USGBC extends Building Performance Partnership

Last summer, the U.S. Green Building Council announced its Building Performance Partnership, a program to engage owners and managers of commercial and residential LEED-certified green buildings, optimizing the performance of buildings through data collection, analysis and action. Starting this summer, USGBC has opened the program to all current whole-building LEED-certified commercial and residential projects.

The partnership will further the efforts to understand how buildings perform from the moment of LEED certification and years beyond.

"The significance of USGBC conducting this research is to inform future iterations of the LEED green building program. By providing a large and accurate data set critical to supporting the ongoing improvement of LEED and continuous optimization of LEED-certified projects, BPP will ensure LEED projects deliver on their extraordinary environmental and economic potential," says Scot Horst, senior vice president of LEED, in a news release.

Participation of current LEED-certified buildings is voluntary. The partnership is made up of owners, managers and occupants of buildings of all sizes and types that are committed to improving their own performance as well as helping drive the ongoing development of LEED. The LEED buildings that participate in the partnership will receive annual information on performance, specifically comparing predicted or actual performance at the time of certification with the project's current performance.

Additionally, the report will show aggregated data of like buildings and certification levels, and will act as a case study of a project's strong performance and/or significant improvement. Currently, more than 120 projects are participating in Phase One and these projects will receive a basic performance report in time for Greenbuild 2010 in November in Chicago.

For information, visit www.usgbc.org/bpp.