’s been many years since I’ve consulted on a “green building” project. When I was working on LEED Platinum, Living Building, and WELL projects; I always felt like these ratings systems were great but doing two things wrong.

#1 They were too focused on checking boxes and creating paperwork and,

#2 They were too complex and overreaching (WELL has a credit for water taste). 

We want to see better buildings everywhere (rating systems only catch the top 10% of projects). Not just for clients that can afford the documentation and teams that can understand everything from energy, water, building materials, landscaping strategies, urban planning, etc. In order to do address the climate crisis, we need to focus on the fundamentals. IMHO these essentials are; meeting and exceeding design standards, creating better processes, advocating for a cleaner grid, and letting data show us where to keep improving. 

A focus on meeting and exceeding existing design standards

The American Society of Heating Refrigeration and Air Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) has some great design standards which in theory require all building engineers to meet a certain minimum design threshold. The three most important are 90.1 (for energy efficiency), 62.1 (for ventilation) and 55 (for thermal comfort). These three standards when done well together make for energy efficient, well ventilated and comfortable buildings. 

Sadly, not every project follows these standards as they are not as well understood as someone from the outside would think an engineering standard would be to the world of engineers in North America. A focus on the fundamentals inside of firms and for municipalities to really figure out how to go above and beyond these basic standards is where the focus should be.  

A thirty percent improvement above 90.1 is often the simplest and best approach any city or project team can take as a means to get to more energy efficient buildings. Everything else is just too restrictive and confusing (the Vancouver envelope first approach for example), and gets into the weeds on carbon (that focus should be directed at the grid). There also just end up being too many ways to model a building when you add new standards. We need to make energy modeling mandatory and sticking with a single standard allows us to make it mandatory (while allowing people to get skilled at it). It's not helpful for the industry to split their focus from city to city and code to code or for multiple rating systems.   

Process matters, but independence matters more

It’s hard to be impartial at the best of times. We all have our inherent biases and the most important thing to do when you know you are going to be making a biased decision is to consult an independent party for their outside opinion. 

Yet the building industry is full of processes that don’t take account of the importance of independence. You have design teams creating their own energy models, HVAC contractors doing their own quality control (it’s called commissioning in the building industry), and many other aspects of design and construction quality control that are being done by those who do the work. 

The most important place to start is with a third party requirement for all energy modeling. This allows us to get that extra step closer to being honest about how we think a building will perform. It’s essentially a quality control step in energy efficient design and that can’t be done by the people focusing on designing a building (they need to focus on meeting existing design standards). 

Once you have a good design that has been impartially reviewed, the only way to build it as designed is with independent parties involved in the implementation process. Third party commissioning is also the most useful thing any city can make mandatory. It’s amazing that third party quality control for multimillion dollar projects isn’t just done without mandate, but that’s the building industry.

Motivation 

Creating incentives and rewards are the key to making things better. In the early days of LEED, it was really smart to base the rating system on Olympic medals (Bronze, Silver and Gold). Unfortunately, that only brought out the competitors and not the entire building and design community (who mostly stayed on the sidelines over the last 20 or so years). If Cities want to see greener buildings, they need to create better and simpler incentives. 

The best incentive for a better building is one that you are forced to manage (and pay the utilities, and costs of capital expenditure cuts on for a number of years). Requiring the developer of a building to run it for at least 3 years or to at least have to pay the utility costs would go a long way towards creating better buildings. There are of course a lot of other ways to motivate the industry to do better, but this simple change feels like the easiest for anyone to enact.

Focus on the utilities

Even if we were able to cut energy use in buildings by 80% (which isn’t possible or probably even sensible), we’d still have to deal with grid energy that isn’t from 100% renewable energy sources. The good news is that things are naturally going in the right direction with wind, solar, and nuclear, (now I’m getting into controversial territory…but it’s called a climate crisis for a reason) becoming the norm. 

Putting our focus into positive policy change and choosing utilities with a low carbon profile (in British Columbia we have no utility choice…but it is very clean), allows for us to focus on efficiency in buildings, and whether renewables are the best approach for the project or if it’s better to leave energy generation to the companies that specialize in it. 

A data driven approach

Without a great deal of building data, we can’t continuously improve buildings over their 50+ year lifecycle. LEED version 5 is going to be moving towards credits for real-time monitoring of water, energy and indoor environmental quality but that’s 5 years behind where the technology is right now (standards like RESET and Wired Score are way ahead already).

LEED (i.e. The United States Green Building Council) was however the first to realize that sub-metering matters (tenants are more motivated by energy efficiency when they pay their own bills). They also pushed the measurement and verification credit (a huge mistake to get rid of it), which allows a team to compare actual energy usage with modeled performance. This is so important because it allows you to figure out where energy is going and once you measure, you can manage. 

The same goes for water and indoor air quality. Airsset was formed on the idea that once we know more about our indoor environments, we can make them better for people (and improve energy performance at the same time). 

Over the 50+ years of operation of a building, giving the power to facility teams to know where energy is going, and how to balance that with human health is what will allow us to create better buildings. Design is just the start of a journey towards low energy and low carbon buildings. It’s best to focus on the long journey we have ahead of us in making every building (including existing) better.