Reinventing Green Building

Why Certification Systems Aren't Working and What We Can Do About It

Jerry Yudelson

• Publisher: New Society Publishers
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781550926118
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Durabilité en architecture

Buildings and their associated systems are the largest source of greenhouse gases in the world. The 2030 Challenge aims to produce zero-net energy from new North American construction by 2030 while achieving a 50 percent reduction in carbon emissions from existing buildings. With less than 4 percent of commercial and residential structures in the United States and Canada certified by 2015, we seem destined to fall catastrophically short of this target.

Reinventing Green Building combines a unique, insider's critique of the current state of affairs with a potent vision for the future. This highly visual, data-driven analysis brings together the wisdom of today's leading practitioners including:

Up-to-date information on green building issues, energy economics, and new technology Dramatic new approaches to certification system design and user experience Creative, outside-the-box solutions using the Internet of Things, big data analytics, and cloud-based technologies for building management

The green building revolution has failed to fulfill its promise to transform the marketplace in a meaningful way. Smart, simple, and sustainable: Reinventing Green Building presents a new approach to certification, designed to radically cut costs while dramatically increasing marketplace acceptance integrating true climate mitigation and better building performance.

Jerry Yudelson, dubbed "The Godfather of Green" by Wired magazine in 2011, has many years of professional experience in the green building field, elected as a LEED Fellow and having served as the president of the Green Building Initiative. He is the author of thirteen books in the field, including Dry Run, Choosing Green, and Green Building A–Z.

CHAPTER 1

The Technological Challenge: The Age of Algorithms and Big Data

Once a new technology rolls over you,
if you’re not part of the steamroller,
you’re part of the road.

Stewart Brand¹

Prepare yourself for the coming era of ubiquitous and never-ending connectivity. Since the 2001 introduction of the iPod, digital innovations are numerous: the iPhone in 2006, the iPad in 2010, the Apple Watch in 2015, mobile computing’s global growth, billions of people on social networks and social media, the advent of the sharing economy, the rise of cloud computing (e.g., via Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Apple iCloud) and the growing “Internet of Things” (IoT) connecting every imaginable digital device, all in real time.

According to Dr. Osman Ahmed at Siemens, four major technologies are “game changers” for anyone in the business of owning or managing buildings:

1. The Internet of Things (IoT), comprising billions of now ubiquitous connected data-gathering devices (an estimated 50 billion interconnected devices by 2020). The IoT is a new market potentially worth $70–$150 billion by 2025.²

2. The cloud, which makes computing power available to anyone, anywhere, from any connected device.

3. Mobile devices and open systems, which allow everyone with a smartphone to have access to thousands of apps that help them to manage their life.

4. Big Data analytics, which has the computing power to handle millions of data points from diverse and disparate sources and provide prediction and diagnostics for better managing building operations and energy use, coupled with algorithms guiding use of Big Data.³

To this list, we can add widely available cheap sensors that flow building operating data up through the IoT, the cloud and Big Data onto mobile devices. Taken together, these five technologies represent the key trend driving the market for automating building operations (Figure 1.1).

Industry expert Realcomm says that standardized, flexible, secure and state-of-the-art IP networks (both fixed-cable and wireless) make tremendous sense to put in each and every green building, old and new, right now, for multiple reasons:⁴

• Cost: running many different wiring systems up a building’s spine is costly.

• Adding New Systems: it’s easier and less costly to use a standardized approach.

• Integration: without a standard network, getting many different systems to talk with each other is both time-consuming and costly.

• Support: supporting the networking/communication needs for many different systems can be difficult and as well as costly.

• Management Ease: multiple systems are harder to manage.

• Security: securing and managing a single IP network architecture is easier.

In a few years, fully capable building IP networks will become as common as mechanical and electrical systems are today. Quite soon, all equipment that goes into buildings will be IP-ready and based on open systems, making this transition even easier. According to one expert, the IoT model for buildings breaks down into seven functional levels:

Devices are connected and send and receive data interacting with the Network where the data is transmitted, normalized and filtered using Edge Computing before landing in Data storage and Databases accessible by Applications which process it and provide it to People who will act and collaborate using the data.⁵

FIGURE 1.1. Five Technologies Driving the Market for Building Automation

Building design, construction and operations are about to undergo seismic shifts, with advanced design software and cloud-based building management systems. Yet during the past 15 years green building certification has hardly changed, except that (in some cases) data for certification can now be extracted from design documents and operational data, and then uploaded to web-based platforms. It is, however, still evaluated item by item by review teams of professional consultants and building assessors.

There are a few exceptions. Paul Shahriari, an experienced software developer for green products, created a decision-making app, ecomedes, that allows one to easily calculate the payback from green investments such as water-conserving toilets and fixtures (Figure 1.2).⁶

In 2012, USGBC introduced an app, the Green Building Information Gateway (GBIG) that allows you to find on your smartphone LEED-certified green buildings in any city, using USGBC’s project database.⁷ That’s just about the extent of the mobile revolution in green building.

FIGURE 1.2. The ecomedes App. Credit: ecomedes, LLC, Paul Shahriari

Just as mobile and cloud-based technologies have totally disrupted revenues and business models for such technology leaders of the 1990s and 2000s as Intel, Dell, HP, Nokia, Microsoft, Research in Motion, etc., and made Apple the most valuable stock of any company in the world in 2015, isn’t it logical to expect that these disruptive technologies will soon challenge and disrupt green building design, construction and operations as well as certification’s current analog-based model?

In The Attacker’s Advantage, management guru Ram Charan writes about the “structural uncertainty” of our times:

Every day more [people] have instant access to any and all knowledge and insights that exist, as well as the ability to collaborate with others as never before. Their ideas can be scaled up swiftly, because capital is readily available to fund promising ideas. For digital companies, the scaling can be accomplished extremely fast and at low incremental cost. On the other side of the coin, consumers have acquired great new powers because of digitization and online connectivity...that give them information and options they never had before.... Every uncertainty is magnified by the quantum increases in the speed of change.⁸

This book’s central thesis is that these rapid technological changes present a major challenge to our current approach to green building certification, but also represent significant opportunities for making changes that could greatly expand the market for green building by lowering costs dramatically and engaging both building owners and occupants in reducing energy use. We’ll return to this theme often in this book.

The Great Convergence: Real Estate, IT, Energy and Sustainability

Given technology’s constant and rapid change, what’s happening with the built environment and building operations? How has it responded to digitization and online connectivity? Neglecting for a moment the revolutions in architectural design and building construction, it’s easy to see how this revolution is reordering building operations. Figure 1.3 shows this convergence.

FIGURE 1.3. The Convergence of Real Estate, IT, Energy and Sustainability

Essentially, information technology and real estate have been converging for many years. For example, in large swaths of commercial real estate, most rents are billed and collected online. What’s new since about 2011 is that the convergence has added energy and sustainability as key components.

New digital “dashboards” allow near-real-time assessment of a building’s electricity use, typically in 15-minute intervals, compared against (an engineer would say “normalized to”) any parameters you want: climate zone, local weather, occupancy, building type/use and geographic location; and display that information in many visual formats, readily available on any Internet-connected device to anyone who has access rights. In a building, as shown in Figure C.12 (color plates), one could display for example, daily, weekly and monthly building energy use to tenants or occupants as a way to influence behavior or reward good efforts.

Dashboards and similar cloud-based software can also handle hundreds of buildings simultaneous...