Here are just a few “LEED firsts” that I have found while surfing the internet.  My favorites are “first”.

Favorites

• First LEED Platinum Single Family Residence in Western Puget Sound – Puget Sound, Washington
• First Ever LEED Certified Floating Green Building - Lake Mohave, NV
• World’s First LEED Certified Pizzeria – Fort Lauderdale, Florida
• First LEED Certified Parking Garage – Santa Monica, California
  • Here is more information on the project from the Santa Monica website. And a bonus…Their LEED Scorecard!!
• First Female, LEED Accredited Attorney in North Carolina – Charlotte, North Carolina

Restaruants

• First LEED Platinum Restaurant – Greensboro, North Carolina
• First LEED Certified Restaurant (McDonald’s) – Chicago, Illinois

Commercial Buildings

• Citi’s Frankfurt Data Center Earns First-Ever Leed Platinum Certification – Frankfurt, Germany
  

  The first flight ever from Kittyhawk to Kittyhawk

• Canadian Triple-A Office Building Aims for LEED First – Oakville, Ontario, Canada
• Broadway Launches First Ever LEED-Certified Theater! – New York
• First LEED Platinum Data Center – Sacramento, CA
• First Ever LEED Gold Certified Automobile Manufacturing Facility – Lansing, Michigan
• First LEED Factory – Grand Rapids, Michigan
• First Ritz-Carlton LEED Certified Hotel – Charlotte, North Carolina
• First LEED Platinum Skyscraper – New York, New York
• First (maybe second) LEED Gold Skyscraper – New York, New York
• First Certified Med Spa in the Country – San Francisco, California
• San Francisco’s First and Only LEED Certified Green Hotels – San Francisco, CA
• First Office Building in LA to Receive LEED Gold EB O&M – Los Angeles, California
• Waco Debuts Nation’s First ‘Green’ Chamber Building – Waco, Texas
• Florida’s First LEED-EB Gold Building – Tampa, Florida
• Africa’s First LEED Platinum Structure – Rwanda, Africa
  

Residential

• First LEED Platinum Home in Virginia – Arlington, Virginia
• New York City’s First LEED Platinum Certified Condominiums – New York, New York
• First Platinum LEED-Certified, 100% Solar Powered, Affordable Housing – San Diego, California
• Lansing’s First LEED Home – Lansing, Michigan
• Chattanooga’s first LEED Certified Residential Properties – Chattanooga, Tennessee
• First Gold LEED for homes certification in region – Baltimore, Maryland
• First LEED-for Homes Platinum Home in Arizona – Bellemont, Arizona
• First Student Build LEED-Certified Modular Home – Bel Air, Maryland
• Nation’s First LEED Platinum Affordable Housing – Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts
• First Home in State to Receive LEED Platinum – Washtenaw County, Michigan
• First in LEED for Neighborhood Development Pilot Program – Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
• Project First in Nation to Complete Stage 1 Certification, begin Stage 2 of LEED ND – Hawaii
• First LEED Project in Oklahoma – Tulsa, Oklahoma
• Community gets Md.’s first LEED gold rating – Baltimore, Maryland
• Nation’s First Multi-Unit LEED Certified Building – Cambridge, Massachusetts
  

Government

• Chicago’s FBI Building Earns First Platinum LEED-EBOM Certification – Chicago, Illinois
• First City Hall in the Nation to Achieve LEED Gold (pdf) – Cambridge, Ontario, Canada
• Science and Technology Facility is first LEED Platinum Federal Building – Golden, Colorado
• First LEED Silver Pump Station at Clean Water Services Facility – Hillsboro, Oregon

Healthcare

• Dell Children’s First LEED Hospital in World – Austin, Texas
• Florida’s First LEED Silver Certified Healthcare Facility – Port St. John, Florida

Education

• First LEED-Certified Laboratory Renovation – San Francisco, California
• Univ. of Florida First LEED Platinum Stadium with Green Power – Florida
• Chicago’s first LEED-built green school – Chicago, Illinois
• Vermont’s first LEED platinum building – Middlebury, Vermont
  

Religious / Museum

• World’s First LEED Museum Complex – Grand Rapid, Michigan
• World’s First LEED Platinum Religious Center – Chicago, Illinois
  
• First LEED Certified Art Museum in New York- New York, New York

An Inconvenient Truth

A couple of months ago, we asked the USGBC for a bunch of data related to LEED projects.  Ask and thou shalt recieve, er something like that.  We received a giant, green boat load of data, stretching back all the way to 2000 and covering all LEED Rating Systems up through the end of 2008.

