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Is the LEED program a fraud?
comments (14) March 13th, 2009 in Blogs
Kevin Ireton, editor-at-large
31 users recommend
The LEED rating system is “a tragedy,” according to Henry Gifford, resulting in buildings that use more energy, not less, and “a fraud perpetrated on U.S. consumers trying their best to achieve true environmental friendliness.” Henry is a mechanical systems specialist in New York City and, apparently, a vocal critic of the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design program. I heard him make these claims on Tuesday night as he sat next to Brendan Owens, USGBC’s vice president of technical development. The two were part of a public debate that took place in Boston at Building Energy 09, the annual conference of the Northeast Sustainable Energy Association.
The source of the debate is a study released a year ago that compared the energy performance of LEED-certified buildings with that of existing, noncertified buildings. The USGBC claims that the study shows LEED buildings to be 25% to 30% more efficient, but Henry says their methodology is flawed. According to him, the LEED buildings actually use 29% more energy than other buildings. Henry also thinks that “green” buildings ought to be certified based on their performance after a year or two of service and that the energy use for buildings ought to be available to the public on utility Web sites. You can read more about Henry’s views on his Web site and in the latest issue of Northeast Sun. Iconoclastic building scientist Joe Lstiburek has weighed in on this debate (pretty much agreeing with Henry), as has Nadav Malin of Building Green.
I should make it clear at this point that the study and the controversy surrounding LEED deal only with commercial buildings, not houses. The USGBC launched the LEED program for commercial buildings more than 10 years ago, while LEED for Homes is brand new. I hesitate to offer an opinion on all of this because I haven't read the study and don't understand the rating system like these other guys do. But I will venture to say that launching LEED and then waiting 10 years before studying the actual performance of certified buildings hardly qualifies as “leadership.” And I certainly hope that the LEED for Homes program learns from this embarrassment.
posted in: Blogs, green building, architecture, hvac
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About this blog
As the editor of Fine Homebuilding, I spend my weekdays trying to produce a magazine that will satisfy 300,000 of the most demanding builders, both professional and amateur. As the owner of a 200-year old Cape in Connecticut’s Litchfield Hills, I spend weekends working on my house.
Each activity invariably informs, and complicates, the other. In this blog, I’ll offer observations from both worlds -- publishing and building -- with the hope of providing some useful or at least entertaining insights.
Comments (14)
I have been a green builder and a whole life span systems cost guy since Wes Peters took me under his wing some thirty five years ago. My entire practice has been devoted to sustainable passive energy design. I am being MANDATED to use MORE energy under the new Cal Title 24 energy codes for systems that are being imposed by the Califonia Energy Commission(made up of PG&E, Edison and ASHRE members)in my new buildings than the buildings I designed before that code was enacted in January.
I am being forced with every code revision to use more steel and more wood, in spite of the fact that there are systems that use less and resist combined earthquake/snow loads.
Code writing has been taken over by industry and industry is mandating we use more of its product. The green involved has nothing to do with the ecology and EVERYTHING to do with the manufacturers bank accounts. Its theft with teh aid of government and it wont change until Architects, engineers and home builders organize together and say oh hell no, enough is enough.
Thank you Henry for proclaiming that the king is nekkid.
We don't need more or better regulations, we need fewer proscriptive constraints, none of whom were written by those standing in place to gain economically.
Posted: 12:41 am on August 14th
LEED has become the bane of my career. Huge waste of time and money with little return.
Ask me to design an energy efficient building and I can. Ask me to design an energy efficient building with LEED and you will get the same thing at almost twice the design fees.
Posted: 5:06 pm on April 6th
Posted: 3:59 pm on December 22nd
I looked into this a little more. 15 kWh/m2/yr is the limit for just the heating load, and the same limit is on the cooling load as well. So you get 15 for each, not 15 total. Cooling is not mentioned on the websites but if you look into the Passive House Planning Package (PHPP, the excel file used to verify passive house certification) you will find that the limit for the cooling load is 15 kWh/m2/year, in addition to the 15 you get for heating.
Posted: 10:01 pm on March 28th
A passive house attempts to control the temperature of the house using only the volume of fresh air ventilation required to maintain indoor air quality. It is impossible to do without a recirculated air system if your house requires more than 15 kWh/m^2/yr for all-inclusive climate control.
