Green Buildings and LEED Training Advice
Expert Advice on Green Buildings

Leed Certified Buildings: What is the Cost?

   
Question:

What is the cost per square foot for LEED certification?

According to a study by the Leonardo Academy Inc., in March 2008, the average cost for a LEED-EB "certified" building was only $2.52 per square foot. "Certified" is the lowest level of LEED-EB certification possible.

Cost per square foot breakdowns for basic LEED-EB certification:

- Soft costs: $1.01
- Hard costs: $.57
- Consulting costs: $.12
- Staff costs: $.82

Total: $2.52/square foot for LEED-EB Certified

It is important to note that there is a LEED standard available which is not certification, but appears, to the uninformed, to be LEED certification. Buildings that may seek to be certified may list themselves as "LEED certifiable".

Hard and soft costs would be considerably less in such a case because commissioning would not be necessary until LEED certification was sought.

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Expert Advice and Comments

Carbon Footprint offset

Tue, 12/23/2008 - 16:48 — John Thomas (not verified)

I've been a builder since 1983 both commercial and residential and finding it difficult, at best, to get a straight answer about Leed Certification.

In order to have a zero carbon footprint you must offset your power and gas/btu needs with wind, solar, and insulated properties.

My home has a 10kW solar power generation system, R38 with Eagle Shield, Low E windows and large amounts of stone and tile products throughout. The added cost to my home was well over $100,000.00 or about 1/8th of the building cost.

I would like to know how you're getting Leed Certified for under $3.00 per s.f.?

Thank you,

John Thomas

LEED certification cost per square foot

Wed, 12/24/2008 - 09:30 — test.com

John Thomas:

Thanks for your inquiry. In terms of LEED EB, which is what Green-Buildings.com is mostly focused on, the cost to receive certification varies depending on the types of investments made to retrogreen an existing building.

With respect to the study that's referenced above, from the Leonardo Academy, the group sent the survey to 53 LEED EB certified commercial building owners and 23 of them returned the survey. Their report, "The Economics of LEED EB" may be found here. The respondents provided information about the costs of implementing a range of both LEED prerequisites and LEED credits with special focus on whether the costs were considered to be "high cost" or "low cost".

From the sample, the reported average costs per square foot are for commercial properties as opposed to single family homes which spreads any fixed costs across a larger number of square feet on average (as commercial properties are typically much larger than single family homes). The total hard, consulting and staff costs, I imagine, may not vary from LEED EB certification to LEED EB certification thereby creating economies of scale on larger projects which would reduce the cost per square foot for the project.

bkurczak's picture

Leed Certified Buildings: What is the Cost?

Sun, 12/19/2010 - 23:38 — bkurczak

The answer is, it depends where you start, and what you are trying to achieve.

If you are working on a $60/sf empty warehouse, the relative premium is going to be much higher, because there typically isn't enough "quality" built into that type of building (like, for example, do you ventilate your warehouse?). However, if your reference is a $150-200/sf office, the relative premium should be modest.

From my experience, you can achieve a *good* LEED Silver building for around 5%. What I mean by *good* is one that has selected those points that have long term benefits to the building, environment, etc - i.e., not just going after the low-hanging fruit. The low-hanging fruit projects are the ones that are resulting in the rhetoric in the industry that LEED buildings don't perform (but that's a post for another day).

We've got a table on our website that we developed a few years ago which we use as a benchmark (and update as better information becomes available): http://www.enermodal.com/leed_explained.html.

Braden Kurczak
LEED AP BD+C
Enermodal Engineering Limited
http://www.enermodal.com

bkurczak's picture

Leed Certified Buildings: What is the Cost?

Sun, 12/19/2010 - 23:38 — bkurczak

The answer is, it depends where you start, and what you are trying to achieve.

If you are working on a $60/sf empty warehouse, the relative premium is going to be much higher, because there typically isn't enough "quality" built into that type of building (like, for example, do you ventilate your warehouse?). However, if your reference is a $150-200/sf office, the relative premium should be modest.

From my experience, you can achieve a *good* LEED Silver building for around 5%. What I mean by *good* is one that has selected those points that have long term benefits to the building, environment, etc - i.e., not just going after the low-hanging fruit. The low-hanging fruit projects are the ones that are resulting in the rhetoric in the industry that LEED buildings don't perform (but that's a post for another day).

We've got a table on our website that we developed a few years ago which we use as a benchmark (and update as better information becomes available): http://www.enermodal.com/leed_explained.html.

Braden Kurczak
LEED AP BD+C
Enermodal Engineering Limited
http://www.enermodal.com

Data Centres

Sun, 04/17/2011 - 15:22 — Datacentre Design Association (not verified)

Data centres are major power users with considerable carbon footprints. Such huge clusters of servers not only require power to run but also power to be cooled. It’s estimated that data centres, which house Internet, business and telecommunications systems and store the bulk of our data, consume close to 4 percent of the worlds power supply. see http://www.datacentredesign.co
The current volume estimate of all electronic information is roughly 1.2 zettabytes, the amount of data that would be generated by everyone in the world posting messages on Twitter continuously for a century. More stunning: 75 percent of the information is duplicative. By 2020, experts estimate that the volume will be 40 times greater than it was in 2010.

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