Growth in Green Building Use Expected to Drive Use of BIM Tools

The growth of the green building market will drive adoption of Building Information Modeling (BIM) software, according to a new SmartMarket Report, Green BIM: How Building Information Modeling is Contributing to Green Design and Construction, released today by McGraw-Hill Construction, part of The McGraw-Hill Companies (NYSE: MHP). Produced in collaboration with the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), the Mechanical Contractors Association of America (MCAA), Autodesk, and 13 other prominent industry organizations, the report provides new insights on the convergence of two important construction industry trends: green building and BIM, known simply as "Green BIM."

"Green building is already transforming design and construction in the United States, and BIM has the  potential to increase innovation—and design and construction efficiency," said Harvey Bernstein, vice president, global thought leadership and business development, McGraw-Hill Construction. "Therefore, the intersection of BIM tool use with sustainability goals is a powerful practice that can be truly transformative in increasing industry productivity."

The industry agrees that they are just beginning to tap the full potential of BIM to achieve their green objectives. Only 17% of Green BIM practitioners are currently realizing more than 50% of BIM's potential for their green goals, but a sharp increase in Green BIM use is expected in the near future.

"The report reveals the share of activity where BIM is being applied to help achieve sustainability goals, showing the fact that this is still a nascent emerging trend," Bernstein added. "However, the future outlook is dramatic: 78% of the survey respondents who aren't currently using BIM on green building projects expect to do so within just three years. That's a significant increase."

The report captures perspectives on the future of Green BIM from a wide range of experts, as well as case studies that demonstrate Green BIM's contributions to achieving sustainable outcomes. According to the report, as green building becomes a larger share of construction, the benefits provided by BIM will also be more widely recognized, and the use of BIM as a whole will increase.

"Green and BIM have been the two most dynamic trends in our industry," said Steve Jones, who leads McGraw-Hill Construction's BIM initiatives. "Although they have been growing independently, it was inevitable that they would converge because the analysis and simulation capabilities of modeling are such a natural fit with the objectives of green building. This report establishes a baseline for the state of that evolution and points the way towards further exciting developments."

Robert T. Armistead, president of MCAA, agrees, "MCAA and our foundation, the Mechanical Contracting Education & Research Foundation, have been working extremely hard over the past five years to provide our members with the highest levels of green and BIM education possible. Until recently, these efforts have been proceeding on separate tracks, but this [Green BIM] study validates what we've seen—or at least suspected—that these two mega-trends are coalescing. Green construction, like everything else in our society, is now highly information-rich and dependent, and that makes it ripe for modeling."

BIM offers an efficient way to create and leverage digital models for the design, construction and operation of projects, and it is revolutionizing the way firms communicate, solve problems and achieve better outcomes. Current users who practice Green BIM also report intensive use of BIM. Nearly half (49%) of Green BIM practitioners use BIM on over 50% of their projects, compared to approximately one quarter (28%) of non-Green BIM companies. Green BIM practitioners are also more intensive users of the software since they both create and analyze models more frequently than non-Green BIM companies.

"Autodesk BIM solutions enable our customers to use the rich, intelligent information from the design model to conduct whole-building energy analysis by accessing local weather data to simulate performance and visualize appearance, all from right within the design palette," said Rick Rundell, senior director of AEC Simulation Products, Autodesk. "This leads to better-informed decision-making, much earlier in the design process. As the McGraw-Hill Construction Green BIM research shows, more and more projects are being completed with BIM to meet goals for sustainability, and we continue to deliver solutions that help put sustainable design decision-making in the hands of architects, engineers and contractors to support industry demands for greater visibility and predictability."

According to prior McGraw-Hill Construction studies, energy efficiency is the most often cited green building benefit, yielding significant cost-savings over a building's full lifecycle, and Green BIM is no exception. The study expects strong growth for energy performance simulation tools in particular: 95% of firms practicing BIM for green projects will do energy performance simulations within two years, compared with 73% now; and 79% of firms using BIM (but not focused on green projects) will conduct the simulations, compared to 21% currently. Energy efficiency is also an important tenet of the USGBC's LEED certification, a sought-after distinction for many green builders.

"At the core of every successful LEED project is a project team that practices integrated design," said Brendan Owens, vice president of LEED Technical Development, USGBC. "BIM provides an essential tool that supports integrated design, and to that end, will be extremely helpful in advancing this important concept. The ability to integrate BIM with LEED Online will move that idea faster and further."