By any measure, the explosion of LEED and the USGBC’s popularity has been unprecedented in the AEC industry.  Let’s dive into that data a little bit, figure out where the growth will be in the coming years and see what has made LEED so popular.

LEED Rating Systems

To give some background, LEED has numerous rating systems that each apply to a different building or project type.  To date, the most popular has been the New Construction (NC) Rating System.  Since LEED NC is the oldest rating system, this would make sense.   LEED NC currently accounts for 58% of all certified or registered projects.  Coming in at a distant second are Core and Shell (CS) and Existing Building (EB) with 12% each.  Commercial Interiors rounds out the top 3 spots with 11%.  The other rating systems (also the newest ones) are in at 3% or less, but as we will see later, they are gaining ground.  Click here for a live Google chart where you can explore the data a bit more.

Registered and Certified Projects

Registered is one thing, but Certified is another.  Certified means you have a plaque on the wall, you have been through the whole process, peer reviewed, etc.  The graphs below show that while registered projects are up, and I mean way up, certified projects are slow to move along.  This criticism is nothing new, as this article from 2005 points out.  I don’t have data on whether any of the registered projects were out right rejected, but to date, the average LEED Certified NC project takes 1,015 days, from the date of registration to the date of certification.  That is 2.75 years.

YOY Growth for EB and NC

The other interesting thing I found is the growth of year over year growth of NC vs EB.  EB is the fastest growing rating system.  This coincides with what we have been hearing from numerous sources:  existing buildings will become the hot item over the next couple of years due to the current vacancy rates.  Many developers do not want to build new, when the costs are relatively high to build, rather than purchase existing.  (Cushman Wakefield report, CBRE Report, JLL Report)

A Convenient Ad Campaign

I noticed something interesting when I plotted all of this data.  There is a spike in the trends after 2006.  I believe that while green building and sustainable design would have continued on its slow course to the mainstream, it was Al Gore’s movie “An Inconvenient Truth” (wikipedia link) that set the trend ablaze with the general public.

An Inconvenient Truth came out mid 2006.  It broke all kinds of box office records for documentaries, won an Academy Award, was well received at numerous influential film festivals and the companion book became a New York Times best seller.  Al Gore is now a Nobel Peace Prize laureate due in large part because of his work with the climate.

I have often thought that the only thing that engineers would need to get the recognition they are seeking is to have a dramatic television series written about our daily lives in the office

Anyway, that is exactly what the green movement and the USGBC got with An Inconvenient Truth.  It was a jump start to the tune of a multi million dollar global ad campaign that went more mainstream than the green building movement could have ever hoped for or probably have done on its own.  Gone are the days of design professionals having to trying to convince owners to pursue sustainable solutions.  Owners are asking for it.  All thanks to Al Gore.

Energy legs

We recently investigated adding solar power to one of our projects; a small retail building in California.  I learned quite a bit and I thought I would share some of the  information I learned.

Parapets

Many jurisdictions require screening for rooftop mechanical units.  A common way to screen mechanical units is to add parapets around the entire perimiter of the building.  Tall parapets will limit the area of roof that will be fully exposed during the day and therefore limit the amount of viable roof area used for solar power generation.   The parapets will shade the roof equal to 2 times the parapet hieght.  For instance, if your parapet is 3 feet, it will shade 6 feet of roof.  See the figure below for more information.

Usable Area and Energy Production

Net effective roof areas

A rule of thumb for the usable square footage (after you take into account parapets and other obstructions), would be to take 60% of the available area.  This reduction accounts for spacing of panels, mechanical ducts, walking areas, chords and other obstructions.

