Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/177297
Mohawk College, Hamilton, ON: Carbon dioxide sensors monitor when fresh air is required, and in turn be increased or decreased based on actual occupancy and demand of space. By allowing ventilation to be tailored to demand, this system differs from typical ventilation design which tends to over-ventilate, leading to unnecessary additional energy consumption and cost. Courtesy Zeidler Partnership Architects. Canadian highrises. "Somebody has to do a less-glazed building successfully to show it can be done," he says. The best-known currently attainable green-building brands are certifications like LEED, the Green Globes, Net Zero and the Living Building Challenge. In North America, LEED currently dominates industry mindshare. "It created a market force to change the way we do buildings," says Blackman. That isn't to say people are entirely enamored of LEED. "The process can get tiring," Driscoll says of LEED's bureaucratic nature. Needless point chasing can also lead to suboptimal choices. For instance, Banelis tried to do a building with no carpeting but LEED mandated some carpeting for the building to qualify for a specific point. "If you Green building certiļ¬cation 16/ december 2012 p12-19GreenBuilding.indd 16 get all the other points and only achieve the minimum requirements on energy, you can still get a LEED Silver building," Adams adds. Bolus points out bumps in the green building evolutionary road due to inadequate costing. "Things seem to be evolving from general sustainability to LEED certification, today's industry standard, then towards Net Zero buildings, and regenerative architecture beyond that," he says. "But the financial model to support these things, life-cycle costing, has not caught up to the goals. Many projects that short on capital to implement will pay the price down the line." Buildings must be looked at "as 40-year investments, not five-year flips," he adds. Perhaps the most egregious oversight is one-time certification. Buildings aren't all audited years after they earn LEED accreditation to verify that they perform according to the standard. "We throw all sorts of sustainability measures onto buildings, and yet we're not getting enough measurement and verification back," says Adams, who wants to know the basics like actual energy and water usage. "We need concrete data that tell us what measures are the most successful, what measures provide the most sustainability." "People achieve LEED and then what happens? We don't know. That feedback is important." Speaking of B.C., "I would say most buildings in B.C. don't have energy models done," says Adams, "so it's a guess whether they meet requirements." Ali Syed suggests introducing a 'shelf-life' concept in which certified buildings would have to recertify every two or three years. Such a system may incent owners to override budget disincentives like the hotel anecdote mentioned earlier, prodding "building owners to ensure that long-term building performance matches the initial energy model's predictions," says the senior energy management project advisor for Hemisphere Engineering Inc. Opresnik suggests that a LEED certificate could become similar to the green pass certificate in Ontario Green building design 11/16/12 3:18 PM