by Brianna Crandall — February 24, 2016—The U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) has approved the addition of New Buildings Institute’s (NBI) Advanced Buildings New Construction Guide as a LEED Pilot Alternative Compliance Path (ACP), offering LEED users expanded opportunity to leverage strong technical guidance for building performance from NBI.
The NBI guide offers a comprehensive approach to new commercial construction projects that achieves efficiencies up to 40% higher than conventional buildings.
By following the prescriptive path in the New Construction Guide, projects can earn up to 10 Energy points in LEED v4 while avoiding costly energy modeling that is often required in LEED certification, notes NBI.
This approval continues NBI’s presence in the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) green building program as the second Advanced Buildings guide available to earn LEED points, the first being the Core Performance Guide, which is currently referenced in the Energy and Atmosphere sections of LEED 2009 and LEED v4 as an option to meet the Minimum Energy Performance prerequisite.
The New Construction Guide option for the LEED Optimize Energy Performance credits was submitted and published through USGBC’s Pilot Credit Library, which allows projects to test more innovative credits that have not been through USGBC’s complete drafting and balloting process.
A summary of the two possible options for using the New Construction Guide to receive Optimize Energy Performance credits in LEED v4:
- Achieve up to six points by complying with the requirements of Section Two: Tier 2 of the New Construction Guide
- Achieve up to 10 point by complying with the requirements of Section Three: Tier 3 of the New Construction Guide
For more information on the process to use with the prescriptive path in the New Construction Guide for LEED points, visit the USGBC Web page, EA Pilot ACP: Advanced Buildings New Construction Guide.
For more information on the Advanced Buildings New Construction Guide itself, visit the NBI Web site.
