Firestorm Over Anti-Green Building Report

Real estate and energy efficiency professionals have called into question the credibility of a study released last week by NAIOP, the Commercial Real Estate Development Association, which challenged the economic feasibility of developing office buildings with progressive energy efficiency goals.

But energy efficiency advocates were quick to dispute the study's findings, citing flawed assumptions and data that they said is incomplete or absent from the study altogether.

'Designing 30 percent better than code is a pretty darn easy thing to do if you know what you're doing,' said Peter D'Antonio, president of PCD Engineering Services Inc., a Colorado-based firm that designs energy efficient buildings and conducts energy modeling and commissioning. 'We know that to build more efficiently, it costs more money up front. But we've seen you can absolutely get that money back within 10 years.'

In a statement, the U.S. Green Building Council distanced itself from the NAIOP study, calling LEED-certified buildings 'proof-positive that you can achieve 30% and greater energy efficiency using integrated design with little or no additional first costs.'

And in a biting memo posted Monday on the web site of Architecture 2030, a green building advocacy organization, the group's founder, Edward Mazria, cast the NAIOP study as a 'disinformation campaign' that was meant to 'stall, confuse and distort' energy efficiency facts in advance of Senate hearings on improving building code standards."

Thanks to Maximilian Tondro