When I was asked to keynote the BlueTech Forum next week in San Francisco, I was excited to discover this kind of action-oriented group. Rarely have I had the opportunity to speak to an existing forum for investors, entrepreneurs and established water technology companies who share this kind of commitment.

As most of you know, I give green building keynotes all over the world. I love the opportunity to step things up a notch for groups who have a basic understanding of what needs to be done. In this presentation, I want to convey the broad range of water issues currently being faced by the developed countries, as well as the new opportunities for businesses of all kinds to step forward and engage with sustainability skills and mind sets.

I’m particularly excited about sharing my knowledge of sustainable water strategies that will lower the “water footprint” of the built environment through creative green building design and whole systems thinking.

When it comes to water, there’s no “1% vs. 99%”: we’re all in this together!

For more information about this keynote and other related resources, please read the press release.

The completion of One Shelley Street also marked the completion of Brookfield’s nine-year redevelopment of the King Street Wharf precinct. King Street Wharf is a neigh­borhood in the Sydney central business district, providing a waterfront location with commercial office space, residential, retail and restaurants.

The sole office tenant, Macquarie Group’s Banking and Financial Services group, was the driving force behind bring­ing a new way of working to One Shelley Street. This approach is called Activ­ity Based Working (ABW). ABW is a program that challenges more traditional ways of working, by seeking to empower workers with the ability to choose a work setting that is most aligned to their particular needs for each day. Each floor also features a themed community space and a shared break-out area, accommodating up to 100 employees. A cen­tral staircase winds its way through the atrium connecting the different work zones, contributing to the focus on transpar­ency, light and space. The atrium contains 26 cantilevered, cube-shaped meeting rooms that project over the atrium, with seating options ranging from traditional tables and chairs to more casual built-in benches.

Click Here to Download the PDF case study of One Shelley Street, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, an excerpt from the forthcoming book, “The World’s Greenest Buildings.”

This download is Yudelson’s contribution to the new 2012 Green Building White Paper from Building Design & Construction magazine entitled “High-Performance Reconstructed Buildings: The 99% Solution.” In this chapter, Yudelson makes a solid business case for super-green restoration of older buildings. According to the green building consultant, the answer to the question of what should be done with these older buildings is simple.

First, they already exist, so it’s generally cheaper to restore them, Second, they are often situated in prime real estate locations. And, finally, in
the case of historic building renovations, there are often tax benefits and other incentives to sweeten the real estate investment.

On the other hand, it is often argued that older buildings may be harder to work with, since the building envelope, orientation, and much of the floor layout are fixed. In historic renovations, there are also often significant constraints on modernizing both the envelope and the interior.

The critical factor, from the standpoint of sustainability, according to Yudelson is that it’s better not to throw away the embodied energy of all the building materials or to down-cycle them for other uses. This makes the green building business and sustainability case for saving older buildings more relevant than ever.

To read Jerry’s research and insights on this important subject, please click here to download the Yudelson chapter from the new 2012 Green Building White Paper: “High-Performance Reconstructed Buildings: The 99% Solution.”

Read the article, download the full white paper, and view or download select chapters at bdcnetwork.com.

Yudelson’s keynote speech will focus on the performance of 55 of the world’s highest-rated green buildings, with the topic: “If It Doesn’t Perform, It Can’t Be Green.” At this presentation, the audience will receive a “sneak preview” of Yudelson’s forthcoming book, “The World’s Greenest Buildings: Promise vs. Performance in Sustainable Design”, to be published early in 2013 in London by Routledge Taylor & Francis, a leading UK architectural press.

Visit the conference website.

Pre-order “The World’s Greenest Buildings: Promise vs. Performance in Sustainable Design”.

Go to Jerry’s Green Building Speaker page.

In Belgrade, Serbia I was interviewed by a local TV producer and got much more than a 30-second sound bite to talk about green buildings and especially the business case for green real estate, an important issue in a country like Serbia that is just beginning to start down the green building path. This happened on the show floor of the first annual Serbia Green Building Council event, which was exceedingly well attended. My hospitable hosts had invited me to keynote their event, hoping for a good turnout, which in fact did happen, thanks to an incredible amount of hard work by the two main organizers, Marija Golubovic and Mladen Vukanac, both seasoned green building professionals in their 30s. Even with my luggage being lost for three days, I felt incredibly well taken care of; Mladen even took me shopping at a designer store, Massimo Dutti, in the country’s largest and newest mall, so that I ended up looking like a 25-year-old Italian when I left the store (sort of).

We are going to see conflicts in the 21st century increasingly based on access to fresh water.

Warnings and what can be done about the potential for an urban water crisis will be the focus of Jerry Yudelson’s keynote speech at Southern Calfornia’s 11th Annual Municipal Green Building Conference and Expo, this Thursday, April 26th, 2012. The event is Southern California’s leading green building conference and will be held at the Southern California Gas Energy Resource Center in Downey, California.

