After Gutenberg

Photo: Tekla Perry
With limited roof area, David Kaneda chose high performance, solar photo voltaic panels for his zero energy office building.

As previously noted, commercial buildings can achieve energy, economic, and environmental performance. Such ‘high performance’ building not only saves money for the owners, but also can provide healthy places to live and work. Furthermore, it can help to preserve our natural resources and significantly reduce a building’s impact upon the environment.

Especially with government incentives, there is a growing recognition by property managers as to the value of DER (Distributed Energy Resources. Thus, there are more demands placed upon architects and builders to lower building costs by means of solar power.

One could perceive such initiative as encompassed by standard for sustainable architecture. The (AIA) American Institute of Architects, which acknowledges on an annual basis a project that meets their criteria for sustainable architecture, recently published a report, entitled “Local Leaders in Sustainability“. According to JETSON GREEN, the report “analyzed 661 communities’ best practices, strategies, and trends.” From this analysis, the authors were able to provide recommended approaches that cities could take, if looking to implement green building programs.

The AIA report noted that, “since 2003, the number of cities with green building programs has risen from 22 to 92.”

• 1 in 7 cities surveyed currently have green building programs
• Number improves to 1 in 5 by next year with current projections
• 39% of citizens live in cities with green building programs
• 36 cities are in an advanced stage of developing a green building program

The post includes case studies from Portland, San Franciso, Scottsdale, Chicago, Austin and Atlanta. In response to a query, Preston noted that in Salt Lake City, Utah, municipal buildings must the LEED silver standard.

Anything over 10k sf receiving money from the city must be LEED certified, I believe.

After that, there’s the green building center which supplies some good stuff for people wanting to renovate green. There’s an underground movement of people trying to move towards green here, but the housing stock is all old, so we’ll either see tear downs with new green construction or green rehabs. Some developers and entrepreneurs are trying to green existing commercial buildings, too.

Buildings can play a lead role in combating climate change. Such initiative is more likely to take place where there are feed-in tariffs and other incentives to improve the energy efficiency of buildings.