The Verdani team recently spent a week in Los Angeles for the 2016 Greenbuild Conference and Expo. This conference brought together thousands of green building and sustainability experts. Our team presented on several panels and attended many great sessions on topics from certifications to reporting to tenant behavior and engagement. We summarized some of our best sessions below:
VERDANI PRESENTATIONS
Engaging Stakeholders on Efficiency in Los Angeles
In this session, presenters shared how the City of Los Angeles, in partnership with the City Energy Project, engaged local stakeholders on energy and water efficiency policy creation. Methods of engagement included assembling over 200 stakeholders for many meetings to gather feedback on benchmarking, transparency, auditing, and retrocommissioning practices. Verdani’s Daniele Horton discussed the challenges and concerns that stakeholders may have with benchmarking, such as privacy, access to data, and costs.
Integrating Sustainability into Acquisitions Due Diligence
Verdani’s, Sara Schoen and Shubha Mohunta shared the process of incorporating sustainability criteria and due diligence procedures into the property condition assessments. As the Director of Sustainability for Clarion Partners, Sara discussed Clarion’s experience utilizing these criteria to evaluate potential environmental performance of new investments.
Criteria include sustainability attributes, climate risks, energy performance, and certifications.
Since the acquisition process is very fast-paced, findings should be summarized in a quick one-pager
OTHER KEY HIGHLIGHTS
Arc
GBCI will be launching Arc in December. This new platform will have many capabilities suited for:
Any existing building interested in benchmarking at real time
EBOM Re-certifications
First time LEED EBOM certifications
Re-certifications of projects previously certified under BD+C or ID+C
Health and Wellbeing
Indoor environmental quality, occupant comfort, and the new WELL Building Standard were popular panel topics at Greenbuild. The industry is moving towards healthier buildings and working environments for tenants, employees, and all building occupants. Healthier buildings lead to happier and more productive employees.
Building Internet of Things
Greater access to data, better communication networks, and new software are having a profound impact on the efficiency of the built environment. In a panel on building IoT, speakers discussed the future of connected devices in building management and how building metrics feed into financial portfolio decision making. As more systems become automated, there is a need for all the systems to communicate with each other to maximize building performance. Building IoT will be a growing trend in the industry.
For more highlights, read some other posts from our peers: