Colorado Real Estate Journal - September 16, 2015
Take everything you know about LEED for Existing Buildings: Operations & Maintenance (LEED EBOM or LEED O+M) and forget it. Over the past few years, the U.S. Green Building Council has been working on a platform called LEED Dynamic Plaque. When it was first presented at the Greenbuild Conference in 2013, attendees were left pondering the purpose of this program, what it did, how it worked and why it was developed. Now, the USGBC is offering LEED Dynamic Plaque as an alternative path to recertification for LEED O+M projects. LEED O+M is the only certification that expires. The construction rating systems simply certify the initial construction or remodel work, but don’t necessarily certify whether the building is going to perform well when people move in. The only way to get a third-party certification of how a building is performing is to use the LEED O+M system; but because operations change over time, the O+M certification expires after five years. Now that the early adopters of LEED O+M are up for recertification, there has been some hesitancy to go through the standard recertification process. The first time buildings go through LEED O+M they need to document at least three months of operations and maintenance practices. To recertify the building, there are different tracking categories for different prerequisites and credits. Most practices have to be documented for 13 or 14 months (the “most recent 25 percent of the recertification performance period”), and some practices have to be documented since the initial certification (for example, sharing approximately 4½ years of repair and maintenance activities on the janitorial equipment for the IEQc3.4 Green Cleaning – Sustainable Cleaning Equipment credit). Therefore, documenting more data translates into consulting fees that often are equal to those paid for the initial certification. And that’s where the problem comes in – some commercial real estate owners are not eager to pay consulting fees every five years to keep their LEED O+M certification, but do not have the manpower or expertise to complete the process in-house. We also haven’t seen most of the buildings certified by the construction rating systems pursue LEED O+M certification. So, although they were built sustainably, they are not moving forward with a certification to audit how they are actually performing. For these reasons and more, the USGBC is launching LEED Dynamic Plaque. LEED Dynamic Plaque benchmarks ongoing building performance across five categories: energy, water, waste, transportation and the human experience. Ideally, monthly energy, water and waste data are shared via www.leedon.io. An annual transportation and occupant satisfaction survey must be performed, and annual carbon dioxide and VOC testing is required. That’s it. This is a dramatic change from the highly prescriptive and documentation-intensive LEED process we know to date. The theory behind this new platform is that it documents results. According to the USGBC, if a building is extremely energy-efficient they should simply share their energy data instead of documenting another energy audit or how the BAS is maintained. Instead of theoretical plumbing and landscape calculations, buildings simply share their whole building water use. So, it’s easy … and it’s cheap. The USGBC is asking an annual fee of $1,800 for annual recertification of the building using this platform. So what are the downsides? The LEED Dynamic Plaque energy performance score is not based on Energy Star benchmarking – a tool embraced by a vast majority of the market. Instead, the USGBC has developed its own algorithms for energy and water performance based on the data from other LEED certified buildings – a relatively small sample as less than 1 percent of buildings are LEED certified. Currently, the USGBC says the scoring information/calculation is proprietary, so we do not know what our “performance score” will be on energy or water until we enter our data into the platform. This is very different from our current practice of using Energy Star and the LEED scorecard to systematically build a program to secure LEED Certified, LEED Silver, LEED Gold or LEED Platinum for five years. Another item to consider is that the building will recertify upon its anniversary annually. Therefore, it is possible to achieve LEED Silver in Year 1, LEED Gold in Year 2, LEED Silver in Year 3, LEED Certified in Year 4 … etc. If the level of certification is unimportant, this may not be an issue. For those who are LEED Platinum and want to stay LEED Platinum, this annual fluctuation may prove problematic. Finally, will this approach be accepted by the market? Will this affordable “performance-based” platform open LEED certification to buildings priced out by the current system? Will this simplistic approach be viewed as greenwashing? Will it continue to transform commercial real estate and multiple industries the way LEED has to date? Only time will tell.