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Advice provided by: Rob Freeman Jr, LEED AP, Green-Buildings.com

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Hi Laura,

As an electrician you are uniquely poised to take advantage of the massive changes taking place energy efficiency. Earning a LEED credential to add to your electrical journeyman experience should give you a broader view of how various areas of sustainability fit together and complement each other both inside and outside of the LEED green building rating system. This can make you more valuable as a consultant and service provider in general.

One of the biggest areas of credits or points that can be earned in a LEED certification is in the Energy and Atmosphere category. For instance, EA Credit 1: Optimize Energy Performance offers up to 19 points for making a building more energy efficient. The low hanging fruit here is often found in lighting and mechanical systems. As an electrician you could make a significant impact with your knowledge of efficient lighting.

If you are not already aware of the EPAct of 2005 and its implications for buildings in the U.S., the feds are requiring that lighting be upgraded from inefficient lighting types (such as incandescent, T-12 fluorescent, magnetic ballasts, metal halide, etc.) to more efficient lighting such as LED, high efficiency fluorescent like T-5 and T-8, etc. Lighting will continue to improve in terms of efficiency and so will the technologies that are used in conjunction with the lighting, such as motion/occupancy sensors, data logging equipment, load management systems, building management systems (BMS), etc.

As more and more service and consulting companies move into the green building space, more and more of them are going to want to do two things:

1) Hire people who have as much knowledge as possible about LEED and the green building space and can think creatively about developing efficient solutions for their clients.

2) Vertically integrate so that they can actually implement the solutions they recommend. However, in order to implement, they're going to need skilled tradespeople such as yourself. For instance, I've seen some lighting retrofit/consulting companies that have their sales people do the audit work to build out a lighting retrofit job and I've seen others that do not. In theory, you could sell, build and install, and get paid well for that knowledge and experience.

Good luck!

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