Five Most Valuable Green Building Lessons Shared by "Godfather of Green" Jerry Yudelson

TUCSON, Ariz., Sept. 26, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- What makes certain buildings around the globe our best teacher for how to create high performance green buildings? What lessons can we take away from the world's greenest buildings? Jerry Yudelson thinks he knows the answer.

(Photo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20130926/PH86497-a )

(Photo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20130926/PH86497-b )

One of the green building industry's leading publications, Building Design + Construction magazine, has summarized the key findings from the green building author, Jerry Yudelson, and his new book, The World's Greenest Buildings: Promise vs. Performance in Sustainable Design (Routledge) which was published last January. For the interview in its entirety, please see http://www.bdcnetwork.com/what-we-can-learn-world%E2%80%99s-greenest-buildings.

Lessons Learned

Key lessons that can be derived from the book:

1. In your next building project, you should be able to achieve the same energy and water use as LEED Platinum buildings around the world, because there is nothing magical or geographically specific about good design.

2. High-performance projects stand out because of the commitment of owners and their Building Teams to achieving "best-in-class" results. The projects Yudelson studied were all LEED Platinum, which means they started with high-performance energy- and water-efficiency goals, along with a full suite of other green building measures. 

3. Most surprisingly, high-performance green design uses about the same energy everywhere in the world, from Northern Europe to the tropics. Typically, once there is a good building envelope and efficient HVAC systems in place, half the remaining energy use comes from plug and process loads, along with lighting, which tend to be geographically similar in most office buildings, leaving about 15-20% for heating/cooling loads to account for regional differences.

4. Great green buildings are just as beautiful, if not more so, than buildings with ordinary energy and water performance. Perhaps it is beauty itself that should be the primary goal in sustainable design. One of the core tenets of the book is that there is no inherent conflict between buildings with architectural merit and those with high-performance green characteristics (such as those with LEED Platinum status) and low-energy outcomes.

5. A final lesson from the research is that there are no standard definitions of building energy use, no good ways to 'tease out' core energy use from special operations such as onsite data centers. In fact, in Australia, the authors were surprised to find that building energy use is typically reported only for the base building, leaving out tenant loads in commercial offices, a practice that dramatically understates actual energy use and one for which the book was able to account.

About Yudelson Associates
Yudelson Associates' founder, Jerry Yudelson, a LEED Fellow, is widely recognized as one of the nation's leading green building and sustainability consultants and an internationally recognized keynote speaker. In 2011, Wired magazine dubbed him the "Godfather of Green." He is the author of 13 green building books and chaired the country's largest annual show, Greenbuild, for six years through 2009.

For more information please contact Jerry Yudelson, 520-243-0996, Email

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