Energy Star

There are presumably people out there who don't enjoy a good hotel room, but I don't know any of them. Not to get too "Up In The Air" on you here, but there's something about those fluffy pillows and big goofy comforters and imposingly glossy dark wood desks they don't even really expect you to use. Something kind of cool and different, yes, but also something that causes even the most virtuous carbon-footprint-watchers among us to forget ourselves and all of a sudden become the sort of people who think, "well, I might as well leave the air conditioning on blast, so that it'll be nice and cool when I return to the room in seven hours." And that -- along with a host of really dumb industry practices like leaving lights on in vacant rooms (which gets called out in the Urban Green Council's massive recent report) -- is why hotels are some of the least-green big buildings in any city.

Earlier today, the City Council passed the four pieces of legislation which Mayor Bloomberg introduced last April as his "Greener, Greater Buildings Plan." As you'll recall, building owners immediately opposed one of the bills (Int. 967: Audits & Retrocommissioning), which would have required them to implement a bundle of energy efficiency upgrades with a payback period of less than five years after the results of a rolling audit process. While auditing remains part of the approved legislation, owners will not be required to make the improvements, which will now just be identified based on a "reasonable" payback period. Public buildings, however, must still install any retrofit measure that the audit pegs with less than a seven-year payback. Although the costs of auditing were noted by opponents to the bills earlier this year, mandatory energy audits are now required every ten years, though buildings certified under LEED-EB and Energy Star are exempt.

We're pretty up front with our pro-Jersey bias here at gbNYC. Stephen and I are both sons of that superfund-y soil, after all, and after several decades of environment-intensive Jersey jokes -- medical waste washes up on your beaches one time and you hear about it forever -- it's kind of empowering to be able to report good green news about the Garden State. And we've had a good amount of it to report of late -- green condos in Trenton, an ultra-sustainable retail building in Montclair, and now, good news about a pair of green housing developments in Morris County and Union County.

When it comes to actually knowing things about sustainable real estate and such, Steve's the heavy hitter. (I'm the guy who buries YouTube links to Fleetwood Mac performances in otherwise dutiful posts) SDP also has an actual job and is doing all the writing at Green Real Estate Law Journal, though, which means that it falls on me to comment on a pair of recent reports that bring both good and not-so-good news to the USGBC's LEED rating program. For all its faults -- and we'll get to those below -- LEED remains the best-branded, most-recognizable way of telling a green building from, like, a beige or brown one. The good news is that, per a recent study by the Urban Green Council, building to LEED specs has proven to be roughly as expensive as building brown.