Future directions of green building policies

New (to me) Green Building Law Update begins a discussion about a potential compromise between the “Efficiency Now” and the “Drill Now” Congressional cohorts.

Entitled Green Building an Election Issue?, it posits that Congressional action could come sooner than expected

“One factor that has significantly increased demand for green building is government regulation that requires green building strategies.’So far, GBLU has focused green building initiatives at the city level.’While there has been some federal green building legislation, GBLU anticipated major federal green building legislation would emerge from Congress in 2009. ‘It now looks like federal green building mandates could be voted on before the 2008 presidential election ever occurs.’

If you read the (in)famous article “LEED is Broken” at Grist, you start to understand the multitude of conflicting, amorphous, or just empty goals of some of this legislation.

I think this arises from two problems:

1. Building types have various energy/utility usage amounts, patterns, and needs.

2. The benefits rarely accrue directly to owners, and must/should be passed through to building owners in one form or another.

I think that 1. will be dealt with largely through owner-driven initiatives and industry guidelines if the regulations allow for some flexibility among usage. I’m very encouraged by the work done by NAHB on the residential green building standards (http://www.nahbrc.org/technical/standards/greenbuilding.aspx). Nevertheless, the type of investment is likely to be high ROI and low payback period initiatives like CFL/LED usage, more careful purchasing for cap ex, and some increase in energy modeling. As a counter-example, I’m not putting Energy Star appliances into many of my affordable housing units because the economics don’t work. The improvements made to even the baseline appliances over the past 10 years is so substantial that the extra money for Energy Star just doesn’t make sense. I’ll try to get some actual figures shortly.

Problem 2. is a larger, more difficult problem that may inhibit systemic change. Stormwater, for example, does not always or easily benefit a land owner. In Arlington County, VA, we can get a 1:1 reduction in stormwater detention if we create a green roof, but in many locales, those types of incentives do not exist. Using graywater is a good solution in some places, but for urbanized development, there’s not always a place to put the non-potable water. I worked on a hotel/office LEED project in Rockville, MD and we had no place to offload the graywater generated by the hotel because the site was so intensively developed. So long as the direct owner benefits are tangential to the societal benefits, very little will change.

For a similar conundrum, look at programs designed to scrap older cars and reduce the amount of CO and NOx released in metro areas trying to comply with Clean Air Act regs. In this example, the driver benefits directly by receiving money to buy a newer car and the locality benefits from reducing the number of outsize polluting cars on the road. It takes direct intervention like this to realize the larger policy goal of reducing air pollution. (http://www.tceq.state.tx.us/implementation/air/mobilesource/vim/driveclean.html)

(Via Green Building Law Update.)