For the solar panel manufacturer we were talking with, thier product would produce 1kW of energy per 100sf.  This is the magic number that the solar industry wants to raise; if one manufacturer can produce more energy per sqaure foot for the same price, they have an advantage over their competitors. 

kW and kWh

Full solar production is during 10am and 4 pm (geographic assumptions include northern hemisphere, west coast, etc.).  On average, there will be 3 hours of full exposure in the winter and 7.5 hours in the summer in which the solar panels will be effective.  Averaged out over one year, that is 5.2 hours per day of available production. 

For instance, if your net effective roof area was 1000 sf, and you happened to building in the same region as our building, you would be able to produce 1000sf*1kW/100sf*5.2 hours/day = 52 kWh of energy. 

This brings up another topic, what is power and what is energy.  This website summed it up best (for me anyways):

Power may be measured at any point in time, whereas energy has to be measured during a certain period.

Disclaimer

This information is very specifc to the one job we worked on, in the one area and the production numbers was one specific product.  The technology is changing so fast, that these costs, available production, etc. might be completely out of date in a couple of months.  However, the tips presented above will stay the same.  Watch out for screening, your entire roof area will not be effective in generating power, solar panels will only produce power for a limited amount of time each day, and it will vary throughout the year. 

For more information, here is a good treehugger.com article on how solar works.

A GOOD visualization

I love visualizations.  Here is another good one from GOOD.is.  It illustrates the water consumed by everyday items and actions, both actual water used (i.e. flushing a toilet) and virtual water used (a steak uses lots of virtual water because it had to eat lots of grain which takes lots of water).

I have recently developed a coffee habit.  One cup a day, black.  I was doing tea for a couple of months.  I would have at least a three cups of tea per day.  I enjoyed using the same tea bag twice, but I would add a second tea bag (of the same or different type) to get more flavor after the first cup.  Looking at the graphic, it appears that my coffee habit (per cup) uses over 4 times the water that tea does.  Maybe I should wake up with a tall glass of wheat beer in the morning (only 20 gallons of water vs coffee’s 37 gallons).

Also interesting to note, is that producing one pound of beef takes 1,500 gallons of water.  Claims vary widely on this, but the idea is the same:  it takes a lot of water to produce beef.

Here is another article from the Economist that deals with the same issue of producing goods and water.  I love the Economist by the way.  Whenever I have a flight, I try to pick up the latest issue.

The intent of both of these articles is the same:  true sustainability must account for the life cycle costs of all items that our processes consume to manufacture and distribute those resources, not just the direct costs .  We could design the most sustainable office building in the world, but if it was 50 miles from any of the occupants (and assuming none of the occupants use mass transit), the benefits would be lost because of the transportation impacts of the occupants commuting to and from the building everyday.

LEED has received a lot of criticism in the past for not taking into account more of these hidden costs, such as transportation.  However, the USGBC is looking to change that in future versions, further solidifying LEED’s place in sustainable design.  LEED is consensus based and because of that the users (us as a design profession) can shape LEED into what we want.

Go to good.is for the full graphic

Good.is has a neat visualization (you know how I love those) on the impact of different modes of travel. The chart metrics are a little confusing (passenger miles per gallon is tough to get my head around) but the impact is noted.

I was surprised by the efficiency of the motorcoach vs a sedan.  But if you pack those things with people, your footprint per person goes way down.

I was happy with the Amtrak efficiency.  I have only ridden the Amtrak once from Oakland to Santa Barbara and thoroughly enjoyed the experience.  However, I must say that there were not 300 people on the train.  On one leg, I was the only person in the entire car. These numbers reflect only the efficiency when the mode of transportation is maxed out with passengers.  Unfortunately, we are going to have to change the way we get around for this graphic to be true a larger percentage of the time.

One last note, carpooling with 4 people in an SUV is more efficient  (miles per gallon per passenger) than one person in a hybrid.  So if you own a hybrid, get a carpool group together to really take advantage of the savings!

Make sure to read the discussion on the article too.  Good stuff.

Then I recieved my Personal Travel Report.  What an amazing service!  I really like visualizations of data and this was most of my big trips visualized.  Plus, it gives you a footprint calculation for the year of travel.

