California LEED Certified Architects : CaliforniaGreenArchitects.com

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California LEED Certified Architects
The Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Green Building Rating System, developed by the U.S. Green Building Council, provides a suite of standards for environmentally sustainable construction. Since its inception in 1998, LEED has grown to encompass over 14,000 projects in 50 US States and 30 countries covering 1.062 billion square feet of development area.The hallmark of LEED is that it is an open and transparent process where the technical criteria proposed by the LEED committees are publicly reviewed for approval by the more than 10,000 membership organizations that currently constitute the USGBC.

Individuals recognized for their knowledge of the LEED rating system are permitted to use the LEED Accredited Professional (AP) acronym after their name, indicating they have passed the accreditation exam given by the USGBC.

History
LEED began its development in 1994 spearheaded by Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) senior scientist Robert K. Watson, who as founding chairman of the LEED Steering Committee until 2006, led a broad-based consensus process which included non-profit organizations, government agencies, architects, engineers, developers, builders, product manufacturers and other industry leaders. Early LEED committee members also included USGBC co-founder Mike Italiano, architects Bill Reed and Sandy Mendler, builder Gerard Heiber and engineer Richard Bourne. As interest in LEED grew, in 1996, engineers Tom Paladino and Lynn Barker co-chaired the newly formed LEED technical committee.

From 1994 to 2006, LEED grew from one standard for new construction to a comprehensive system of six interrelated standards covering all aspects of the development and construction process. LEED also has grown from six volunteers on one committee to over 200 volunteers on nearly 20 committees and three dozen professional staff.

LEED was created to accomplish the following:

Define "green building" by establishing a common standard of measurement

Promote integrated, whole-building design practices

Recognize environmental leadership in the building industry

Stimulate green competition

Raise consumer awareness of green building benefits

Transform the building market

Green Building Council members, representing every sector of the building industry, developed and continue to refine LEED. The rating system addresses six major areas:

Sustainable sites

Water efficiency

Energy and atmosphere

Materials and resources

Indoor environmental quality

Innovation and design process

Certification
Different LEED versions have varied scoring systems based on a set of required "prerequisites" and a variety of "credits" in the six major categories listed above. In LEED v2.2 for new construction and major renovations for commercial buildings there are 69 possible points and buildings can qualify for four levels of certification:

Certified - 26-32 points

Silver - 33-38 points

Gold - 39-51 points

Platinum - 52-69 points

LEED certification is obtained after submitting an application documenting compliance with the requirements of the rating system. Certification is granted solely by the Green Building Council responsible for issuing the LEED system used on the project.

Recently the application process for new construction certification has been streamlined electronically, via a set of active PDFs that automates the process of filing the documentation.

LEED versions
Different versions of the rating system are available for specific project types:

LEED for New Construction: New construction and major renovations

LEED for Existing Buildings: Existing buildings seeking LEED certification

LEED for Commercial Interiors: Commercial interior fitouts by tenants

LEED for Core and Shell: Core-and-shell projects

LEED for Homes: Homes

LEED for Neighborhood Development: Neighborhood development

LEED for Schools: Recognizes the unique nature of the design and construction of K-12 schools

LEED for Retail: Consists of two rating systems. One is based on New Construction and Major Renovations version 2.2. The other track is based on LEED for Commercial Interiors version 2.0.

LEED has evolved since its original inception in 1998 to more accurately represent and incorporate emerging green building technologies. LEED-NC 1.0 was a pilot version. These projects helped inform the USGBC of the requirements for such a rating system, and this knowledge was incorporated into LEED-NC 2.0. The present version of LEED for new construction is LEED-NC v2.2. LEED also forms the basis for other sustainability rating systems such as the Environmental Protection Agency's Labs21.

LEED is a popular guide for green building in the United States and it is developed and continuously modified by workers in the green building industry. Some criticism suggests that while the LEED rating system is sensitive to local environmental conditions, its checklist system does not vary by the local environmental conditions enough (for instance, a building in Maine would receive the same credit as a building in Arizona for water conservation, though the principle is more important in the latter case). Another complaint is that its certification costs require money that could be used to make the building in question even more sustainable. Many critics have noted that compliance and certification costs have grown faster than staff support from the USGBC.

The Canada Green Building Council recently created its own version of LEED with the foundation based on LEED-NC 2.0. This document is called LEED Canada-NC v1.0.

LEED and carbon trading
It is expected that LEED-NC 3.0 will include a requirement for a carbon footprint (carbon building print) and a significant reduction of GHG (green-house gasses) beyond a baseline level. The reduction in carbon dioxide must be measured based on the direct and indirect carbon dioxide and equivalent reductions. These include emissions related to the consumption of grid delivered electricity, on-site combustion of fossil fuels, and fugitive refrigerant emissions.

The efforts to quantify emission and reductions in emissions will be in an effort to monetize the climate change externality in the same way that a Kyoto Clean Development Project (carbon project) does. There has been one green building project in the world to monetize the reductions that acts as the main precedent for this type of project. This was the ITC Hotel Sonar Bangla Sheraton & Towers Kolkata, India.