The year 2014 was a historic year for LEED specifically, but also the green building community more broadly. More than 675 million square feet of LEED real estate was certified last year, the largest amount of space to achieve LEED-certification during a single calendar year in the green building rating system's 14-year history.
In 2015, USGBC is pushing the innovation envelope even further with the LEED Dynamic Plaque, a building performance monitoring and scoring platform. The plaque is poised to revolutionize the building industry by helping building owners and operators evaluate building performance in near real-time and enact strategic, resource-, and money-saving strategies for optimum results.
Backed by software that measures building performance across five categories (energy, water, waste, transportation, and human experience), the LEED Dynamic Plaque uses numerous data streams and aspects of building performance data to generate a current LEED performance score that is updated whenever new building data enters the system. Changes in a given building's score — especially decreases — can inspire meaningful corrective action. The plaque also benchmarks local and global building performance, as well as past performance for a given building, so that owners and operators can assess their progress and performance in context.
The LEED Dynamic Plaque hardware, for display in a building's lobby or other prominent location, presents the current LEED performance score. The platform also uses data from occupant surveys to update the transportation and human experience scores. By engaging tenants, occupants, and building visitors in these ways, the plaque can spur behavior change, and building staff can engage occupants in taking meaningful actions to improve the LEED performance score.
The option of displaying the LEED performance score will be particularly valuable to commercial property owners when it comes to attracting new tenants or making value comparisons with the surrounding real estate market. It is easy to be confident when talking about the high standards of human health and energy efficiency a building maintains when the results are displayed and clearly visible in the lobby.
The importance of this focus on performance for the green building market cannot be overstated. The LEED Dynamic Plaque is the next step in measuring and improving building performance over the life of these buildings, increasing the triple-bottom-line positive impacts of green building strategies and operations. This is especially pertinent now, as green buildings are increasingly viewed across the marketplace as being more valuable real estate due to their abilities to keep operating costs low and to produce tangible health benefits for their occupants. Furthermore, the LEED Dynamic Plaque provides annual recertification to LEED projects.
The LEED Dynamic Plaque signals an exciting paradigm shift in the green building community and the broader market that LEED has created. It represents value that you can see and verify, and in this way it is emblematic of a 21st century approach to the green building movement's long-term vision of delivering positive impacts for people, planet, and profit.
Building’s Energy Efficiency, Occupant Comfort Are Related
Occupant Response Measures Must Figure in Building Evaluation
Buildings’ Data Helps Reveal Effectiveness of Energy Use
AIV Metric Can Build Accountability into Building Performance
LEED Dynamic Plaque Is a Paradigm Shift in the Making
