2018-IgCC Introduced at Greenbuild 2018

In order to continually push the green building envelope and make it easier for architects, builders and owners to get their projects certified, the three major players in the world have come together to align their code standards, announced at Greenbuild 2018.

Transcription,

“Used to LEED, if you’re used to green building codes like those out in California. It’s got site provisions, water, energy efficiency, of course. It connects directly with the 9.1 standard, as well as there’s connections for IDCC.

There’s also materials provisions for saving resources and waste, and also picking better multi-attribute products. And, importantly, it has a chapter on the construction and plans for operation. So while building code has to, by law, they cannot go past permit, by occupancy. The document felt it was necessary if we’re doing all these great things, to set up a building for success, we need to have plans for operations so the building can be operated in those ways. So there’s a chapter in there that deals just with the construction practices and planning for the operation. Things like commissioning, and plans to operate the building, maintenance, etc., is in there.

What is the USGBC doing to help support this? We put out, I won’t make you read this, so I’ve gotta zoom in. We’ve got a document that’s on our website, I’ll show that in a minute, that we just released, which is a set of the most, what we think are the adoptable measures within this book. It’s a pretty big book, there’s a lot of good stuff in it, and there’s also a lot of overlap with LEED. And so what we’ve done is gone through each of the categories and mapped out some of the LEED credits, which you see on the left here. There’s your LEED credits or prerequisite the corresponding measure from the book. We’ve also added what is the achievement rate for these in LEED projects to date. So these are water, what you’re seeing here, the prerequisites, and the 100% achievement rate.

Next, just to give an example of the energy stuff, there’s commissioning, energy performance, optimize energy, refrigerants, and building level metering. Those are all included in the IgCC as well, and they have very high achievement rates in LEED projects. Hopefully this will help give a framework for what are some of the strategies and how readily they are for adoption. LEED is used all around the world, and the prerequisites have to be done on every project.

This document is available for download, it’s a two page thing, and at the bottom, there’s basically all the prerequisites and 20 points are targeted for alignment. What we plan to do with this document is not only give it out there as a resource, but also to take this to our LEED steering committee and our committees, and have them get pre-approved for equivalency in LEED certification. So if you bring a project through a jurisdiction that has adopted these measures, those will be streamlined in your LEED compliance documentation.

We have a sample of this, we did a similar thing recently and added to it in California. So if you’re now building to California’s robust energy and green building codes, you can get all prerequisites down to 12 points, or 6 points, sorry, up to 6 points for your LEED BD+C projects that are streamlined. You’re essentially relying on the code compliance documentation as a way to show that those measures are there. We also have a path for IC+C homes, and there’s a new alternative energy scoring pathway for California. So for those of you building with a top 24 energy code, there’s no need to have to do additional modeling just for LEED. You can use that documentation that would show compliance.”

If you would like to learn more about global standards for green building, get in touch: Chuck Lohre, chuck@lohre.com, 513-260-9025