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.

The first visualization I could obtain without much effort is the number of LEED Accredited Professionals by state.  California leads the nation with over 11,300 LEED APs. New York comes in second with over 4,900 LEED APs.

However, when I normalized the data to display number of LEED APs per million people (based on 2007 census information), the picture changes quite a bit.

Washington, DC has a small population, but a relatively large LEED AP population with almost 2,300 LEED APs for every million people. California, on the other hand has 311 for every million people. A couple of things come to mind for why DC is so high:

• The USGBC keeps its headquarters in Washington, DC.  In 2006 they had 70 employees.
• Government LEED APs could skew the numbers.  GSA, US Dept of Interior, lobbyists, etc.
• A number of large architecture firms have offices in Washington DC (Gensler, HOK, Perkins + Will, RTKL, URS, etc.)

For the rest of the data, I am going to try and take this slow and dig through over the next couple of weeks.  I am interested to hear what type of charts you would like to see.  Make sure to leave a comment and I will see what I can do.