Data presented in the report are drawn from a McGraw-Hill Construction survey of design firms, contractors and other major construction industry players in the U.S. who already use BIM. The report aims to determine how often, when and why they are using BIM on green projects, and provides a portrait of firms that are already Green BIM practitioners in contrast to typical BIM users, as well as insights into how they use BIM to achieve their green goals and what they anticipate the future to hold.

To download the free report, visit http://construction.com/market_research/FreeReport/GreenBIM/.

Premier association partners include U.S. Green Building Council and the Mechanical Contractors Association of America. The premier corporate partner is Autodesk. Corporate contributors include Balfour Beatty, Chicago Faucets, Graphisoft, Johnson Controls, and Parsons Brinckerhoff. The association partners are the American Institute of Architects, the Associated General Contractors of America, Construction Owners Association of America, Design-Build Institute of America, National Association of Women in Construction, National Electrical Contractors Association, National Institute of Building Sciences, and buildingSMART alliance.

About McGraw-Hill Construction:

McGraw-Hill Construction connects people, projects and products across the construction industry. For more than a century, it has remained North America's leading provider of project and product information, plans and specifications, and industry news, trends and forecasts. McGraw-Hill Construction serves more than one million customers in the $5.6 trillion global construction industry through Dodge, Sweets, Architectural Record, Engineering News-Record, GreenSource, and 10 regional publications. To learn more, visit www.construction.com or follow @mhconstruction on Twitter.

About The McGraw-Hill Companies:

Founded in 1888, The McGraw-Hill Companies (NYSE: MHP) is a global information and education company providing knowledge, insights and analysis in the financial, education and business information sectors through leading brands including Standard & Poor's, McGraw-Hill Education, Platts, and J.D. Power and Associates. The Corporation has more than 280 offices in 40 countries. Sales in 2009 were $5.95 billion. Additional information is available at http://www.mcgraw-hill.com.

Nine Challenges of Alternative Energy

In his just-released report, "Nine Challenges of Alternative Energy" Lawrence Berkeley staff scientist David Fridley assesses the obvious yet too often overlooked obstacles to the widespread deployment of alternative energies around the world. The report can be downloaded here. According to Fridley, these nine challenges are:

Scalability and Timing

Commercialization

Substitutability

Material Requirements

Intermittency

Energy Density

Water

The Law of Receding Horizons

Energy Returned on Energy Invested

USGBC Celebrates Five Years of Green Building, Economic & Educational Progress in New Orleans

(Make It Right activist and actor Brad Pitt, left, and USGBC President, Rick Fedrizzi, right) presented a LEED Platinum plaque to Make It Right homeowner Deidre Taylo and her children, during a Clinton Global Initiative event in Sept. 2009 (Photo: Business Wire)

Five years after the devastating hurricanes that ravaged New Orleans and much of the Gulf Coast, many organizations have stepped in to help rebuild the city, placing emphasis on resilience, sustainability and economic prosperity. The U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), the driving force of the green building industry in America, has also made rebuilding New Orleans green a key priority. Through USGBC’s LEED green building certification program, hundreds of homes, schools and commercial buildings are being rebuilt to be high-performance, resource-efficient, durable and healthier places for the people of New Orleans who occupy them. Below is a report of USGBC’s efforts since 2005.

USGBC’s Notable Accomplishments:


USGBC embedded an expert in the Recovery School District to work with all schools on rebuilding green.

All public schools built to minimum LEED Silver Certification.

Green movie studio in the Lower Garden District will be LEED Silver.

Make It Right has built the largest community of LEED Platinum homes in the world.

Salvation Army’s EnviRenew is building and repairing 250 homes in five New Orleans neighborhoods to be green and energy efficient.

USGBC and EnviRenew’s Natural Talent Design Competition will build four LEED Platinum homes in the Broadmoor neighborhood.

Preservation Resource Center (PRC) and the Center for Sustainable Engagement and Development (CSED) will be opening a new LEED Platinum community center/headquarters in the Holy Cross neighborhood of the Lower Ninth Ward.

