You hit the issue on the head. The consulting community and building industry has abdicated its responsibilities in regard to construction practices. They are never held responsible for there performance unless it becomes a Health/Safety issue. Do not include IAQ as one of the health issues. Lets call that a safety issue that the fire departments in force.

I also find that the same consulting engineering firm makes the same mistakes in design form project to project. The reason for this is no feed back loop. The design team never learns if there design works. This proposal will create the feed back loop. Once you are held responsible in the pocket book the approval of alternatives and value engineering will stop.

I get called into new buildings all the time that are uncomfortable and energy hogs. The most common reasons are shabby construction practices, value engineering and the control system not being programmed. Once these deficiencies are built into the building they are very expensive to fix. Today the consulting engineer who has construction management responsibilities abdicates them to the commissioning engineer. Almost all the work the commissioning agent does is in the base contract of the design engineer of record but is not done. I am performed the some work today as a commisssioning engineer or energy auditor that I use to perform as a consulting engineer doing construction management.

As far as your metric is concerned I think once all the data is collected we will find that building perform worse then currently advertised through the CEBEX system. The 25% criteria may still result in poorly performing buildings. I have noticed that it is getting easier to get an Energy Star rating through Portfolio Manager as the data base increases. I would consider 35 or 40% of average in the northeast. Considering that a large percentage of the building stock is over 50 years old and some 300.

Yes consultants and builders should be held accountable to there Errors and Emmissions Insurance to get the job done correctly.

Remember construction management jobs can not be out sourced over seas.

What happened to Pride in your work.

I really like Chris Benedict’s idea, too.

Along with David’s truly great idea of making interest rates adjustable subject to metered energy performance, two other really great ideas on this subject recently came out of private conversations.

Chris Benedict suggested that the wall thickness dedicated to insulation be deducted from the square footage of buildings for purposes of calculating real estate taxes. Currently building areas are generally calculated to the exterior for tax purposes, so more insulation adds to ongoing real estate taxes without providing revenue from usable space. Chris’ proposed change would provide real benefits on an ongoing basis for the life of the building. While perhaps not applicable to public buildings, this is a wonderful idea for property tax policy generally.

Carl Freeman suggested a system of revenue neutral tax credits and debits based on performance. His ideas inspired me to think of addressing the public building challenge by establishing a revenue neutral energy fund which again compares buildings relative to a baseline with buildings performing worse than baseline paying into the fund and those performing better than baseline receiving cash from the fund. Such an “energy tax” system on public buildings would magnify the financial costs and benefits of energy performance. It would also have the same ancillary benefits of the original proposal in this post regarding getting baseline data on existing buildings and having a constantly self adjusting benchmark. Tied to a PR effort, it would spotlight the companies creating both great and lousy buildings and the effectiveness with which agencies manage their operations.

All these ideas seem far superior to counting points and chasing plaques. More feedback and creativity like this is really helpful as we think about how to approve the pending green building legislation here in Rhode Island and throughout the country.

Thanks all,

Fred

Fred certainly makes a point in that a building should not be built just to chase points. And the efficiency of long term operations of the building after the fact are indeed what truly matters. The one area directly affecting the building performance over time is the lack of commissioning a building properly. ANY building that is not controlled properly no matter the details of the shell, HAVC systems etc. will fail to live up to its potential performance expectations or declarations.
Here in RI where I live, a green building bureaucracy has been proposed. If the type of financial arrangement proposed here were to become a reality, we now lovingly can say our state government has an added layer of hidden financial decisions whereby those controlling the strings will have a field day, what with all that great stimulus money coming!!!!!!!!!!

It amazes me that since American’s spend over 90% of their time in a building, all buildings aren’t “green”. It might be a boost for our health.

An architect that I respect immensely has pointed out in private communication that the proposal I suggested is far too harsh and draconian with half the cost of a project potentially subject to claw-back and the resulting finger pointing and dispute if the energy performance doesn’t measure up.

I am far less wedded to the specifics than the general concept of tying this stuff to dollars rather than greenness points. Perhaps the right answer is that only 5% or 10% of the construction funding should be subject to actual performance results.

Perhaps instead of any penalty, there should be a bonus payment that is shared between the architect, contractor and facilities manager. The bottom line is to make the standards accountable to real performance and tied to real dollars, so people pay attention to performance.

Fred