Here is some more information on Dopplr travel reports.  They take travel data from the presidential candidates and plug it into their system.  Pretty interesting stuff.

Try it out, and friend me on Dopplr while you are at it.

Dopplr Personal Report


The ecofont (second from top) compared to Bitstream Vera (top)

I have come across this story from multiple sources now.  Here is the link to the story on NPR, and the link to download the ecofont http://www.ecofont.eu/ecofont_en.html. The ecofont is made by a company called Spranq.

From the ecofont website:

…how much of a letter can be removed while maintaining readability? After extensive testing with all kinds of shapes, the best results were achieved using small circles. After lots of late hours (and coffee) this resulted in a font that uses up to 20% less ink. Free to download, free to use.

Of course, I immediately downloaded it to try it out.  I love techie stuff like this.  I liked the idea of reducing consumption from another angle.  The font is an innovative way of spurring more conversation about alternative methods of reducing consumption of a potentially hazardous product, toner and ink. Spranq states that they base the 20% reduction on the Bitstream Vera font.

I wanted to see how our BJG fonts used in letters and manuals (Swiss 721 Light Extended BT for the majority of text and Vera Humana for titles and such) stacked up against the new ecofont.

So, I set out on a little experiment.  I took a letter I had written and changed the fonts to the new ecofont.  I printed them both out.  There was a noticeable difference between our standard font and the ecofont.  The ecofont website implies that they would use the font for daily use and not for final draft materials and I agree.  The ecofont comes out looking a little on the grey side.

My test suite of fonts

Next, I got a little more scientific.  I opened up Google SketchUp to get the exact (or close enough) area of a couple of different fonts.  I used the sentence “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” (a panagram for you trivia buffs) as my baseline.  I scaled all the sentences so that the letter “T” in the each sentence was 1′-0″ high.  I figured this was a good estimation of getting the fonts the same size.

I then exploded the fonts used SketchUp to calculate the areas of the letters in the sentence for each font.   The table below shows the results.

Setting up the fonts

True to their claim, the ecofont uses exactly 20% less area than the Bitstream Vera font.  However, the Vera Humana font uses 10% less than the ecofont and the Swiss font uses 3% more.  Before I started out, I assumed that the Swiss font would have used less, but numbers don’t lie!.  Interestingly enough, plain old Times New Roman uses the same area as the ecofont.  And of course, the big, bold, Arial Black uses 128% more area than the ecofont.

Again, I really like the idea of the font.  It is innovative, different and spurs conversation about alternative ways to reduce our consumption of hazardous products.  I am amazed that it received coverage on NPR.  Green is on the forefront of everyone’s mind these days.

That is why I was very excited to find ECOTECT.  Through reading one of the Revit blogs, I came across an announcement that Autodesk had acquired ECOTECT.  From the ECOTECT website:

ECOTECT is a complete building design and environmental analysis tool that covers the full range of simulation and analysis functions required to truly understand how a building design will operate and perform.

I downloaded a free trial for a number of their products.  They have weather and analyzer tools, as well as a number of other visualization and modeling tools.  I have been playing with the weather tool for a little bit.  The tool allows a user to plot all sorts of weather related graphs for a certain region: temperature, wind direction, humidity, etc.

When I tried to find weather data for Reno, it wasn’t in the program.  A quick look on the ECOTECT website gave me a link to the US Department of Energy website that houses loads of weather data.  Now I have a way to not only find elusive weather data, but also a way to plot it.  This kind of data is necessary for the next step in green design.  Incorporating sun angles, temperatures, prevailing wind direction, etc. into building design is uber-green and something I would love to learn about.

If you have any references for this level of design, please share them in the comments.

As an example of the data, I have embedded average temperature data for the three BJG offices.  As it is July, I am glad I am in Pleasanton and not Las Vegas; I can’t handle the heat!  I plotted this in Excel.

Happy plotting!

Misleading statement #1: Automatic ID Credit

Nothing will give you an automatic ID (Innovation in Design) credit.

