LEED To Be Upgraded in 2009

In 2000, the US Green Building Council (USGBC) introduced the LEED Green Building Rating System. For the last 8 years, the LEED system has established a set of integrated, measurable goals that guided how eco-conscious buildings were to be designed and constructed.

LEED v3, which will go into effect in 2009, will bring about several significant changes to the green building rating system, and it will have several components. The updated technical standards will be codified in LEED 2009. This was not intended to be a "tear down and rebuilt" of the current LEED system, but rather, a reorganization of the existing system. The USGBC has characterized LEED 2009 as the sum of four parts:

1. LEED prerequisite/credit alignment and harmonization
2. Predictable development cycle
3. Transparent environmental/human impact credit weighting
4. Regionalization

The second part of LEED v3 is an expanded third-party certification program. Currently, all LEED project submissions are reviewed by USGBC with the support of independently contracted reviewers. Beginning in January 2009, however, the USGBC will move administration of the LEED certification process to the Green Building Certification Institute, a non-profit organization established in 2007. This reorganization was done to improve the overall certification process in way that can grow with the demand for green building certification. The other goal was to establish third-party certification that can be audited to determine effectiveness and fairness.

The third part of LEED v3 is the LEED Online management system, which should hopefully make the legwork part of all-things-LEED a little easier.

With 8 years of growing pains out of the way, and over 7,000 comments on LEED 2009, hopefully the USGBC has developed a good sense of what works and what doesn’t. All in all, LEED v3 should be an enhanced, more workable version of what was started in 2000.