LEED Version 4 is Really Cool (BE14 Workshop Report)

The USGBC MA had a trio of LEED Champions present a full-day workshop on the v4 update to LEED on 3/4/14. NESEA hosted our workshop at Building Energy 14 (BE14 - the biggest green building-oriented conference in the northeast which comes through Boston each year in March).

Thank you to Chris Schaffner (The Green Engineer), Andrea Love (Payette), and Jim Newman (Linnean Solutions) for facilitating the workshop.

We had about 25 green building professionals come out to take the deep dive into the LEED rating system. We heard about how LEED has been evolving over the past 15 years and how LEED is a flexible system - originally designed to accommodate periodic updates and capable of responding to changing market conditions and realities. People asked a lot of questions throughout the day, deepening the experience and getting into the nitty-gritty based on real project experience.

 The facilitators also guided the attendees through a sequence of exercises to explore the changes in the v4 system. This included looking at environmental product declarations and the old "how to hold a charette" - a charette on charettes as it were - as smaller break-out groups. Much of the afternoon portion was spent looking at the specific changes in each of the credit categories - what has shifted, what has a new name, what has been eliminated. The focus was on how the system is evolving to require better performance in buildings.

The group of attendees was really quite an interesting crowd - with representatives from small practices to major firms from across the entire state. Many already knew each other from previous project experience. All made new connections.

Stay tuned to the USGBC MA Chapter for more opportunities to maintain your LEED AP credentials and stay connected to your most interesting and gregarious green building pros!