Performance Beyond the Plaque

By Jeremy Cohen, Government Sector Manager, USGBC

Green building is fundamentally about performance. As green becomes the norm for the design, construction, operations and maintenance of public buildings, LEED certification is understood as an important performance milestone as opposed to an end in and of itself. Government organizations are endeavoring to better communicate the performance behind the LEED plaque and to ensure progress toward the next milestone. 

Different stakeholders look at various scales of performance – the flow rate of a faucet, the total energy consumption of a building, the building as a component of a community, etc. – and the ultimate success of a green building effort is judged on the sum of these factors. For government entities with organization-wide green building programs, where the stakeholders include every taxpayer and performance is summed across an entire building portfolio, quantifying and communicating green building impacts is a challenge. LEED certification provides an easily understood stamp of approval for a successful green building effort, a verification of performance and potential at one point in time. For many, this heightened focus on building performance generates new interest and necessity to track, maintain, evaluate and improve green building performance over time. 

With an ethic of accountability and an imperative to serve the public good, government organizations at all levels are taking ongoing green building performance seriously. The U.S. Department of Energy worked with Pacific Northwest National Laboratory to develop a methodology to compare the lifecycle cost and performance of a green building to a traditional building. The data collection protocol has been applied in several studies for the Department of Energy, the U.S. Navy, and the U.S. General Services Administration. The National Association of State Facilities Administrators (NASFA) in cooperation with the AIA Public Architects Committee assembled a best-practices guide to post-occupancy facility performance evaluation programs, featuring a menu of methods that states such as Massachusetts, Washington, California and Ohio are employing to inform maintenance planning and future design decisions. Cities such as Seattle, San Francisco, Washington, D.C, and Denver are tracking a range of metrics on public and private green buildings, while in western Michigan, Illinois and New York City, USGBC chapters have spearheaded public-private partnerships to conduct cost-benefit and performance evaluation studies. 

This focus on ongoing building performance is evident across the green building movement. At Greenbuild 2009, there were only a handful of education sessions dedicated to measuring and evaluating green building performance. At Greenbuild 2010, there was an entire session track titled simply, "Measuring Performance". All of this work and momentum is helping to raise awareness and to develop best practices. Limited time, staff and money are common barriers to doing more about ongoing building performance, but shared experiences and tools illustrate that where there is a will there is a way.

USGBC is working to make ongoing performance monitoring more accessible and to make ongoing improvement a necessity. LEED for Existing Buildings: Operations & Maintenance and recertification provide paths to holistically score and verify facility performance at the next milestone. TheBuilding Performance Partnership provides performance analysis and feedback to owners of LEED-certified buildings. And the Green Building Information Gateway, a mapping and data-sharing tool that has been introduced in beta for certain geographic areas, will make it easy to view and compare metrics on LEED-certified projects within a specific area. Achieving LEED certification is a huge achievement that represents leadership and the intention to leverage the built environment in the pursuit of sustainability – a goal that can only be fully realized through ongoing attention to building performance. 

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Mission: To transform the way buildings and communities are designed, built and operated, in a way that improves the quality of life in West Michigan.