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FROM THE EDITOR
It’s a near-daily occurrence anymore – a press release hits my inbox about the latest, greatest LEED certified high-performance building. There are breathless statements about massive energy savings and reduced greenhouse gas emissions. There’s a quote from an executive about the organization “walking the talk,” or sometimes, how the organization is “LEEDing the way.” And there is always a sort of qualification about how this LEED building is unique — it’s only the third Gold high school building greater than 50,000 square feet in Cuyahoga County, or similar.
That probably sounds more cynical than it should – but as an editor who covers high-performance buildings day in and day out, these releases start running together. The point, though, is that more and more buildings are going high-performance (whether LEED certified or not), and that’s truly a great thing. We’re moving quickly to the tipping point high-performance building advocates have long predicted: the point at which there are no high-performance buildings or traditional buildings. There are just buildings — and ALL of them are what we now think of as high-performance.
Are we close? Last month, the U.S. Green Building Council announced it had crossed the 3 billion square foot mark of LEED certified space. While that is an impressive milestone, it might be hard to put that in perspective.
So here are some numbers that are more meaningful: McGraw-Hill’s predicts in its 2013 Dodge Green Construction Outlook that by 2016, high-performance green buildings will represent more than half of all construction and be worth as much as $248 billion. By way of comparison, in 2005, McGraw-Hill estimates that high-performance green construction was worth $10 billion. That’s impressive — and a sure sign of real progress!
It wasn’t too long ago — I’d say as recently as five years, especially at the start of the Great Recession — you’d still hear skeptics decrying high-performance green building as a fad, that it was unnecessarily expensive, and that besides, less than 10 percent of buildings were built or operated high-performance anyway. It was a small niche market that would never go mainstream.
How wrong they were! This “fad,” has definitely become a movement, and will soon be the norm. That’s been USGBC’s goal from the start: to transform the market. And while there’s still a ton of work to be done, you’d have to agree that progress has been pretty impressive.
As always, I’m interested to hear from you. What’s your take on how high-performance green buildings have transformed the market? Are there high-performance strategies you perform in your own buildings now that have simply become standard operating procedure?
Cheers,
Greg Zimmerman, editor
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