AGC is a sponsor of the High Performance Building Coalition, a group of approximately 200 organizations (including industry representatives) that helps inform congressional staff on issues pertinent to high-performance buildings. This High Performance Building Week, June 13-16, 2016, the coalition is hosting a series of Congressional briefings on related standards and developments. Here are three recent happenings that will be discussed.
As highlighted at the initial June 13th briefing, the ANSI Energy Efficiency Standardization Coordination Collaborative (EESCC) recently released a progress report on its strategic roadmap, Standardization Roadmap: Energy Efficiency in the Built Environment. This collaborative brings together industry, standardization groups, and government to review the available programs that promote a more energy- and water-efficient built environment, to identify gaps, and to make recommendations. The progress report is a good resource on available standards and what standardization groups and others may be working on in the future to address some of those gaps. You can access the April 2016 EESCC Progress Report and the June 2014 Standardization Roadmap online at http://www.ansi.org/eescc.
Another briefing this week will discuss revisions to the Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB) Circular No. A-119, which guides the government’s participation in the development of and use of voluntary consensus standards. The circular reaffirmed the government’s commitment to using voluntary consensus standards “except where inconsistent with law or otherwise impractical”—instead of developing their own standards, such as for green buildings, as an example. The final revision of OMB Circular No. A-119 (published, Jan. 2016) is available on OMB’s website.
The National Institute of Building Sciences (NIBS) will also provide a briefing on the latest findings of its Consultative Council. NIBS’s 2015 Moving Forward Report centers around ways to promote resilience, a high-performance built environment, and the buildings-related workforce. It focuses on barriers to success in these three areas and makes recommendations on how the federal government could support and incentivize industry and local community efforts, such as working with industry “to develop guidance and tools that support increased resilience.” You can find out more about the Consultative Council on NIBS’s website.
More Information on High Performance Buildings
If you are interested in learning more about high-performance buildings, the NIBS released a design guide in 2014 that provides performance-based requirements in eight main categories: whole building performance, site, structural engineering, enclosure, interior systems, mechanical engineering, lighting design, and electrical engineering. Within those categories, the guide identifies attributes, provides performance levels, and refers back to an applicable standard, such as the LEED Green Building Standard, policy directive, or executive order. NIBS’s National Performance Based Design Guide is available on the Whole Building Design Guide at http://npbdg.wbdg.org. You can also visit NIBS’s main Whole Building Design Guide website at http://www.wbdg.org for more information and resources on attributes of high-performing buildings, including links to participating agencies. According to the WBDG, the website has “over 500,000 users downloading 6 million documents per month.”
For more information, please contact AGC’s Melinda Tomaino at tomainom@agc.org or (703) 837-5415.