Skipping Stone, Schneider Electric and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory announced today the formation of a committee tasked with enhancing the current Demand Response LEED Pilot Credit. The team, led by Skipping Stone and composed of Schneider Electric and the Demand Response Research Center (DRRC) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, will collaborate on enhancing the credit to enable commercial building owners and LEED green building projects to earn credits in LEED for enrolling in utility or wholesale market demand response programs.
The enhanced program will provide LEED projects with demand response definitions, participation options for buildings, and implementation and documentation requirement guidelines. The team will also develop a robust market research agenda to study participation across markets, adoption criteria, load reduction scenarios, utility service territory benchmarking and implementation technology drivers. To assist buildings in identifying existing demand response programs, Skipping Stone will provide U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) members with a searchable national database of programs.
“Demand response is unique in comparison to other LEED credits as it requires coordination with the utility and wholesale markets,” said Brendan Owens, Vice President, LEED Technical Development, USGBC. “By bringing this team of experts from the energy and building communities together, USGBC will benefit from the combined expertise.”
“Demand response is a new path for USGBC and critical to the building communities’ involvement in the smart grid,” indicated Mark MacCracken, USGBC Chairman.
“One of our key strategic initiatives focuses on taking buildings into the energy markets through demand response initiatives,” said Jim Anderson, Vice President, USA Utility and Smart Grid Business for Schneider Electric. “Being asked to assist USGBC by providing our proven building and implementation perspective is an honor in this groundbreaking endeavor.”
The revised Demand Response LEED Pilot Credit will be published later this spring. Based on feedback from participating buildings, the market research generated in the market pilots and input from pilot sponsors, recommendations will be made for eventual integration of the Demand Response Credit into the Energy & Atmosphere Credits in the next version of the LEED rating system, LEED 2012.
To propel building community adoption of both demand response and the revised LEED credit, USGBC will be launching a series of utility service territory market pilots. Skipping Stone has been named as the market pilot manager and is currently developing stakeholder support with potential host utilities, market operators, regulators, enabling technology and services providers and other interested parties.
“This USGBC initiative is a game changer for the adoption of demand response by the commercial building sector,” said Peter Weigand, Skipping Stone Chairman and CEO. “We hope that the energy community gets behind these market pilots because this it is a great opportunity to help drive commercial sector adoption of load management programs.”
Related Stories
| Dec 17, 2010
New engineering building goes for net-zero energy
A new $90 million, 250,000-sf classroom and laboratory facility with a 450-seat auditorium for the College of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign is aiming for LEED Platinum.
| Dec 17, 2010
Toronto church converted for condos and shopping
Reserve Properties is transforming a 20th-century church into Bellefair Kew Beach Residences, a residential/retail complex in The Beach neighborhood of Toronto. Local architecture firm RAWdesign adapted the late Gothic-style church into a five-story condominium with 23 one- and two-bedroom units, including two-story penthouse suites. Six three-story townhouses also will be incorporated. The project will afford residents views of nearby Kew Gardens and Lake Ontario. One façade of the church was updated for retail shops.
| Dec 17, 2010
ARRA-funded Navy hospital aims for LEED Gold
The team of Clark/McCarthy, HKS Architects, and Wingler & Sharp are collaborating on the design of a new naval hospital at Camp Pendleton in Southern California. The $451 million project is the largest so far awarded by the U.S. Navy under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The 500,000-sf, 67-bed hospital, to be located on a 70-acre site, will include facilities for emergency and primary care, specialty care clinics, surgery, and intensive care. The Building Team is targeting LEED Gold.
| Dec 17, 2010
How to Win More University Projects
University architects representing four prominent institutions of higher learning tell how your firm can get the inside track on major projects.
| Dec 13, 2010
Energy efficiency No. 1 priority for commercial office tenants
Green building initiatives are a key influencer when tenants decide to sign a commercial real estate lease, according to a survey by GE Capital Real Estate. The survey, which was conducted over the past year and included more than 2,220 office tenants in the U.S., Canada, France, Germany, Sweden, the UK, Spain, and Japan, shows that energy efficiency remains the No. 1 priority in most countries. Also ranking near the top: waste reduction programs and indoor air.
| Dec 7, 2010
Blue is the future of green design
Blue design creates places that are not just neutral, but actually add back to the world and is the future of sustainable design and architecture, according to an interview with Paul Eagle, managing director of Perkins+Will, New York; and Janice Barnes, principal at the firm and global discipline leader for planning and strategies.
| Dec 7, 2010
Green building thrives in shaky economy
Green building’s momentum hasn’t been stopped by the economic recession and will keep speeding through the recovery, while at the same time building owners are looking to go green more for economic reasons than environmental ones. Green building has grown 50% in the past two years; total construction starts have shrunk 26% over the same time period, according to “Green Outlook 2011” report. The green-building sector is expected to nearly triple by 2015, representing as much as $145 billion in new construction activity.
| Dec 7, 2010
USGBC: Wood-certification benchmarks fail to pass
The proposed Forest Certification Benchmark to determine when wood-certification groups would have their certification qualify for points in the LEED rating systemdid not pass the USGBC member ballot. As a result, the Certified Wood credit in LEED will remain as it is currently written. To date, only wood certified by the Forest Stewardship Council qualifies for a point in the LEED, while other organizations, such as the Sustainable Forestry Initiative, the Canadian Standards Association, and the American Tree Farm System, are excluded.
| Dec 7, 2010
Hot rumor: Norman Foster designing Apple’s new campus
Lord Norman Foster, reportedly has been selected to design Apple’s new campus in Cupertino, Calif. If the news is true, Foster is a good match for Apple say experts. Foster built his celebrity by marrying big gestures to technological wizardry. And, unlike some starchitects, he has glommed onto the environmental revolution—something Apple has made a point of embracing, too.
| Nov 29, 2010
Data Centers: Keeping Energy, Security in Check
Power consumption for data centers doubled from 2000 and 2006, and it is anticipated to double again by 2011, making these mission-critical facilities the nation’s largest commercial user of electric power. Major technology companies, notably Hewlett-Packard, Cisco Systems, and International Business Machines, are investing heavily in new data centers. HP, which acquired technology services provider EDS in 2008, announced in June that it would be closing many of its older data centers and would be building new, more highly optimized centers around the world.
