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How does LEED affect your expenses?
This credit involves a review and analysis of your building’s operational expenses. The goal is to better understand the financial impact on overall operating costs of improvements made during the LEED performance period.
It’s not intended to compare buildings to one another, or to demonstrate that your LEED investments generated specific paybacks. It’s simply valuable for you to understand how your building performs over time. Internal consistency with your accounting methods is more important than whether you categorize expenses in the same way other projects do.
The credit is primarily an accounting exercise—you’ll collect historical financial data detailing the year-to-year expenses for cleaning services, building repair and maintenance, utility bills, and roads and...
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Got the gist of the LEED credit but not sure how to actually achieve it? LEEDuser gives step-by-step help. Members get:
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Credit language straight from USGBC
Need to check up on the exact LEED credit language from the LEED Rating System on the fly? LEEDuser includes the verbatim language. Members get:
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Why waste time chasing down referenced standards and supporting resources when LEEDuser links you directly to the ones you need? LEEDuser has gathered all the best tools out there and organized them by credit for easy reference. Members get links to:
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Documentation Toolkit
In the end, LEED is all about documentation. LEEDuser’s Documentation Toolkit saves you time and helps you avoid mistakes with:
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17 Comments
Overlapping
Can the performance period overlap the historical year? Or should the historical years end before the performance period starts?
There shouldn't be any overlap, in my experience. You don't have to stick with calendar years necessarily, so that might help in avoiding overlap.
Performance period falls in between 2 different years
I have a project performance period that falls in December of 2010 to February of 2011. I know how to get the predicted numbers for 2011, but I'm wondering what to do with 2010. Do I put 2010 information into both historical and performance period years? Or just in historical years as 11/12 months were before performance period?
Hi Samantha,
I would focus on making your performance period for this credit just the most recent 12 months (for example, May 2011 - June 2010), and then use the same time frame for the previous 5 years in filling out the historic years. Alternatively, if it's more convenient to look at calendar years, you could do Jan-Mar 2011 and extrapolate out for the rest of the year, plus calendar years for 2006-2010 for the historic data.
Sustainable Purchasing - No simple payback
Some of our clients' sustainable purchases (like ongoing consumablesOngoing consumables have a low cost per unit and are regularly used and replaced in the course of business. Examples include paper, toner cartridges, binders, batteries, and desk accessories., for instance) do not have a simple payback or annual savings. Is it okay to include these items and mark the annual savings as $0.00? Or are sustainable purchases like ongoing consumables not intended for this credit. Similarly for sustainable purchases of durable goodsDurable goods have a useful life of 2 years or more and are replaced infrequently or may require capital program outlays. Examples include furniture, office equipment, appliances, external power adapters, televisions, and audiovisual equipment., are we supposed to come up with an average of kWhA kilowatt-hour is a unit of work or energy, measured as 1 kilowatt (1,000 watts) of power expended for 1 hour. One kWh is equivalent to 3,412 Btu. saved by purchasing an EPEAT laptop over a regular one and how do we aggregate that same data with purchases like electric equipment for site/landscaping maintenance?
John, In my experience people don't try to capture expenses like ongoing consumablesOngoing consumables have a low cost per unit and are regularly used and replaced in the course of business. Examples include paper, toner cartridges, binders, batteries, and desk accessories. in the table, though you could if you wanted to. For durable goodsDurable goods have a useful life of 2 years or more and are replaced infrequently or may require capital program outlays. Examples include furniture, office equipment, appliances, external power adapters, televisions, and audiovisual equipment., I would include computer and site maintenance equipment only if you really went out of your way to make a different choice per LEED, and there were sizable costs/savings implications. There's a fair amount of applicant discretion over including these types of smaller expenditures, so I wouldn't sweat it too much.
Performance Period too short to reflect annual costs
I have a client attempting this credit. The performance period for the client is only 3 months but the spreadsheet wants a whole year of "Sustainable Costs" in order to compare it with an average of past years' cost. This makes sense, to compare apples to apples you need years and years. But we just don't have a year of "Sustainable Costs" data to submit. Could we take the 3 month number sand multiply it by 4 to get the whole year? Would we want to explain this with some narrative?
A little confused on how to proceed. Any help would be greatly appreciated!
You've got it Ben - Take your 3 months of data and multiply by 4 to extrapolate a year of costs. It's not a perfect solution but its the best you can do (and its what the GBCI expects).
Can I also have my performance period from January to April 2011 and multiply it with 3 even if the year 2011 is not ended?
Proprietary Information
I have a client who will have to get ownership buy-in to share the historical costs, as it is proprietary information. Who would have access to this historical data? Is this information shared within GBCI confidentially? I didn't see anything in the reference guide in regards to anonymity of information.
USGBC has said on many occasions that any data collected from LEED buildings that is shared will be anonymous. For exmaple, check what they've said on the Building Performance Partnership. They're really sensitive to wanting to collect data and encourage data analysis, but not dis-incentivize participation by sharing too much data. Does this help?
Yes it does. Thanks again for your help Tristan.
Unsegregated Cleaning Expenses Vs Custodian Service Cost
What is the difference of between Unsegregated Cleaning Expenses and Custodian Service cost?
This is on the LEED Online form?
Sounds to me like they could refer to the same thing, but the former is more general and could be any miscellaneous, lumped costs, and the latter is specific to a custodial service.
Ya, both occur in the same form. therefore wonder what is the actual definition of these two.
what will happen if i did not fill either one in the IO form, because there arent any proper definition.
LEED Certification
This is more of a question, I currently work in a 395,000 sq ft. manufacturing facility in Ava, Missouri within Emerson Climate Technologies. Our shortime goal is to apply for LEED certification.
I was curious if there were other manufacturing facilities in this area, this area meaning Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, or would you have a little more detailed literature on what it takes to become LEED certified.
Patrick, I don't know of any such facilities offhand but you might want to peruse USGBC's LEED certified project list.
Regarding what it takes to become LEED-certified, that's what this site is all about. We walk you through each credit—what the requirements are, what the common pitfalls are, and how to maximize your performance. We provide hundreds of sample documents. I recommend becoming a LEEDuser member!
As far as the technical details of getting certiifed, LEED Online is your first stop to register a project.
Please register to use the forum.