Closing the gap

Portland’s OHSU is not meeting its energy-use goal. Courtesy Gerdling Edlen Development Co.

When Portland-based Gerding Edlen Development Co. achieved a Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Platinum rating for its Center For Health & Healing at Oregon Health & Sciences University in 2007 (the year after its completion), it was considered one of the most energy-efficient buildings ever to be constructed.

Four years later, the award-winning building is not quite meeting expectations. It’s not to say the building is inefficient in its energy use; it is still vastly more efficient than a building built to code. But according to a post-occupancy evaluation issued in 2009, the building did not fulfill its projected energy savings of 45 percent over standard code and an annual energy cost savings of 54 percent.

But the building does not stand alone. The issue of performance gap is a relatively new but huge issue facing the green building industry—and one this media company has reported on many times in the last year. It was just last August that the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), which developed the LEED rating system, announced it would begin collecting information about energy use from all the buildings it certifies.

USGBC is also now requiring all newly constructed and existing buildings it certifies to provide energy and water bills for the first five years of operation as a condition for certification. (In the past, designers and clients could choose from a menu of LEED points that could provide certification without any energy efficiency measures.)

That decision came after the results of a USGBC-commissioned study done by New Building Institute showed that of the 121 new buildings certified by USGBC through 2006, 53 percent did not qualify for the Energy Star label. (A project must receive a minimum 75 points to qualify; the LEED Platinum-rated Center For Health & Healing received 77.) Even more, 15 percent of the buildings were found to use more energy per square foot than at least 70 percent of comparable buildings in the existing national building stock. Although the study did not delineate how poor performance affects costs to building owners, it’s clear some owners are concerned. Developers of the Riverhouse condo project in New York, for example, took legal action after their high-budget project did not meet the performance expectations of its LEED Gold rating.

What’s at stake when buildings don’t perform as well as intended? There is more to lose than energy and cost savings and lawsuit settlements. The reputation of the LEED rating system, the nation’s most widely accepted green building certification system, could start losing fans in droves and the green building industry itself could lose momentum if the trend continues.