Should LEED be government mandated?

The Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) rating system is a poor regulatory instrument. Government should not be invasive in the way of mandating increased performance, which essentially is what mandating LEED would do. The simplest thing government can do is to mandate transparency.

New York City has ruled that all commercial office buildings over 50,000 square feet must publicly disclose how much energy they use annually. There is now a list of 3,000 buildings publicly available. Anyone can go online and find out how well a building (be it theirs or a competitor’s) is performing. This is going to change the market because people like to compete, and now there is a set of rules and a scoreboard for building energy.

For new condominium projects, there should be an agreed upon energy modeling protocol that generates reliable predictions. Government can then mandate that all advertising include a message describing how well a building is going to perform. This will drive the market in a way that doesn’t cause any money to change hands between industry and government or force the industry to do anything beyond current building code requirements; rather, it will cause purchasers to ask for better buildings.

Doug Webber is the green building practice leader for Halsall Associates.