Accelerating Green Building Market Transformation with Information Technology

Christopher Pyke

 

The green building movement seeks to advance the design, construction, and operation of built environments to promote human health, well-being, and the restoration of the natural environment. The contemporary green building movement began two decades ago with a powerful mental image and a simple idea.

The image was a classic curve—the distribution of practice across the industry ranging from a few scofflaws, through the average-performing majority, to a small group of innovators—a variation on a pattern recognized across many industries (Roger, 1962). The idea was to use strategic market interventions to permanently shift this distribution toward higher performance. At the time, very little information existed to define this conceptual distribution of practice, and there was little experience with specific market interventions.

The lack of experience or data did not deter the movement. The nascent green building industry set course and went to work with passion. The early areas of focus included efforts to create a broad-based industry coalition, grow a trained workforce, create assessment tools, and reward buildings based on performance and achievement. There are clear signs of success in each of these areas. Here, we will focus on new opportunities pertinent to project-based information and analytics.

Green building practice rests on tools and processes to design and assess high-performance green buildings and communities (i.e., projects). These tools and processes allow practitioners to identify and communicate about relative merits of green building strategies (e.g., integrative design, energy efficiency, or water conservation), the achievement of milestones (e.g., facilities management policies), and, ultimately, the performance of whole systems ranging from interior spaces to neighborhoods (e.g., whole-building energy performance). These tools and processes are codified in building rating systems, such as the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED?) and a number of analogous systems around the world (Cole, 1999). LEED provides practitioners with a platform to advance the consideration of issues related to location and transportation, design and engineering processes, construction activity, site planning, energy, water, materials, indoor environmental quality, and innovation. One of LEED’s fundamental benefits to the market is greater transparency about the achievements and performance of buildings with regard to these previously invisible characteristics. Over the past decade, the day-to-day tools underlying LEED have been a simple paper scorecard and, at the end of the process, a glass plaque displayed in a building lobby. It is remarkable to consider the impact that these simple elements have had on the industry. Today, we have the opportunity to build on these fundamental goals and concepts with information technologies that can vastly accelerate and scale up their impact. This paper describes one vision for this new phase of information-powered, analytically driven market transformation.

 

Classical economics assumes that market participants have equal and immediate access to information (Fama, 1970; Malkiel, 2003). Markets use this information to set prices and value assets. Today, real estate markets have developed sophisticated tools to provide information on the financial aspects of individual buildings and portfolios. Commercial information services provide data and benchmarking related to capital cost, sales price, tenancy, and a myriad of other factors. Markets for this information are sophisticated and highly segmented. However, there are no readily accessible, consistent, or comprehensive resources to address the non-financial dimensions of assets, such as energy use, water consumption, or occupant experience in or around the property. The absence of this information contributes to inefficient markets, impairs innovation, and, in some cases, contributes to market failure (Gillingham et al., 2009).

The most direct remedy to this situation is to create public and private mechanisms to provide information on the non-financial aspects of assets, that is, the green dimensions of homes and commercial buildings. This can be accomplished through public labeling programs and private efforts to create asset dashboards and key performance metrics. The development of these programs is accelerating, witnessed by the success of building-level Energy Performance Certificates in the European Union, green building certification, and, in a few major metropolitan areas, municipal energy benchmarking (IEA, 2010). However, these efforts only scratch the surface. Ultimately, we need to connect information about energy performance with detailed information about project attributes (e.g., technologies, management strategies, etc.) and utilization (e.g., occupancy schedules and occupant density). These data must then be embedded in tools and services explicitly designed to foster constructive competition and accelerate market transformation.

 

Information about outcomes and performance are the foundation and currency for the next generation of green buildings. However, by itself, this is not sufficient to propel market transformation. Information alone does not drive the change. It needs to be interpreted and attached to mechanisms that create clear market opportunities for high-performing projects and, by extension, competitive risks for low performers. This is where our interest diverges from agnostic market analytics. The green building movement seeks to use this information to drive permanent, self-sustaining change. Simply providing richer reporting on the status quo is inadequate. Our success will ultimately be measured by the rate

and magnitude of change.

This means that we seek to use information technology to actively accelerate the diffusion of innovation. This concept refers to the rate with which new practices are taken up by market participants. Some industries have a long tradition of embracing diffusion theory and working across research, development, and deployment to accelerate change. For example, programs to increase appliance efficiency have raised the bar repeatedly over the past decades and achieved notable success (Gillingham et al., 2006; Nadel et al., 2003). The building sector as a whole has not traditionally embraced these concepts, particularly for whole buildings or real estate portfolios. Yet, information technologies create opportunities for new, scalable market interventions. We recognize and address three key dimensions in our work:

? Define outcomes—dimensions for performance and evaluation. Green building is not, in isolation, an outcome. It is a framework, and we have developed new approaches to define and evaluate specific outcomes expected from green buildings. These outcomes provide the basis for market competition and differentiation.

? Understand and reward relatively high performers. These new performance dimensions can be used to sort and rank projects, discover their underlying practices, products, and services, and create performancebased reward systems.

? Inspire and assist relatively low performers. Conversely, this information creates the opportunity for low-performing projects to identify higherperforming peers and potential solution providers.

 

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