“As Mark Twain once said, ‘whiskey’s for drinking and water’s for fighting.’ We must deal proactively with our vital but overstressed water resources, both in the US and in other countries. We are going to see conflicts in the 21st century increasingly based on access to fresh water.” Yudelson’s presentation at the MGBCE event will deal specifically with strategies that public officials can take to head off future water scarcities caused by droughts, climate change, environmental regulations and continued population growth.

As a leading green building and sustainability consultant as well as a professional engineer, Yudelson underscores the importance of this subject, “If we are serious about cutting our carbon emissions, we have to deal with water conservation. Most people don’t know that California uses nearly 20 percent of its electricity for moving and treating water and nearly one-third of its natural gas for heating water. Because of these facts, water conservation is the cheapest form of energy conservation.”

The conference is a jointly sponsored event of the Los Angeles and Orange County chapters of the US Green Building Council. Los Angeles Chapter Executive Director Dr. Jorge Partida said, “We chose Jerry Yudelson to keynote this year’s conference because of his leading role as an author and advocate in promoting efforts to prevent future urban water crises. We believe that public officials need to focus more attention on water, as it’s on the cusp of a major technological revolution and offers major green jobs potential.”

Yudelson is the author of the seminal book presenting design and planning options for increasing water abundance: Dry Run: Preventing the Next Urban Water Crisis. While he advocates for technological solutions, Yudelson also says, “We must change our approach to treating water as a free good and instead recognize instead that it’s a vital resource for our entire economy.”

Jerry hopes to meet as many readers of this blog as possible at the event. If you are in Southern California this week, please come and say hello.

Click here to read the press release and see other free resources.

Watch the video trailer for Jerry’s book “Dry Run: Preventing the Next Urban Water Crisis”.

Over the past six years, of course, green building has become mainstream in the commercial property market and the number of consultant firms providing LEED certification and sustainability services has grown into the hundreds, if not thousands. So much so that these kinds of consulting services have become commodities provided mostly by junior staffers, but not necessarily by serious building consultants. What then, should be the role of a building consultant firm in this new environment? How can a building consultant work with you to make sustainability into a game changer for your company?

For anyone developing buildings, including explicitly green buildings, I have one message: While every firm I encounter has the skill set to do their chosen work efficiently and effectively, to be successful in the green building business, a firm has to develop a new mindset. It’s not enough to aim at some level of LEED certification for a new or renovated building project, or to engage in sustainable purchasing practices. What’s needed is to have a pervasive business rationale for sustainability as an ongoing business process and strategic direction.

Hence, I sincerely believe that there is a differentiator for our role as a building consultant firm. At Yudelson Associates, clients work with senior management to incorporate sustainability and green thinking into the “DNA” of any company that develops, owns, renovates or operates buildings.

During the past five years, many leading firms such as CB Richard Ellis, Jones Lang LaSalle, Lend Lease, Cushman & Wakefield, Hines and Transwestern and USAA Realty, to name a few leaders, have gone in this direction. But many smaller and more localized firms still lag behind. Many developers focused on local markets and on many subsectors of commercial building, such as retail, food service and hospitality, have yet to make green building and green operations core to their business processes and to their strategic thinking. Now is the time, as we gradually come out of the severe economic recession in the property sector, to create a secure and lasting strategy for the next five years.

So, if you think that your firm needs a new sustainability mindset, to go with its current building development and operations skill set, I’d welcome the chance to meet with you to discuss how Yudelson Associates can help you to fully realize the potential of sustainability as a game changer for your business. Feel free to email or call me: jerry@greenbuildconsult.com; +1-520-243-0996. I look forward to your comments and feedback.

Jerry Yudelson, PE, MBA, LEED Fellow

Before he moved south in 2006, Yudelson, a professional engineer, was a fixture in Portland’s green building movement. He held positions at Interface Engineering Inc. and Green Building Services, and chaired the steering committee for the U.S. Green Building Council’s GreenBuild conference.

Last week, Yudelson gave the keynote speech at the 2012 Passive House Northwest spring conference. He also spoke with the DJC about trends and tensions in the green building movement.

DJC: The third comment period for the proposed Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design 2012 update opened recently. What are a couple of the major issues being parsed out in this draft, and how does it differ from LEED 2009?

Jerry Yudelson: I just read the third draft, and it’s pretty similar to second draft, which came out at the end of last summer. They’re in the end game now, so they’re moving credits around into different categories, but it’s basically the same stuff.

The really big change in LEED 2012 is not what you do, but about how you do projects - it’s about integrative design. The biggest emphasis is that you have to commit to provide performance data.

Somebody once said, “Only your parents love you unconditionally; for everybody else you have to perform.” It’s not a green building unless it performs. That’s where everything is moving, from promises to performance.

DJC: Is the industry ready to see its performance data, or do you think there will be some surprises about how buildings actually perform?

