Page 111 - Green Building Through Integrated Design

88 BARRIERS TO HIGH-PERFORMANCE BUILDINGS

Figure 5.1 Located in downtown Chicago, the Exelon headquarters contains
220,000 square feet of LEED-CI-certified office space. Courtesy of Exelon Corp.

LEED FOR EXISTING BUILDINGS

LEED-EB has been one of the slower programs to get going, because it involves bench-
marking facility management and operations practices, often requiring a company to
spend $50,000 or more (for internal labor or consultants) for the LEED effort as well as
a few hundred thousand dollars for the upgrades required for certification in most cases.
To date, less than 10 percent of registered projects (counting both the pilot version and
the version 2.0, which has been around since November 2004) have received certifica-
tion. Through March of 2008, corporate or for-profit entities had registered 62 percent
of such projects. One expects the numbers of completed projects to be higher because
a facility manager typically wouldn’t register a project without having the funds and the
commitment to complete the certification. Corporate life generally doesn’t reward those
who don’t deliver, so the motivation for completing projects is pretty significant.
Nonetheless, LEED for Existing Buildings’ projects currently have a worse completion
record than LEED for Commercial Interiors or LEED for New Construction. A
countervailing factor that has emerged in 2007 and 2008 is the acceptance of LEED-EB
as a platform for demonstrating sustainability concerns by some very large real estate
management firms. For example, CB Richard Ellis, the world’s largest property manage-
ment organization, expects to submit more than 200 projects for LEED-EB certification