Related Links: The EIA Commercial Building Energy Consumption Survey The U.S. Energy Information Administration's Office of Energy Consumption and Efficiency Statistics is working on the latest version of a national survey of commercial buildings' energy consumption and expects to begin releasing its first sets of data in April 2014, says the office's director, Tom Leckey.The Commercial Buildings Energy Consumption Survey (CBECS) is a national sample survey that collects baseline information on U.S. commercial-building stock, their energy-related building characteristics, and their energy consumption and expenditures. The survey data underpin much of the work that has been done in the energy benchmarking
Related Links: GSA Federal Center South Green Design-Build Model Crafted for Buildings To Achieve Net-Zero Energy Use In an unprecedented departure from the norm, the performance-based design-build team for a fast-tracked office building nearing completion in Seattle is at risk for 0.5% of its original $66-million contract award. The team will not receive the $330,000 held back by the owner unless the three-story building meets energy-use targets promised by the team long before a shovel hit the ground.The fee holdback, combined with a 12-month, post-occupancy measurement and verification period to fine-tune building operations, is the brainchild of the U.S. General
Courtesy of AISC AISC's Steel Construction Manual, which weighs 4 lb in its 2,400-page print form, is now available for use on tablets. Users can cut and paste and create bookmarks, among other things. Courtesy of AISC Users can put each copy purchased on six digital devices. Members of the building-materials supply chain can expect a lot more paperwork to satisfy more green-building codes and standards, code watchers say.In a couple of years, every segment of the building-materials supply chain will need to meet the requirements of three green model codes and energy standards, not simply one, said John P.
Coming soon for all members of the building materials supply chain: Lots more paperwork to satisfy more "green-building" codes and standards.In a couple of years, every segment of the building materials supply chain will have to have information to meet the requirements of three green model codes and energy standards, not simply one, said John P. Cross, a vice president of the Chicago-based American Institute of Steel Construction (AISC) at the 2012 North American Steel Construction Conference, held April 18-20 in Grapevine, Texas. The conference, with a record attendance of more than 3,500, incorporated the World Steel Bridge Symposium and
Related Links: NRELs Research Support Facility: An Energy Performance Update For its first year of full occupancy, the nation's biggest energy miser—the nearly two-year-old 220,000-sq-ft Research Support Facility of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory—met its modeled annual energy-use targets, reports the Golden, Colo.-based NREL.But a market-rate, low-energy-use office building doesn't happen by accident. "It's not going to work unless the owner takes responsibility both in planning and operating the building," says Jeffrey M. Baker, director of NREL operations for the U.S. Dept. of Energy's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy.For the 12 months beginning in February 2011, the building's
The International Code Council's 2012 International Green Construction Code, or IgCC, released on March 28, seeks to provide the building community with more flexibility in the design of high-performance buildings than did earlier versions, its developers say.The culmination of a three-year effort by the ICC, the code was developed with significant input from construction industry leaders, policymakers and environmental groups. Formally approved in November 2011, it is the first model code to include sustainability measures for an entire construction project and its site for the entire life cycle of the project.The 2012 code incorporates the 2011 version of ANSI/ASHRAE/IES/USGBC Standard
Photo Courtesy of ASHRAE An Oberlin College building, designed for net-zero energy use, has not performed as well as hoped. Green does not necessarily mean energy-efficient. "A lot of people think it does," said consulting engineer Lawrence G. Spielvogel at the ASHRAE winter conference last month. The veteran mechanical engineer then charged that the long-used energy standard for commercial building systems, ASHRAE 90.1, "provides and requires a variety of means to waste energy efficiently, which is why so many 'green' buildings have high energy use."Among many things, Spielvogel—a known gadfly—blames code-required control systems for waste. "Good mechanical engineers do not
Related Links: Related Story: Resilient Systems Not Yet Tested by a Quake Structural engineer Steven Tipping doesn't often attend industry events, let alone introduce himself to keynote speakers. But he is glad he did just that on Dec. 5, 2007. So is the team for the $145.5-million San Francisco Public Utilities Commission Headquarters, a nearly finished job with a difficult past.Tipping's actions at the Dec. 5 breakfast—at which a project of his was recognized and he heard Webcor Builders' Phillip Williams speak—inadvertently helped recenter the ailing job. The 13-story showcase for sustainable design and construction owes its existence, in part,
Related Links: Main Story: Tensioning Eases Stress on a 13-Story Sustainability Showcase Tipping Mar's vertically post-tensioned concrete shear walls in the 164-ft-tall San Francisco Public Utilities Commission Headquarters is the most ambitious—and tallest—example to date of a family of lateral-load-resisting structures designed to minimize damage in a major earthquake and allow immediate reoccupancy. U.S. structural practitioners and researchers have been developing the self-centering systems, modeled after PT bridge construction, for about a decade.Self-centering structures, when designed in structural steel, have become known as "rocking frames." In addition to concrete systems, there are examples of self-centering PT structures in precast concrete
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