By: Diane Benjamin’
https://www.usgbc.org/articles/us-green-building-council-announces-2022-top-10-states-green-building
Illinois ranks third, behind Washington DC and Massachusetts, in the LEED certified number of square feet per capita.
Many of those LEED buildings are in Normal. The new Uptown buildings have it written on the doors, Normal requires LEED construction whenever they can.
The Children’s Discovery Museum is one of those buildings. Building to LEED is supposedly GREEN and efficient. (and more expensive)
https://greenexhibits.org/dream/buildings_ncdm_case_study.php
Excerpt:
Building GREEN didn’t achieve the desired results: https://smartenergy.illinois.edu/normal-childrens-discovery-museum/
A study had to be done to determine why the building wasn’t performing as predicted: https://faasedac.web.illinois.edu/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Childrens-Discovery-Museum-Case-Study-053113.pdf
Comedy time!
Click and link and read it yourself. A few takeaways:
Observations made during the site visit partially explained the discrepancy. It was a normal practice, according to
building staff, to prop the door open when groups of visitors arrived. Lights were also left on all night.
Evidently everything from lights to heat and air conditioning is programmed. All the systems were reset, what happened next?
This document is dated May of 2013.
https://www.normalil.gov/ArchiveCenter/ViewFile/Item/4544
The above link is to last Monday’s meeting. Two energy bills were listed for CDM: PDF page 36
All of the payments for the last year are in the packets, anyone want to add them up?
Of course building LEED is more expensive. CDM is the best case study available. If every month is this expensive LEED is just a sign on the door and means next to nothing.
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Typical for everything the government does,
Staff pushes LEED for an award. Getting the award is more important than it being efficient.
LEED has only to do with the energy efficiency of the building as designed and built. Normal brags about the LEED certifications in Uptown. However many facilities both public a nd private are operated inefficiently. I was alerted a few years ago when a study showed this. I .met with with the Director of Facilities management and he confirmed this. Therefore, LEED buildings may use less energy than non-LEED buildings, but many use the same or more. A STudy had been conducted of Normal’s facilities demonstrated that the Town many times failed to operate the buildings inefficiently.
Government never does anything well!
Yes, they Don’t have to, more money is available from taxpayers
It is not about the outcome, just the intent.
They don’t pay for the energy out of their own pockets, so they don’t have to care how much an electric or gas bill is. In our homes, we are very vigilant about energy usage because we pay the bills. There is no consequence for poor management in government. It was someone’s responsibility to take care of this system and they didn’t do it. They can just jack up taxes to cover their mistakes and let the taxpayer bear the burden. That’s government for ya. Plus, they would never actually take responsibility for screwing up.
It’s a sad alignment of government dis-incentive to operate efficiently with the fact that many things people Think are green are actually Bad for the environment. I remember reading about a library someplace that was so proud of the ‘renewable’ bamboo flooring. Until they realized high traffic areas had to be replaced very frequently, making for a bad customer experience, making it effectively much more expensive than planned, and a net environmental negative due to the resources used/wasted for frequent replacement.