would benefit from greater energy efficiency. By that point, the builder is long gone, but the choices made by the builder remain. Similarly, for rental units, owners may not have an incentive to put in more efficient appliances because it is the tenants who pay the energy bills.
Homeowners expect quick paybacks on efficiency investments. Lack of knowledge is a chronic issue. How many homeowners actually have any idea how much they will save with tighter insulation or by turning down the thermostat? Some of these issues can be corrected with zoning regulations and other requirements, appliance labeling in terms of energy efficiency, and dissemination of comprehensible information. Focus and measurement can bring unexpected results in commercial buildings.
Simon Property Group is one of the largest operators of shopping malls in the country, including some of the best known, ranging from Stanford Shopping Center and Laguna Hills Mall in California to the Houston Galleria to Pentagon City near Washington, D.C., and The Westchester in New York. Between 2003 and 2009, Simon reduced its energy use by 25 percent. “As much as 60 percent were generated by the implementation of best practices and by using common sense and paying attention,” said George Caraghiaur, the executive at Simon responsible for energy efficiency. “That means shutting off lights, keeping doors closed, and not cooling the entire plant. Basically, it’s telling our mall managers to do the kind of things our parents told us to do.”13
Best practices also include “not easy to see” things, he said, such as proper maintenance of heating and air-conditioning systems. The other 40 percent required investment in such things as lighting, more efficient cooling systems, and management controls. The investment can be in very big new systems. It can also go into readjusting the soft drink machines so that they don’t cool cans at night when no one is buying drinks because the mall is closed.
EFFICIENCY BY DESIGN
Efficiency by design is becoming part of the approach to buildings. Green building is an initiative that started off as a fringe activity and is now firmly in the mainstream. It is already changing the way buildings are constructed and is stimulating research and development in an industry—construction—in which R&D has not been anything resembling a priority.
In the 1980s a number of organizations began to develop methodologies for rating the environmental aspects of building construction, operations, and upkeep—thereby encouraging efficiency and conservation. The best known are those of the U.S. Green Building Council and its LEED, the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design program. LEED generates a set of guidelines and certifications for new buildings and remodeling, for both energy and environmental goals. It operates on a points system with ratings ranging from “certified” to “silver” to “gold,” and, the most highly prized of all, “platinum.”
But devising a system to rate the environmental impact of buildings—and everything that goes into them—is no easy thing. For instance, should the environmental assessment for a building focus mainly on energy use and carbon emissions, or should it also include sustainable forestry, toxic waste disposal, urban congestion? Geography complicates matters further. Water, for instance, needs to be treated differently in Arizona than in Maine. In short, energy and environmental accounting isn’t easy. As a result, some efficiency experts question the methodology of programs like LEED.
Integrated design is now seen as a key to achieving higher levels of energy efficiency in the fragmented building world. That means architects, developers, engineers, and consultants working together from initial design to the final construction. This collaboration tries to ensure that a building’s walls, heating and cooling system, ventilation, and lighting are all well integrated—bringing substantial savings. For instance, a high-performance envelope—that is, the outer walls—would eliminate the need for separate heating systems near the windows and reduce the size of the main heating and cooling equipment.
Some of the most important innovations in buildings today hearken back to principles that went into buildings prior to the twentieth century and before people gained control over their environment—before they began to “manufacture weather.” But of course today that means acting on those principles in far more sophisticated ways, using advanced technology and tools, and a scientific and engineering understanding that was not available even in the recent past. The thermal mass of the building is used, like those stones walls were once used, to store energy during the daytime in order to provide heating at night.
“In a way,” said Leon Glicksman of MIT, “all this is going back to the solutions that evolved over the