January 27, 2010
CA in 2011: Green Buildings Required
A few days ago Gov. Schwarzenegger announced CALGreen, a green building code for California that will mandate green building features and practices beginning January 1, 2011.
CALGreen affects residential as well as commercial buildings. All buildings will be required to
- Reduce water consumption by 20%
- Divert 50% of construction waste from landfills
- Install materials that emit low amounts of indoor pollutants
The most demanding aspects of the code are for non-residential buildings in excess of 10,000 square feet. These buildings, in addition to the above, will need to:
- Have major systems commissioned
- Have indoor and outdoor water metered separately
- Have moisture-sensing irrigation systems
With ASHRAE’s development of Standard 189.1 (ASHRAE Standard for High-Performance Green Buildings), many experts expect that building code authorities will increasingly include green building requirements into mandates. Another driver for green building codes is that using the LEED(R) Rating System as a mandate is not viable long-term.
This is not viable long-term for several reasons. Two such reasons are that (a) not all buildings will be able to maintain a LEED certification and (b) there are some antitrust issues currently associated with the LEED Rating System. The former issue is a result of the LEED for Existing Buildings (EB) certification which utilizes the ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager rating of a building. Portfolio Manager scores buildings relative to the national building stock and therefore the building scores are dynamic (think of this like a person having to take the SATs each year — you would receive a different score each year even if you answered the questions the same because your score is based on the performance of your peers nationally).
CALGreen may be expected of one of the states that is often at the fore on environmental issues in public policy, but leading thinkers and practitioners in commercial real estate expect increased regulation even if it does not come from the federal level.