Friday, April 8, 2005
CONTACT:
Jerelyn Wilson
802-257-7300, ext. 102
jerelyn@BuildingGreen.com

100^th Green Building Case Study Now Online in the High Performance Buildings Database

Brattleboro, VT--BuildingGreen, Inc., which developed and maintains the High Performance Buildings Case Studies database for the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), has recently published its 100^th case study to that database. "Our 100^th project was the Traugott Terrace housing project in Seattle," according to Jessica Boehland of BuildingGreen, who works with building owners and designers in getting these projects online.

The idea for the High-Performance Buildings (HPB) Case Studies Database is to collect and make available information about green buildings that is presented in a consistent, easily understandable format. Drury Crawley, P.E. of DOE and Paul Torcellini, P.E., Ph.D., of DOE's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) worked with BuildingGreen in developing consistent metrics of building energy performance. "Once we decided what we needed," said project manager Nadav Malin of BuildingGreen, "we had to develop an online submittal process that would be as easy as possible for a building owner or designer to work through."

"The results are well worth that effort," notes Malin. Because DOE focuses primarily on energy, the buildings displayed on the DOE High-Performance Buildings website are only those for which good energy performance information could be collected. Currently about 75 projects display on the DOE site. More projects are displayed on the BuildingGreen.com website, because BuildingGreen is less strict about how detailed the energy information needs to be in the display of a project. In addition to energy information, the HPB database displays information on other environmental features relating to the site, water, materials, and indoor environmental quality. Other aspects such as costs, design and construction process issues, and lessons learned are also published for most projects.

Several other organizations and agencies are drawing from projects in the HPB database for their own purposes. The U.S. Green Building Council uses the HPB database to display detailed information on those LEED-certified buildings that have been entered into the database--currently 34 projects. The Federal Energy Management Program (FEMP), which is a program of DOE, displays information on federally owned buildings--currently 20 projects. And the Cascadia Chapter of the U.S. Green Building Council currently displays 13 projects located in the Pacific Northwest. The American Institute of Architects Committee on the Environment (AIA-COTE) also uses the database for their annual Top Ten Green Projects competition.

"Our idea with the HPB database," says Malin, "was to create a common platform for the display of energy and environmental performance metrics that could be used by other organizations and agencies in addition to DOE. "Through management fees, these organizations are helping to make the HPB database self-supporting," he said.

Those who are not subscribers to the BuildingGreen Suite can view projects from the HPB database at www.highperformancebuildings.gov, which links to the DOE Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) website.

BuildingGreen, Inc. is publisher of the nation's oldest publication on sustainable design and construction and the leading national directory of green building products. 2005 marks the company's 20^th anniversary. For more information on BuildingGreen and its resources on environmentally responsible design and construction, visit www.BuildingGreen.com, e-mail info@BuildingGreen.com, or call 800-861-0954 (outside the U.S. and Canada, call 802-257-7300). BuildingGreen is an independent, socially responsible, company based in Brattleboro, Vermont.

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Editors: BuildingGreen staff members Nadav Malin and Jessica Boehland are available for interviews about the High-Performance Buildings database. To arrange an interview, contact Jerelyn Wilson (802-257-7300 ext. 102, Jerelyn@buildinggreen.com).