Green building is a concept that has been gaining traction in recent years, as more and more people become aware of the environmental impact of construction and the need to reduce emissions. Green building practices aim to reduce the environmental impact of construction, while also improving indoor air quality and reducing energy consumption. ENERGY STAR is a certification for energy efficient buildings, while green building certifications are for environmentally friendly buildings, in more general terms. The EPA believes that energy efficiency is the first step toward ecology and that all green properties must be energy efficient. Using ENERGY STAR tools and resources, and ENERGY STAR recognition, when available, will ensure that your green properties (whether certified by LEED or another system) are truly energy efficient.
Green or sustainable buildings are often capable of saving electrical energy, but not necessarily of reducing peaks in demand. Certified green buildings substantially reduce energy consumption per square foot and also focus on indoor environmental quality. Year after year, we calculated LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certification rates in six countries (United States, China, India, Brazil, Germany and Turkey) and then used data from the Green Building Information Portal (GBIG) to estimate energy savings in each country each year. Building Information Models (BIM) are files (often, but not always, in proprietary formats and containing proprietary data) that can be extracted, exchanged, or networked to support decision-making about a building or other built asset. The Environmental Protection Agency's small blue ENERGY STAR label is used to identify the most energy efficient buildings in the United States. The Code is intended to be a global standard of good practices for measuring the environmental performance of corporate buildings.
We use data from commercial real estate owners and investors to analyze the financial performance of high-performance, energy efficient office buildings. As for green building, in recent years there has been a shift from a prescriptive approach, which presupposes that certain prescribed practices are better for the environment, to a scientific evaluation of real performance using LCA. The level of energy consumption of buildings around the world and the most advanced technologies for zero-energy buildings over the past decade have been studied.
