Lisa Stanley is Director of Sustainable Facilities at CTG Energetics. She is a former property manager for Cushman & Wakefield. Lisa is based in CTG’s Denver office.
Since the beginning of the LEED EB Rating System, there have always been challenges for building owners and property managers wishing to achieve certification for their buildings: LEED EB seems cost-prohibitive on a per-building basis. Which buildings out of the many in my portfolio should I choose? There should be a way to bundle certain tasks together, and combine the efforts of individual buildings.
USGBC actively listens to feedback and is constantly improving their rating systems and programs. As a result of this improvement process, USGBC developed, tested, and recently launched the new LEED Volume Program, with tracks for both Design & Construction and Operations and Maintenance.
CTG has been closely following the development of the LEED Volume Program, especially the Operations and Maintenance track. We were the first company to successfully support submitting (and achieving) certification under the LEED EB Volume Pilot Program – an 18 building portfolio for a major property management firm. And in a current assignment with the U.S. General Services Administration, Public Building Service we were also the first to support submittal of the prototype to USGBC under the newly launched official LEED Volume Certification Process for Existing Buildings. The program we have developed to facilitate Volume Certification for LEED EB O+M is called eVOL™.
>> View Screenshots from the eVOL Program
A Game Changer
Speaking from the perspective of a former property manager, I can say that every so often a new tool or program is introduced which has the power to fundamentally change the way we work with commercial buildings – I call these "game changers." eVOL falls into this category. While many owners are either pursuing or would like to pursue a sustainable facilities program, they run into any number of roadblocks – the most common being: the per-building expense is too high, the logistics are too difficult to manage for an entire portfolio, and challenges of how to make the program long lasting, and not just an event that will fade. eVOL removes many of the barriers and complexities associated with pursuing a sustainable facilities program, and can be deployed for a fraction of the cost of traditional per-building programs.
USGBC conceived the Volume Certification Program to address the issues and drawbacks of a pursuing LEED certification on a building-by-building basis. CTG and our team have taken the backbone and methodology of the Volume Certification Program and built it into a user-friendly and web-enabled interface that is customizable to any number of parameters and systems a client might need. eVOL facilitates building assessments to help determine which buildings should be prioritized for certification, it allows owners to benchmark and compare performance of all buildings, either as a portfolio or as a discrete group, and it enables data management, documentation, and submittal via LEED Automation to USGBC.
Robust Capability
Put simply, eVOL was made to easily facilitate cost-effective greening of large building portfolios. The current version of the program was designed to support GSA in an effort to green their portfolio which consists of more than 9,200 buildings and more than 400 million square feet of development. Using eVOL, CTG and GSA are currently screening 1,000 buildings to find the best candidates to include in the initial phases of the program. More than 50 buildings have been selected for the first phase of GSA's volume certification program, and at least 200 will participate in the second phase.
Cost Savings
Because the USGBC Volume Certification Program is designed to work for portfolios of 25 or more buildings, there are inherent cost efficiencies which can be achieved by certifying multiple buildings at once. At CTG, we're estimating our clients will save as much as 70% on the per-building cost of achieving LEED EB certification by pursuing a portfolio approach. When it comes to customizing and deploying eVOL, the good news for future clients is that the program has already been developed, deployed, and tested, meaning you greatly benefit by leveraging technology which already exists. All you pay for is customization, program development, training, and submittal to USGBC.
If you're interested in learning more about eVOL, how the pricing structure works, or to schedule a demo, please give me a call. I'm based out of CTG's Denver office: 303-573-0070.
Thanks,
-Lisa
Contact: ctg@ctgenergetics.com
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