The U.S. Green Building Council's Building Performance Partnership (BPP) is now open to all current whole-building Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certified commercial and residential projects.
Launched last August, this program aims to develop a data collection and analysis methodology that will be shared with LEED building owners and project teams to help them optimize the performance of their buildings, along with helping drive the ongoing development of LEED.
USGBC says the partnership between the organization and LEED project owners will create a comprehensive green building performance database and enable standardization of reporting metrics and analytics to establish new building performance benchmarks.
Participation by current LEED-certified buildings is voluntary. The partnership consists of owners, managers and occupants of buildings of all sizes and types.
The LEED buildings that participate in the partnership will receive annual information on performance, specifically comparing predicted or actual performance at the time of certification with the project's current performance.
The report also will show aggregated data of similar buildings and certification levels, and will act as a case study of a project's strong performance and/or significant improvement.
Currently more than 120 projects are participating in Phase One, which focuses on energy and water. This data-collection effort will be based in Energy Star's Portfolio Manager for LEED-certified commercial projects and Earth Aid for LEED-certified residential projects.
USGBC says no building will be decertified for performance or a performance gap. The information will be used to inform and help projects achieve higher levels of performance.
A study released in October last year by the Center for Neighborhood Technology also found that it was important to continue to collect and analyze energy use data on an ongoing basis in order to understand the impact of changes over time. It also indicated that performance evaluations must take into account changes in building occupancy, use, operations, and maintenance, as well as systems improvements.