Posted: 1:57 pm on March 25th
In a nation with limited attention spans, few look for the details behind the data or have the time to do so. The USGBC has always wanted to keep LEED evolving and trying to push the envelope, but that has been hard to accomplish [I think] since the acceptance, incorporation and draw of LEED exploded beyond original expectations. If a horse jumps out of the barn at full speed, teaching it to canter gracefully is going to take longer than originally planned. The newest version of LEED is working to address a lot of the concerns and LEED-H [as noted by vermontstreetproject] reflects the efforts to listen to what is happening in the field. Since the original version of LEED, other checklists and rating systems have been released to illustrate different ideas and where others have found discrepancies. Even as an advocate of LEED, I recognize that there are other analysis and comparison tools and LEED is not the single best answer for all situations. Similar to the toolbox, there are general tools and specialty tools and the better builder knows when it is appropriate to use them.
Posted: 11:40 am on March 23rd
While I don't agree 100% with the way in which Henry Gifford and those who work closely with are attacking LEED & USGBC, I do agree that the system is seriously flawed, both in design and the way in which it's being applied by designers and adopted into legislation without verification. But it does take an extreme point of view to call attention to just about anything these days, so I'm glad that Henry and others are making noise - and it's being heard.
Regarding the passivhaus info in the previous post, there are some errors that should be corrected. The 15 kWh/m2/year is in fact heating only, *not* including cooling, fans, pumps, etc. There is another requirement of 120 kWh/m2/year of primary energy which includes all these other uses of energy. Also, the conversion to sqft is wrong, 15 kWh/m2/year is 1.4 kWh/sqft/year, or about 4750 Btu/sqft/year. (Now I just hope that my conversions are correct!).
Anyone interested in the PH approach should check out http://www.passivehouse.us/
Posted: 11:30 am on March 19th
While I wouldn't use the term "fraud" to describe LEED, because I believe that those who created it were well-intentioned though they used processes that resulted in creating misguided policies and less-than-stellar building results, Henry's criticisms (and those of many who've commented above) match with what my experience of LEED has been. It is quite possible to achieve a Platinum LEED rating in any of their programs, including LEED for Homes, without achieving any better energy performance than the minimum pre-requisite Energy Star level of performance, which is currently only about 30% better than minimum code-compliance (and its illegal to do less than that).
I did a little life-cycle environmental and economic analysis as a result of my teaching sideline, and the research clearly shows that operational energy costs far exceed any other factors in environmental and economic impacts of building construction, so that is the major bone I have to pick with LEED. Either the points awarded should be based on the relative environmental impacts resulting from the green improvement to the building, or there should be an increasing minimum level of points in the Energy and Atmosphere category required in order to be able to move to a higher level of LEED certification. If they don't make some changes like that to ensure that exemplary energy efficiency is a requirement, not just a suggestion for achieving a LEED certification level, then they should stop claiming in their marketing that they are an exemplary energy standard, because as currently written, its energy standards are no better than the old Energy Star program. People who buy a LEED building think they are getting something that will save them money and save the environment, but that is often not the case.
The Passive House Standard actually is a rigorous energy efficiency performance standard, in which certified buildings can use no more than 15kwh/sq.meter annually (about 5000kwh/sq.ft annually) for space heating and cooling energy, including all associated fans, pumps & motors in the equipment. This is about 90% savings over code compliance (codes vary by jurisdiction). Instantaneous max. heat demand tops out at about 1 w per square foot, so a 1200 sf Passive House dwelling can be heated by an electric heating element the size of one in a typical hair blowdryer! There is no "point" system to memorize, only software (an Excel spreadsheet) for modeling the project's energy consumption, which has been refined for more than a decade by test results from certified Passive Houses worldwide. The calculations done by the software are submitted by the certified PH consultant to PHIUS for checking, which is what your certification fee pays for. The final step to certifying a building is submitting the third party blower-door test results showing that the building complies with the P.H.Std's max. 0.6 ACH @50 pa requirement for air-tightness, the testing & balancing documentation, and photos showing the project was build to the approved contract document specifications. This certificate is as close to a mpg efficiency tag for buildings as you can get, which is what buyers need.
