The US Green Building Council offers free webinars for professionals who wish to receive continuing education. The Data Collection & Analysis of Green Affordable Housing webinar we participated in featured 3 different presenters who covered 4 key objectives: Evaluate the costs and benefits of building green affordable housing, successfully track benefits and savings of green practices, analyze and utilize collected data to benefit future decision making and identify available tools to aid in data collection and analysis.
The webinar is meant to provide affordable housing developers, public housing authorities and owners with educational tools to track the success and failures during a project. The main focus is to give them the means to make accurate and effective future project decisions.
Currently, they are tracking 981 buildings and 18,699 units to measure and verify data so that benchmarks can be created and data analyzed in order to determine range performance and rankings. One of the more impressive findings was the evaluation of energy star gut-rehab projects which found that 250% more gas and 150% more electricity (in centralized buildings) was used in unrenovated buildings. In an overall comparison of 35 energy star buildings, the energy star rehabs performed 54% better than buildings without the retrofit.
Yianice Hernandez, with Enterprise Community Partners, shared some of the initiatives they are launching such as Green Communities. Green Communities aspires to prove that green affordable housing offers clear benefits to residents and to show that affordable housing can be achieved utilizing green building practices. Part of their mission is to share information with developers so that they better understand the cost and benefits of sustainability. Their data was compiled through a survey of project managers of green developments and then shared back with them to ensure quality results. To further solidify their findings, Enterprise worked with utility companies and property owners to collect actual utility data from a subset of projects. One of the findings from the report showed that efficiency measures, per unit, not only paid for themselves but produced a lifetime savings of $2,900 per unit. By compiling, analyzing and dispersing sustainability benefit data early, and engaging members of development and operations, affordable green building could be achieved. The data Enterprise collected led to the findings that most developers failed to routinely track costs associated with going green while owners failed to track utility usage. By engaging everyone in the sustainability efforts and proper procedure long term expenses could be avoided.
The webinar also offered helpful tips about gathering utility tracking data and the importance of analysis tools in helping to understand what the data means.
Overall, one of the key benefits in providing these types of webinars free to professionals seems to be the benefit of educating not only the professionals taking the course, but the people who work with them and who will occupy the units. If professionals learn to track and analyze the data and share it with others than green building can have a more solid foundation to grow from.
No comments:
Post a Comment