Green Building Challenge 2000
Green Building Challenge is an international collaborative effort to develop a building environmental assessment tool that exposes and addresses controversial aspects of building performance and from which the participating countries can selectively draw ideas to either incorporate into or modify their own tools.
Green Building Challenge 2000 is a continuation of the GBC '98 process and an 18-month period of review, modification and testing of the GBC Assessment Framework and Green Building Tool (GBTool) - the operational software for the assessment framework. This current round of the GBC process culminated in the presentation of the assessed buildings at the Sustainable Building 2000 Conference (SB 2000) held in Maastrict, The Netherlands, October 23-25th 2000.
The GBC 2000 Conference
The joint international conference SB/GBC2000 presented a unique opportunity for participants to learn details about some of the world's finest green buildings with the inevitable expansion to the building sustainability.
Green Building Performance Assessments
The presentation and analysis of the buildings that have undergone in-depth assessments were a main feature of the GBC 2000 part of the conference.Analysis of the assessment framework
The assessment framework represents a major milestone in the development of our understanding of building performance issues. The framework has been analyzed, scrutinized and its features discussed by those who developed it and those who had their projects assessed.Technical papers
Technical papers were presesented that relate directly to the GBC 2000 themes. The papers addressed a wide range of issues of importance to green building and its assessment, including performance target-setting, regional and climatic considerations, technologies and the characteristics of current performance assessment systems.Poster projects
Additional green building projects were exhibited in a unique poster sessions.
The Performance Assessment Process
The assessment framework being used to assess the selected projects is being developed by a team of international experts under the direction of an International Framework Committee. The final GBC2000 version of GBTool in MS Excel format is available on this CD as a part of the assessment together with the Volume 1, a detailed background information on the GBC process in MS Word format.
In January 2000, national teams have begun the work of adapting the core assessment framework to the conditions of their own countries and regions. The regionally adapted systems reflect issues such as regional energy and environmental priorities, cost-effectiveness and urban planning issues.
National teams are developing benchmarks for the assessment process. These are being established by developing hypothetical reference buildings and practices that reflect current typical practice relevant to the buildings being assessed.
Buildings to be assessed are being selected by national teams to represent "best practices", and conform to key criteria of the assessment framework. National teams will supervise the information gathering process about these buildings, including a detailed characterization of the building, a description of the process followed in its design, construction and operation and planned building operation procedures. The teams will then undertake energy simulations using accepted computer programs like DOE-2 or EE4 (in Canada).
A central quality control mechanism will ensure that national teams use relatively consistent assumptions. The heart of the process is the detailed assessment of 2 or more "best practice" buildings from each participating countries resulting in at least 36 detailed case studies. The national teams will assess selected buildings relative to the benchmarks already established.
The results will be scored, weighted and graphically represented, all assisted by a software program developed especially for the purpose. To maximize comparability and to keep the process manageable, the building types assessed will be limited to mid-size office or residential buildings, and schools in both "new" and "retrofit" types.
Other objectives:
To test new methods of assessing building performance
To showcase "best-practice" examples of green buildings around the world
To document the successful elements of individual green buildings
To offer direction to participating countries in the development of regionally-sensitive assessment models
To promote an international exchange of information, ideas and green building technologies
GBC will serve as a synthesis of current thought on the subject and as an on-going test-bed for new systems. The assessment framework builds on current work being undertaken in more than 20 countries around the world in consultation with IEA Annex 31, whose task is to investigate the energy implications of building environmental performance assessment systems.
National research agencies will have access to the comparable information on energy issues and environmental priorities at both national and regional levels. This will be invaluable to policy makers in the rapidly evolving field of environmental management.
GBC has provided participants with second-generation green design guidelines and a second-generation tool for building performance labelling.
Research agencies and designers have access to detailed information (subject to owners’ confidentiality requirements) and performance data on close to a hundred buildings that have been and will be assessed over six years of GBC activities.
Benefits of the GBC to the Industry
Both GBC '98 and GBC 2000 have presented a unique approach to performance assessments through its use of national/regional overlays on top of a global core system. Thus the framework recognizes ab initio the importance of regional factors related to climatic, resource, economic and even cultural conditions. The “regional layers” have been developed by national teams and are usable by participating countries even now, for the purpose of developing local labelling systems.
All three conferences are doing much to raise the consciousness of green building amongst delegates and building industries in all the participating countries.
Investors ?
You know that a fundamental change in the public attitude towards the environment is taking place. This will soon create significant differences in the long-term asset value of green buildings and conventional ones. Protect your long-term interests by learning about the issues!
Engineers ?
Keep up to date with what your peers in other countries have been doing, and learn about new simulation tools. Even more important, find out about how new design processes put the emphasis on your involvement at the very earliest stage of design.
Benefits of the GBC to you
Developers ?
