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Designing a building that simply meets local code requirements is not necessarily the optimal way to do it when you consider all the long-term costs. Now, building professionals in more than 200 U.S. cities can use a new database developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to evaluate whether it pays to exceed code requirements for energy efficiency by tallying expected costs, kilowatts expended, carbon emissions and other impacts over a planned commercial building's lifetime.
Called BIRDS (Building Industry Reporting and Design for Sustainability), NIST's new database and software tools are designed to assess three major determinants of building sustainability: energy, environmental and cost performance.
Focusing initially on 11 building prototypes that account for about half of U.S. new commercial construction annually, the online data package features an innovative "whole building measurement system." An integrated set of metrics gauges sustainability of materials and energy usage, assesses carbon footprints and 11 other indicators of environmental performance, and tabulates economic costs over nine different investment horizons.
BIRDS implements a novel hybrid life-cycle assessment (LCA) approach to evaluating the environmental performance of a building. The new tool combines two separate LCA approaches—"top-down" environmental input-output data and "bottom-up" process-based data—to calculate a more accurate environmental impact.
NIST's aim is to make LCA and life-cycle costing—analytical methods now mostly plied by specialists—more accessible with hands-on tools anyone can use to answer "what if" questions when planning or designing a new office building, retail store, or any of nine other types of commercial structures.
"BIRDS simultaneously considers environmental, energy and economic performance," explains Joshua Kneifel, the NIST economist who led development of the database and its measurement tools. "Measuring a building's sustainability performance required us to pay special attention to establishing consistency among its many dimensions."
"The metrics are solidly based on science," says Ravi S. Srinivasan, University of Florida assistant professor of low and net-zero energy buildings who beta-tested the tool. "Yet, BIRDS is very easy to use. By including operating energy use—as well as addressing the question, 'Can I get my money back?'—it helps moves life-cycle assessment out of the realm of primarily academics and researchers."
Article originally published on NIST's Website
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