Excellent to hear from you! We’ve not actually tackled LEED-EB yet, as we’ve been so focused on delivering such a high volume of new construction. I would certainly benefit from any additional lessons that you can add to this list, especially those that are suited for LEED-EB.

As a former campus sustainability professional turned LEED consultant, I definitely agree with all of these, and hope these recommendations will be useful to folks at other campuses.

Have you tackled LEED for Existing Buildings yet? Given the maintenance and operations focus, it offers a new set of process-oriented lessons, some of which are the same, but many of which are different.

LEED for Existing Buildings is my primary focus area, and I’m happy to offer my lessons learned – just drop me an email.

I was not close enough to that particular project (with the x50 overdesign) to know, but fortunately my colleagues stopped it. However, many of the projects that I’ve been involved with have also initially suffered from significant overdesign. Some common themes include not applying diversity factors, assuming a wintertime 99% design temperature that is way below ASHRAE for this area (ASHRAE recommends 34 degrees for this part of Houston, and I’ve seen our consultants use 20 degrees), lack of available operating data to guide designers, etc. There are lessons here for both the owner and the consultant, and I think Stephen’s remarks offer a pathway for better performance from both.

Excellent comments. This is the general direction that my lessons have been leading me, and you captured what that new process would look like quite nicely.

Richard Johnson

Then study your building design with energy modeling and some level of BIM (Building Integrated Modeling)which works in your setting and capabilities.

Another area to apply is corporate social responsibility and bring in triple bottom line accounting standards to not under design that important more intangible area. Often this is a neglected area not on anybody’s radar screen.