The Rating Game: ASHRAE's Building Energy Quotient Newest Ratings Player, Durst Gets On Board

Seven and a half years ago, The New Yorker's Hendrick Hertzberg greeted the arrival of the short-lived, pretty thoroughly noxious neoconservative broadsheet The New York Sun with a gracious invocation of an E.B. White quote on the old (and equally noxious) New York Sun's demise. White bemoaned the loss of "a voice in the choir," Hertzberg welcomed the addition of another one. What that notional voice was saying -- or, in the case of the short-lived Sun reboot, sneeringly insinuating -- was less important than the fact that said voice was there to be heard. It's unfair to compare Building Energy Quotient, the new green building rating system devised by the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE), to the New York Sun. This because The Sun was terrible, and Building EQ looks, on its face, to be pretty good. But here's a case where Hertzberg's graciousness makes actual sense: the addition of another contender to the building rating marketplace is indeed something to celebrate.

A measurement of a building's operating efficiency rather than design efficiency, Building EQ is competing less with LEED than with Energy Star. But "compete" seems like the wrong idea, here. With very low building rating fees -- between $500 and $1000, at least in the just-initiated pilot program -- Building EQ seems designed mostly to augment the field. Building EQ's rating is split in two, with an In Operation rating measuring a building's performance relative to utility bills and a As Designed rating gauging the structure's simulated performance per the building's design elements. The idea is that a comparison between the two will help owners and managers realize areas in which efficiency can be improved. The color-coding and letter-grading -- from a net-zero A-plus on down to F -- hearkens back to LEED's credit card-themed rating levels, but the focus on real-world assessment relative to design goes some way towards correcting what has been a persistent irk for LEED critics.

""We like to think about the energy quotient of a building as like the intelligence quotient of a person," ASHRAE's Ron Jarmagin told E&E News' Michael Burnham. "You get to see how 'smart' a building is." The pilot program will assess about 20 buildings before mid-June, with the properties being graded belonging to a grab bag of participants that includes Houston-based real estate agency Hines, Michigan Department of Management and Budget, the United States General Services Administration (which has an astonishing nationwide inventory of 354 million square feet of office space) and New York's own Durst Organization. Until we hear the words this particular voice-in-the-choir is singing, it's hard to know what to make of Building EQ. But the sheet music, at least, looks pretty good, and better a choir than a soloist. Or, lord knows, the New York Sun.