PHIUS first (Fairview) projects came in for about $120/sf, exclusive of site/infrastructure costs. The original goal of the Passive House Standard was to maximize life-cycle energy and cost efficiency, by increasing the performance of the building envelope to the point at which the mechanicals for the building could be down-sized to offset some of the costs of better building envelope. The 15 kwh/sq.m annually limit is the level at which that mechanical down-sizing becomes possible.
I hope this clarifies for folks the differences between LEED and the Passive House Standard, and encourages others to pursue true building excellence. Achieving P.H. Consultant certification won't turn you into a Henry overnight, but it is a good grounding in the principles of integrated sustainable design and equips you with valuable tools for achieving high-performance, climate appropriate buildings. Check it out!
Posted: 6:39 pm on March 18th
A friend from Santa Fe told me a year or so ago that building green was much more than following a list. In the first place, a long list is not a huge motivator for most of us, certainly not for me. What we need, so he said, is a change in the way we think about our world.
We need to begin to see that the earth does not belong to us, but that we belong to the world. I have a hard time thinking of one single item in the building industry that is sustainable. Sustainability means, for me, that we give back to our earth at least as much as we take from it.
These days I build Habitat for Humanity houses. Some of what we do with those houses is not sustainable, but it is a beginning approach that everyone can understand and get behind. STEP ONE in building a house that has some sustainability is to BUILD SMALL. There is a house being built not far from me that looks like a high school.
I for one, can't afford all the "green bling" the Leed list says I need for a certified green home. But there are lots of fairly simple things I can do or have done to our small home to cut down on energy waste: better windows, weather proofing, solar heated water, more insulation, collect water, air dry clothes, and use local materials.
Maybe we could listen to our Native American brothers and sisters who encourage us to not build anything without thinking about how it will impact the next 7 generations---our children and their children.
Thanks for allowing me to say a few words. Larry Haun
Posted: 1:03 pm on March 18th
I agree that LEED has a mess of problems. But,it has raised awareness for green building. It's not all bad...just needs a major overhaul and price reduction.
Here's some problems I see with LEED:
1. There is no education or experience required to become LEED certified. Pay your $250 and like magic, you are a green building pro. The test focuses primarily on how to get a project through the process, not sustainable design.
2. It's not climate specific. How can we design the same for Florida as Alaska?
3. It's a measurement tool- NOT a design tool. HEY! I need another point..how about that bike rack ;)
4. It doesn't embrace basic passive solar design principles nearly enough.
Here's a video of a keynote I gave to the USGBC and AIA last April http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=prelitz+leed&hl=en&emb=0&aq=f#
Onward, Chris www.NewLeafAmerica.com
Posted: 9:20 pm on March 17th
www.simplyeleganthomedesigns.com
http://simplyeleganthomedesigns.blogspot.com
www.larsonbrenner.com
Posted: 9:05 am on March 16th
Add to that some of the assertions made by the USGBC crowd, and you have what is a purely political movement, without the slightest care for a 'green' life.
Posted: 10:27 pm on March 15th
I was pleased, then, when I sat down with the LEEDS-H provider for my own project and found an intelligent, generally right on and even instructive process. There are flaws, like a broad brush discounting of electric btu sourcing and the ratios of bedrooms-to-points-requirements, but even those are forgivable in light of the overall soundness of the program, and its ability to force wide ranging conversation about placement, services, neighborhood, and building systems. I learned a few things, and became a fan.
Word has it that the lessons learned here and elsewhere are soon to inform additonal improvements in the other LEEDs areas.
Posted: 1:15 pm on March 15th
LEED and other green building verification systems are focused on changing the marketplace and the way we build homes by rewarding designers and builders who look at their buildings as full systems with resource efficiency, life cycle cost, water and energy conservation, indoor air quality and other impacts taken into consideration in their design, construction and commissioning. It's about building better buildings and also about improving the way we build in America.
Unfortunately the cost of the LEED certification causes the USGBC to self-select for super high end buildings that are often loaded with glass and lit extravagantly at night for "marketing (ego) purposes." These glass box billboards inevitable waste energy compared to the proletarian building with few windows and thrifty management practices. This doesn't make LEED a fraud, but it certainly points to the need for improvement in many areas.
Henry is a great guy making an important point, more power to him for that!
Posted: 12:01 pm on March 14th
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