Linking Energy to Health and Productivity in the Built Environment Evaluating the Cost-Benefits of High Performance Building and Community Design for Sustainability, Health and Productivity

While an ever increasing number of clients and professionals are committed to achieving high levels of energy and environmental standards in new and retrofit projects, the investment community still has not moved beyond first cost decisionmaking. The need for life cycle decisionmaking will depend on multiple national and international efforts to develop the financial algorithms and collect the databases demonstrating the link between high performance buildings and energy, environmental, health and productivity benefits. This paper introduces eBIDS™, a web-based life cycle decision support tool under development for the cost-benefit analysis of the DOE data base of high performance building components, systems and whole building projects. This DOE interactive tool is linked to BIDS™ - the building investment decision support tool that has been developed by the NSF/IUCRC Center for Building Performance at Carnegie Mellon University, with the support of the Advanced Building Systems Integration Consortium (ABSIC). The cost-benefit decision support tool presents the results of field case studies, laboratory studies, simulation, and other research, clearly demonstrating the relationship of quality building investments for workstation, central system and whole building/ LEED design approaches to multiple cost benefit factors. The BIDS™ tool is more fully described in “Building Investment Decision Support (BIDS)” published in the Austin Papers – the Best of the 2002 International Green Building Conference (Loftness and Hartkopf 2002). 1. CONFLICTS BETWEEN COST, ENERGY AND ENVIRONMENTAL QUALITY? There are two debates that consistently hamper the drive to improve indoor environmental quality in U.S. buildings. First, many environmentalists argue that improving indoor environmental quality does not cost more (Figure 1a), while many building owners argue that the increased first costs for high performance buildings cannot be considered in today’s market.