Working with USGBC, several groups in the city are training workers to rebuild the city better and greener: LA Greencorps, Good Work Network, Electrician’s Union, Delgado Community College, Deep South Center for Environmental Justice

USGBC in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast

Since the devastating hurricanes and subsequent floods that ravaged New Orleans and the Gulf Coast region in 2005, USGBC has been on the ground there, developing strategies for rebuilding even as the flood waters began receding. At its 2005 Greenbuild Conference in Atlanta, just weeks after the hurricanes came through, USGBC convened 160 participants, including many New Orleans residents, USGBC chapter members and other leading experts in planning, environmental engineering and architecture, in a planning charrette.

The outcome was the New Orleans Principles, a roadmap and specific action plans for the re-planning and rebuilding efforts, with the intent of enhancing environmental, social, and economic outcomes. To ensure the principles became actions, USGBC created the position of “New Orleans Green Building Coordinator” to facilitate and execute the strategy on the ground. For more than two years, Anisa Baldwin Metzger has been on the ground, working with the Recovery School District and has become a nationally recognized leader in translating green building strategies into real world results. USGBC’s Louisiana Chapter has been a driving force for keeping sustainability at the forefront of rebuilding efforts.

The New Orleans Principles

1. Respect the rights of all citizens of New Orleans.

2. Restore natural protections of the greater New Orleans region.

3. Implement an inclusive planning process.

4. Value diversity in New Orleans.

5. Protect the city of New Orleans.

6. Embrace smart redevelopment.

7. Honor the past; build for the future.

8. Provide for passive survivability.

9. Foster locally owned, sustainable businesses.

10. Focus on the long term.

The Road to Educational Recovery

Chief among the action plans was a strong commitment to ensuring the schools are not only rebuilt, but are built to LEED Silver– so that every child within the school system could attend classes in safe, structurally sound and resilient facilities that enhanced the goals of learning. Before Hurricane Katrina:

There were 439 buildings on 127 active public school campuses, serving 63,000 students.

Virtually all of that space was substandard - parents chose where to send their children based on how “less bad” the bathrooms were.

Then Katrina hit, and more than 80-percent of those buildings had more than 25-percent damage. With children to educate immediately, the first initiative off the drawing board was Quick Start, a community process that had the goal of building one new school in each of the five city council districts in New Orleans.

Quick Start Schools: Langston Hughes Elementary, Wilson Elementary, Lake Area High School, Landry High School and Fannie C. Williams.

Each school is LEED Silver and will reduce energy use by 30-percent.

The first of those schools opened in August, 2009, with double-digit increases in test scores just in the past school year.

When phase one of the master plan is completed in 2013, there will be 17 new and 13 renovated LEED schools.

“Make It Right” with Affordable, Durable, Sustainable Homes

The Red Cross estimates Hurricanes Katrina and Rita destroyed more than 350,000 homes.

An additional 146,000 had major damage.

Overall, 850,791 housing units were damaged or destroyed.

The number of homes destroyed equals about 17-percent of annual home construction.

Among the many organizations that stepped forward, Make It Right has taken on the challenge of providing New Orleans residents with quality, affordable homes. Make It Right devoted itself to the rebuilding and restoration of the debilitated communities in ways that honor the past, but build in the advancements and practices that define today’s green buildings – energy efficiency, water efficiency, improved indoor air quality, more daylight.

USGBC worked closely with Make It Right providing sustainable design expertise in the building of:

50 Platinum LEED homes built in the Lower Ninth Ward that now house 179 people with 100 more LEED Platinum homes underway.

It’s the largest community of LEED Platinum homes in the world.

Designed to be high-performing and energy efficient.

Make It Right LEED homes are built to use only 1/3 of the energy that would be used by a comparable new home.

They are more sustainable than the homes they are replacing by a factor of 10.

Additionally, Salvation Army’s EnviRenew Initiative is building 125 new homes and renovating 125 existing homes over the next three years in five New Orleans neighborhoods. The campaign revolves around the idea that financially vulnerable individuals and families are especially in need of the benefits that green building practices provide. Healthy indoor air quality, lower utility bills, and high quality construction are vitally important for moderate and low income populations in their quest for economically prosperous lifestyles.