Are you tired of developing conventional and poorly-performing buildings, but are afraid of the costs of "going green"? The extra costs of doing so are usually very modest, and sometimes zero, while advantages can include rapid leasing and greater tenant satisfaction.
Researchers ?
If you have any involvement in green buildings or performance assessment, these are a must-see: both GBC'98 and GBC 2000 post-conference CDs, where world-class researchers in the fields of assessment systems, life-cycle analysis and technology development are all presenting their research, thoughts and ideas.
Architects ?
Find out how painless and satisfying it can be to design really green buildings. There is lots of detail on almost 100 case study projects which have been and will be assessed over the course of GBC activities.
Facility Managers ?
Weary of low-quality and inflexible buildings that are full of dissatisfied and unhappy people? Green buildings provide a greater degree of flexibility, adaptability and indoor environmental comfort. You can learn how to assess your own buildings to see if they measure up.
Policy Makers ?
Do you have a commitment to keep on greenhouse gas reduction? The Green Building Challenge process will show you how to specify and assess building performance, and will outline practical ways in which you can implement labelling systems.
GBTool Overview (v.107 used for GBC2000 assessments)
The GBTool software has been developed as part of the international Green Building Challenge process The version GBT2kV1.07 has been used by the national teams on one or more case study buildings in each country. The results of the tests can be found in the Case Studies section where the GBTools are included.
Note: Current version V1.56 (or greater) is better designed, more comprehensive and user friendly and contains a lot of new features. It will be available for public download by the end of September 2001.
Using GBTool - Section 7of the Assessment Manual
The GBC Assessment Framework and GBTool are designed to enable of user-defined scoring scales and weights to replace the defaults provided in the start-up version. This section following guide is intended to clarify the best procedure for doing this and provides a step-by-step approach to using GBTool. (see guide)
Main
The GBC 2000 Assessment framework showing all performance issues, categories, criteria and sub-criteria.
These, along with the assigned scored, weights, weighted scores and reporting, can be viewed and accessed at different levels. The main sheet can be opened to five levels:
Example: Resource Consumption - Energy
Level 1: Performance IssuesLevel 2: Performance Categories
Level 3: Performance Criteria
Level 4: Performance Sub-criteria
Level 5: At this most detailed level (level 5), the default scoring scales are shown.
Begin
Brief overview of GBC 2000, the International Framework Committee members, the case study building name and location, and a road map for using GBTool.
Project ID
More specific information about the case-study building, including filename, building name, type and location, and contact information on person responsible for the assessment. This sheet contains the important warning that a separate file is required for each building assessed by the participating country.
Example: Office
These sheets provide simplified input tables that enable assessors to record pertinent information about both the case-study building and benchmark, for the three respective building types. The information primarily relates to the description of the building shape and size (number of floors, height, wall and glazing areas etc), thermal characteristics (U-values, thermal mass type) and the calculation of the appropriate floor areas and occupancy that will be used in the normalization of the performance data.
These sheets are designed so that they can be given to a separate person or group (e.g. designers) responsible for entering all data on the project, while keeping such activities totally separate from assessments (which are usually done by others).
Energy
This sheet provides information related to energy use and air emissions, again facilitating both the benchmark and case-study building. It breaks down the various calculations for establishing the primary energy use, the equivalency calculations for greenhouse gas emissions and acidification.
Supporting Sheets
Economics
This sheet provides information on the calculation of the initial building cost and the derivation of life-cycle costs. For the purposes of GBC 2000, only a very crude total lifecycle cost calculation was possible.
Context
Detailed description of a host of characteristics about the context of the case-study building, including its atmospheric conditions, transportation, land use, existing buildings. water supply etc.
Results
The output of the GBC 2000 assessment is shown on the Results Sheet of GBTool.
Support Manuals
The primary advantage of using Microsoft Excel(TM) is that it permits greater operational simplicity. Rather than have detailed descriptions of the background, intent, and other assessment information embedded within GBTool, these have been included in a three companion user's manuals.
Volume Two: Office Buildings
Volume Three: School Buildings
Volume Four: Multi-Unit Residential Buildings.
Goals and Objectives
The three general goals for the Green Building Challenge process are:
To advance the state-of-the-art in building environmental performance assessment methodologies.
To maintain a watching brief on sustainability issues to ascertain their relevance to "green" building in general, and to the content and structuring of building environmental assessment methods in particular.
Sponsor conferences that promote exchange between the building environmental research community and building practitioners and showcase the performance assessments of environmentally progressive buildings.
These goals reflect the acknowledged success of the GBC process in having significantly increased the understanding of building environmental assessment through international collaboration. In addition to the above general goals, two specific objectives of GBC 2000 process are:
To develop an internationally accepted generic framework that can be used to compare existing building environmental assessment methods and used by others to produce regionally based industry systems.
To expand the scope of the GBC Assessment Framework from green building to include environmental sustainability issues and to facilitate international comparisons of the environmental performance of buildings.