Image from BrightTALK web site

This post will review BrightTALK Green Building Summit sessions six and seven. Yes, I’m skipping session 5, primarily because Kevin presented it. If you would like to see it, please go here. We’d love to hear your feedback.

The sixth webcast in the series was presented by Ralph DiNola, Principal at Green Building Services, Inc. and it was titled LEED 2009: Advanced Project and Professional Performance. He focus specifically on reviewing LEED v. 3 and on the future of accreditation and certification. For the rating system itself, here are some things practitioners can expect to see:

• a harmonization of the point system: all the rating systems will have the same 0-100 point scale with the possibility for 10 bonus points, and will be broken down like this:
  • Certified – minimum of 40 points
  • Silver – minimum of 50 points
  • Gold – minimum of 60 points
  • Platinum – minimum of 80 points
• a credit alignment endeavor that will result in fewer reference guides
• a weighting of relative impacts, where the number one concern is climate change followed by issues such as resource depletion, human health impacts, eutrophication, smog formation, and acidification.

He reminded listeners that LEED accreditation and certification are handled by the Green Building Certification Institute and that, going forward, there will be a sort of caste system for accredited professional and that these individuals will face credential maintenance requirements.

The accreditation breakdown looks like this:

• LEED Green Associate: this is the entry level
• LEED AP: this designation will now identify individuals who enrolled in and tested for a specialty, either Building Design + Construction (BD+C), Interior Design + Construction (ID+C), Operations + Maintenance (O+M), Homes, and Neighborhood Development (ND).
• LEED Fellow: this is essentially the elite class of accredited professionals. The application process for this one is still under development, but it will be used to designate individuals who, for example, actually contribute to the standards of practice.

For LEED APs to hold on to their accreditation, they will be required to accrue 30 hours of continuing education (CE) and six hours of LEED-specific CE within a two-year reporting period. There are various ways in which individuals can log in these hours, but, at a minimum, it seems reasonable to expect that the annual Greenbuild International Conference and Expo will begin assigning CE values to their sessions. Anyone attending the conference will likely be able to meet these requirements without much trouble.

Image from BrightTALK web site

The final webcast of the day came from Barry Hooper with the San Francisco Department of the Environment, and titled Greening the Built Environment in San Francisco. He started off by saying that the city is really leading by example. It is encouraging and helping its staff to become LEED accredited professionals. To date, it has over 135 LEED APs across more than twelve city departments, and as of January 1, 2010 there were 16.9 million square feet of LEED certified space. Recreation centers, transit terminals, museums, hospitals, libraries and offices have to be LEED Silver certified, at a minimum.

The city has also mandated that all new and existing facilities must receive services for waste, recycling, and composting. Additionally, there is now mandatory recycling of construction demolition waste, and across the board water harvesting is being encouraged. City officials actually set up a priority permit incentive, where, instead of the typical 6 – 9 month permitting process, any project shooting for LEED Gold would be reviewed within one month. However, and unfortunately, the incentive wasn’t really used in 2009 due to the building industry bust.

In December 2009, Mayor Newsom’s Task Force on Existing Commercial Buildings issued recommendations for the city and county of San Francisco (read it here). It recommended the adoption of a voluntary goal to reduce total energy use in existing commercial buildings by 50% by the year 2030. In order to achieve that goal, the city will need to design effective energy efficiency policies, so it will be very interesting to see how the city tackles this impressive goal.

Hooper mentioned two cool sites to check out to learn more about what is happening in the city: the first is the Urban EcoMap which actually tracks greenhouse gas emissions by ZIP code in the city of San Francisco (and Amsterdam). Of the 25 SF ZIP codes, ten are already producing less emissions per household than the city’s goal. The second is the San Francisco Solar Map which identifies all the solar installations in the city and tracks their activity.

All in all, the Green Building Summit was a very educational single day event. Remember that all of these webinars were recorded and are available for viewing at any time here. And take a look at their programming for April 22, 2010. Four sessions dealing with green building topics are already on the schedule for that day.

related posts:

• February 3, 2010 -- BrightTALK Green Building – Review 2 (2)
• January 29, 2010 -- BrightTALK: Sustainable Materials (1)
• March 17, 2010 -- stories of sustainability: Black’s Farmwood (0)
• March 6, 2010 -- review: MiaGreen session 1 (1)
• February 22, 2010 -- on tour: epOxy Green (1)