Leading green building consultant and author Jerry Yudelson says US can learn from Europe
By Kevin Doyle
Slowly but surely, the United States has been implementing green building practices since the 1990s under the auspices of the United States Green Building Council’s LEED rating system.
In fact, the USGBC launched LEED v3 in April. The streamlined version incorporates aligned credits and is based on a 100-point scale. However, when it comes to the greenest new buildings on the planet, American green building consultant Jerry Yudelson says the best examples of large-scale, energy-efficient green buildings are located in London, Frankfurt and Amsterdam.
"The Europeans are now the leaders," says Yudelson. "It turns out they know a lot more about environmentally-aware architecture and construction than we do."
Yudelson based his conclusions on the research he recently completed for his new book, "Green Building Trends: Europe,” which documents the latest European sustainable design techniques, cutting-edge ideas and green building trends. Based on more than a year of on-the-ground research in Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, Yudelson's book chronicles the work of leading architects, engineers and contractors involved with many of the continent's exemplary green buildings.
"I found European approaches that would work in the U.S. and Canada," says Yudelson, "Even given the different cultural, political, economic and climatic factors that influence building decisions."
What he discovered is that many European green buildings routinely use 50 to 90 percent less energy than comparable certified green projects in the U.S. "These are mostly issues of design and emphasis," says the author, the founder and principal of the green building consulting firm, Yudelson Associates. "And we certainly have the knowledge and skills to emulate what's being done abroad."
Yudelson makes three specific recommendations:
First, "The U.S. should adopt the European Union's system of building energy labeling," says the author, "so that everyone can see the actual energy performance of each building. This practice will lead to a revolution in commercial and institutional building design and operations, almost like having to wear a Scarlet Letter with your energy crime out in plain sight."
Second, North American architects and engineers should spend time in the U.K., Germany, Holland and Switzerland, to see first-hand how their commercial buildings work. "There's no question that seeing things first-hand and talking with the professionals who design and build them will change our design and construction practices rapidly," adds Yudelson.
Third, homebuilders need to study the German Passivhaus system for reducing energy use for heating and hot water by 90 percent. "For the most part, we could cut the energy use of new homes by 50 percent at no little cost, just by adopting proven methods of building design and construction," says Yudelson. This measure alone, he suggests, could lead to an enormous reduction in greenhouse gases if implemented over the next 25 years.
"Designing green buildings is not rocket science," says the green building consultant. "In this book, I've clearly demonstrated that we can have beautiful, high-performance, super-green buildings, using best-in-class technologies and systems, with the knowledge we already have, but don't use very much. We just need to go across the pond and look at what's already been done in the past ten years by the Europeans."
Source: www.prweb.com