The following statement was taken from the U.S. Green Building Council’s website.  (This document specifically):

LEED ID Credits are evaluated for each project. It is important to note that the award of an ID Credit for one project at a specific point in time does not constitute automatic approval for a similar strategy in a future project. Innovation credits are not awarded for the use of a particular product or design strategy if the technology aids in the achievement of an existing LEED credit.

USGBC does produce a catalog of ID credits awarded on past projects.  But this document is meant as a “brainstorming tool only to assist project teams in the development of new ID credits. It does not set any precedent to be upheld during a LEED Certification Review.”

Misleading statement #2: LEED Certified Product

From the USGBC website:

The USGBC does not certify, endorse or promote products, services or companies, nor do we track, list or report data related to products and their environmental qualities.
However, using green products and materials may contribute to a building’s LEED Certification. See our Green Building Links for information from other green building organizations.

Misleading Statement #3: LEED Qualified Product

The image below was taken from a carpet manufacturer’s website.  The USGBC strictly prohibits using LEED in reference to a product. Refer to the Member Logos and Guidelines on the USGBC website.

The logo may not be placed on product packaging, ads, or be used as a visual reference to LEED claims in product literature.  For example, the logo cannot be placed next to text that says, “Product A can help fulfill Credit X under the LEED Rating System”

Although the logo below does not use the actual LEED logo, the name still implies endorsement.  This is wrong and misleading.

Further more, the language included in the image above is not clear.  It is fantastic that their carpet contains 10% recycled content.  However, is it post-consumer or pre-consumer?  There is a difference when calculating your total project recycled content.  LEED instructs us to only to take 1/2 of the pre-consumer content and all of the post-consumer content.

In addition, claims that because a product is 100% recycled, your project will earn points is incomplete.  Your overall project needs to meet certain goals, not just a single product.  If the only recycled content in your project was the carpet above, you would most likely get no recycled content credits.

Conclusion

LEED is a complicated guide to green building.  It is complicated because it needs to be thorough.  Here are some things you can do as an owner, developer, home owner or concerned tenant to help you through the green building process.

• Ask a LEED Accredited Professional.  All LEED APs are listed at the Green Building Certification Institutue’s website.  (The GBCI is the testing and certification arm of the USGBC, although it is completely independent from the standards writing USGBC.)
• BJG has 7 LEED APs and we would be happy to help you with your next proejct.  Feel free to contact us:  Reno (775.827.1010), Las Vegas (702.990.3532) or Pleasanton (925.251.9800).
• Ask questions.  Many manufacturers will tell you that their product will give you 6 LEED points.  (This happened to a coworker of mine today, in fact).  As discussed above, this statement is not true.  Ask them what points their product will contribute to.  Ask them for literature and backup.  Really press them on how their product is green.
• There are some directories out there for reference.  Many cities, like Portland and Santa Monica, are starting to compile directories of products not only green, but also regionally manufactured. Buildinggreen.com and Builditgreen.com are reputable sources for green information.

Everyone wants a piece of the green building pie.  Make sure to not get caught up in the marketing hype.

If you’re not familiar with the Sony Reader, you can download up to 160 books on the portable device. It weighs about nine ounces and is about the size of a large greeting card. You purchase the books from the on-line store; the prices could be cheaper, but they are certainly more reasonable than a book store. The battery lasts quite awhile because the display is not backlit. That also makes it easier to read and you get about 7500 page turns with each charge.

For me, it means that I can browse on-line and choose several books I want to read, purchase them, and download. When I finish one book, the next one is already there for me to read. No more being on vacation, finishing the books I’ve brought to read, and having to figure out where to get a new book. It used to be a problem if I wanted to finish a book I was reading on an airplane flight. I needed to carry the book I wanted to finish, plus the next one I wanted to read. If I didn’t like the book I brought, I was stuck reading it anyway; there weren’t any choices. Now I just have my Reader to carry and I can have all the choices I need. The more I use it, the more I like it. I find it’s way more comfortable and easier to hold than a heavy book; my only possible complaint is that I don’t really like the button you click to turn pages.

I’m sure there will be many improvements made in the future, but I figure I’ll get my money’s worth out of this one in a short period of time.