Newspaper Interviews

Last Friday, I had the opportunity to be interviewed by phone for the local business journal. I have done it before. I was very naive in my first interview and didn't realize the extent to which the journalists need to pare your comments to fit into the story. It seemed that what I remebered saying and what was printed weren't really in sync. The reality was that I wasn't misquoted, or even that my words were twisted, it just didn't feel like me talking in the article.
So going into this interview, I was hyper-sensitive to what I was saying and constantly wondering how it would all come out in the end.
The subject was the upcoming changes to the US Green Building Council's LEED rating system for buildings. The new changes are fairly significant as they increase the number of points you get for energy effeciency and water conservation and that they have added a sort of "wild card" regional category. The intent is to address criticism (from lots of folks like me) that a national sustainability standard is inherently week on regional issues. If your community is low on water resources, it may be more important to focus more points on water conservationn and reuse, where you have a critical shortage of landfill, waste management could be more important. All in all the revisions will be positive for LEED in general.
A large portion of our conversation ended up being on the idea of sustainable guidlines in general. LEED is a check list based voluntary system. You pick which categories are the most relevant to your project and then attempt to meet the guidlines in the program. I think that the future requires a mandatory performance based system. Where performance thresholds are codified in the local code and you get fee/tax bonus' or demerits depending on the actual performance of the building. This has as many downsides as ups, especially in the commercial end of construction, where the owner wont necessarily occupy the building. Since the owner is would be responsible for the actual performance, how does he manage his tenants differently. If your taxes and fees aren't fixed but vary with things as capricious as the weather, how do you budget and plan for that. I'm not sure, but if what we really want buildings to perform better, we have to track them for life.
A recent speaker on designing zero energy homes pointed to a experiment where they built identical homes in a development, with the same orientation, materials and such. They tracked the actual energy consumption and found that their was a wide range of actual performance due to the different ways in which the occupants used the home. This is something that is inherently hard to design for, especially when so many of the buildings we design are for future, unknown occupants. Thus my belief that there needs to be a bigger carrot and a bigger stick tied to energy consumption. Tiered rates go a long way, but ultimately the energy company doesn't want you to use no energy, where would they get the money to stay in business? This fundamental conflict (at least in California) is tricky, the energy companies are primarily responsible for energy conservation in California. They have an interest in keeping consumption in lines with their production, but not to far below what they can supply, because that wouldn't be good business practices. To illustrate, here is a story from my dad.
In his town, due to a drought, the residents were encouraged to conserve water. They did a smashing good job of it. So well in fact, that they were notified this year, due to reduced demand the water rates needed to be increased in order for the water district to pay for its operations.
Well, the same potential is there for energy and waste and any number of other green topics.
Some day we may figure this all out, but it certainly isn't going to be simple.
I will update when the article hits, so you can see how much of our conversation actually makes it into the paper.
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