EnviRenew is collaborating with USGBC’s 2010 Natural Talent Design Competition, which will be held Friday, August 27, 2010 in New Orleans. Four student and emerging professional design team finalists will be chosen from more than 360 submitted designs of 800-square-foot, affordable homes designed to LEED Platinum guidelines. The winning designs will be built in the Broadmoor neighborhood. Once the ADA (American Disabilities Act) compliant homes have been built and the homeowners have taken residence, the homes will enter the measurement and verification phase. The design team of the home with the best energy, water, waste and other performance metrics will be deemed the final winner and will receive their prize at the 2011 Greenbuild Conference. For more details about the Natural Talent Design Competition, visit: www.usgbc.org/designcompetition

Community-Based Environmental Sustainability

Rebuilding a disaster-stricken region not only requires the construction of new facilities, but also the maintenance of the historical preservation and integrity of existing ones. The Preservation Resource Center (PRC) of New Orleans is transforming a house of architectural and historical significance to the Lower Ninth Ward into a community center using many of the structure’s original building materials. The Holy Cross Community Center will stand as the neighborhood’s “headquarters” and is expected to be certified LEED Platinum. USGBC has also supported the Lower Ninth Ward through Historic Green, an organization that is helping to rebuild the Holy Cross neighborhood as the nation’s first zero carbon community.

USGBC’s experience in New Orleans has informed the disaster recovery assistance that its 17,000 members and 80 chapters have undertaken in response to the natural disasters that have occurred since Katrina. With tragedies such as the devastating tornadoes in Greensburg, Kansas in 2007, the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti and the recent oil spill in the Gulf Coast, the imperative to make all buildings sustainable, durable and resource efficient is critical – not solely in disaster-stricken areas, but everywhere.

U.S. Green Building Council

The USGBC community is transforming the way we build, design and operate our buildings and communities, leading to healthier, more resource-efficient places where people can live, work, learn and play. Headquartered in Washington, D.C., the Council is the driving force of the green building industry, which is projected to contribute $554 billion to the U.S. gross domestic product by 2013. USGBC leads a diverse constituency of builders and environmentalists, corporations and nonprofit organizations, elected officials, concerned citizens, teachers and students. The USGBC community comprises 80 local chapters, 17,000 member companies and organizations, and more than 150,000 individuals who have earned LEED Professional Credentials. Visit www.usgbc.org for more information.

PNC Bank Adds Seven LEED(TM)-Certified Green Buildings; Raises Total to 8

The U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) has certified seven more Green Branch(R) locations of PNC Bank based on environmentally friendly construction and design, boosting its total to 84 LEED(TM)-certified green buildings.

In 2002 PNC became the first major U.S. bank to design and build environmentally friendly LEED-certified bank branches in the United States and has more newly constructed certified green buildings than any company on Earth.

PNC (NYSE: PNC) is the only bank permitted to use the term Green Branch(R) based on the registered trademark granted by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office. The trademark is affirmation of PNC's leadership and commitment to green business practices.

"We have continued to evolve our innovative approach to eco-friendly business practices and we have momentum with 30 additional locations awaiting certification by the USGBC," said Gary Saulson, PNC's director of corporate real estate.

The bank's prototype Green Branch(R) features include:

- Materials: more than 50 percent of the branch is locally manufactured or made from recycled or green materials.

- Energy & Water Efficiency: energy usage is reduced 35 percent or more compared to a traditional branch; water usage is reduced by 4,000 gallons a year and window walls are three times more efficient than code.

- Pollution Control: construction waste is recycled or salvaged and the cooling system is designed to protect the ozone.

The newly certified Green Branch(R) locations are in three states. All 84 (81 for new construction and three for interiors) certified locations can be found via www.pnc.com/green.

Pennsylvania Newtown - Newtown II, 2500 South Eagle Road Yardley - Octagon Center, 91 Oxford Valley Road Bethlehem - Plaza on Eighth, 1481 Eighth Ave.

Virginia Fredericksburg - Celebrate Virginia South, 1001 Gordon W. Shelton Blvd. Woodbridge - Potomac Town Center, 14910 Diamond View Way Centreville - Sully Station, 5321 Westfields Blvd.

New Jersey East Windsor - East Windsor, 440 Route 130

The PNC Financial Services Group, Inc. (www.pnc.com) is one of the nation's largest diversified financial services organizations providing retail and business banking; residential mortgage banking; specialized services for corporations and government entities, including corporate banking, real estate finance and asset-based lending; wealth management and asset management. Follow @PNCNews on Twitter for breaking news, updates and announcements from PNC.