Designing a building that simply meets local code requirements is not necessarily the optimal way to do it when you consider all the long-term costs. Now, building professionals in more than 200 US cities can use a new database developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to evaluate whether it pays to exceed code requirements for energy efficiency by tallying expected costs, kilowatts expended, carbon emissions, and other impacts over a planned commercial building’s lifetime.
Called BIRDS (Building Industry Reporting and Design for Sustainability), NIST’s new database and software tools are designed to assess three major determinants of building sustainability: energy, environmental, and cost performance.
Focusing initially on 11 building prototypes that account for about half of US new commercial construction annually, the online data package features a “whole building measurement system.” An integrated set of metrics gauges sustainability of materials and energy usage, assesses carbon footprints and 11 other indicators of environmental performance, and tabulates economic costs over nine different investment horizons.
BIRDS complements NIST’s popular tool known as BEES (Building for Environmental and Economic Sustainability) that allows a user to meas-ure economic and environmental impacts of building products, ranging from concrete to roof coverings to floor coverings.
Due to the complexity of a building and the hundreds or thousands of products that are required to construct and operate the structure, it is not feasible to use typical life-cycle assessment approaches to estimate its environmental performance.
Instead, BIRDS implements a novel hybrid life-cycle assessment (LCA) approach to evaluate the environmental performance of a building. The new tool combines two separate LCA approaches—“top-down” environmental input-output data and “bottom-up” process-based data—to calculate a more accurate environmental impact.
NIST’s aim is to make LCA and life-cycle costing—analytical methods now mostly plied by specialists—more accessible with hands-on tools anyone can use to answer “what if” questions when planning or designing a new office building, retail store, or any of nine other types of commercial structures.
“Buildings are complex systems, and how they perform is not simply the sum of their many parts,” says Joshua Kneifel, who led the development of the database and its measurement tools. “With BIRDS, anyone can measure and compare operating energy use through detailed simulations, materials use through innovative life-cycle inventories, and building costs over time.”