Jerry Yudelson: We have a lot of green projects that we don’t know anything about except what they were when they started. It’s like the “Wizard of Oz” movie, where there’s just the little guy with a megaphone behind the curtain.

You already have to report performance data under LEED 2009; it’s just anonymous and for research purposes. But it’s now a formal requirement so that you can’t do a LEED project unless you commit to continually monitoring performance, so that’s a change - it’s going to affect the way projects are handled from the beginning.

DJC: Do you think the building community will resist the move toward additional sensors and monitoring of buildings?

Jerry Yudelson: The general contractors and the key subs - mechanical, electrical, controls and plumbing - they’ve all adopted and made peace with commissioning. They understand that it’s better for everyone if they get a reputation for doing good buildings.

But hey, it’s a rough and ready process. If times are good and everyone’s busy, then if you can fog a mirror or pass a Breathalyzer test, you can get onto a jobsite. When times are tough and the workforce narrows down, you weed out poor performers. But people take shortcuts; they don’t follow the plans - it’s just the nature of the beast.

The contractors around here - like Hoffman and Howard S. Wright - they’re really good companies, but they’re the generals and then you’ve got all the subs. Everyone is trying to do a good job, but stuff happens and you’ve just got to go find it and make sure. To me, it’s in the nature of the process that you need to check, check and double-check. That’s eventually going to yield better results.

If we’re really after this green building thing because of the planetary impacts, we’ve got to get serious about it. Nature doesn’t care how we say we’re doing - only how much CO2 is in the atmosphere. And as I like to say, nature bats last.

We’ve done good job in the last 10 years of bringing LEED into the mainstream, but now we have to get serious about how this is really working and make sure it’s working for the long term. The next big step is to take these obligations seriously, to measure what we’re doing, and to change what needs to be changed.

DJC: What is the most contentious issue in the green building community right now?

Jerry Yudelson: I certainly think getting it right on performance is a big issue, but getting it right on cost is a big issue too - we don’t really know how to do high-performance buildings continuously, and do it at the regular cost. That’s a big challenge.

The bigger issue is why projects say they’re going to do LEED and then don’t finish. I liken it to getting engaged and never getting married. Everyone says, “Oh yeah. We’re going to do a green building.” But then some of them don’t follow through.

DJC: Because of the cost of the certification?

Jerry Yudelson: No, because the building process is pretty messy. I always ask people, “Would you want to fly in an airplane that was built the way a $50 million building was built? Where it’s done on-site, a bunch of guys show up, the project goes to the lowest bidder. Do you want to get in this?”

There are a whole bunch of handoffs in this industry and they don’t always go smoothly. Engineers like to design really complex systems (and) contractors do their best to install them, but not every part that you install actually works.

We have to design buildings that aren’t as sensitive to all that complexity, or if you do design a complex building, you really have to educate the users on what you’ve given them. And so the biggest issue is buildings that become too complex for the operators.

DJC: You’ve talked in the past about the need for construction and design professionals to identify “frugal green” practices. One of the main critiques against the Oregon Sustainability Center seems to be the more than $60 million price tag, much of which would be state-funded. Is there a way to balance the high costs of innovation and the public demand for frugality here?

Jerry Yudelson: I think there’s a role for public money in experimentation, but do you have to build a whole building? Can’t you do parts and pieces in different places and get the same information?

The problem with projects like that is that budgets tend never to stay fixed because if you’re really innovating and really experimenting, you don’t know what it’s going to cost. My view is that good design is doing things for $1 that a bad design can do for $2; good design is about economy of resources, and we have to hold all projects to that test.

DJC: Do you think it will be built?

Jerry Yudelson: It’s a very tough economic climate for new buildings. And what could we learn if we took $60 million and used it to subsidize 50 projects in existing buildings? That’s the most sustainable thing - to keep the buildings in place.

If you’re going to spend money, can you spread it around enough to buy a lot more information? Most of the future work in Portland is going to be in existing buildings because there are so many of them and it’s cheaper to refit based on new principles than to tear it down and build a whole new building.

DJC: We seem to be hearing about more projects in Oregon that are aiming to meet Passive House standards. Do you think that standard is gaining momentum in the U.S.?

Jerry Yudelson: Passive House was originally designed for continental European climates - cold winters, mild summers. It doesn’t fit the whole U.S. It may fit here because our temperatures our pretty similar, even though we have more rainfall.

I feel like it’s a valid standard, but in the U.S. to call anything “passive” sounds kind of wimpy - we’re a high-performance, four-on-the-floor, NASCAR, “go” kind of culture. I think there’s a nomenclature issue. The original distinction was passive versus active - so “active” means you have all the air conditioning and heating systems active; “passive” means the building does most of the heating and cooling by the way it’s designed.

It’ll have to get Americanized to be more widely adopted, but hopefully not watered down because it’s a good, clean standard. LEED works because it’s become a brand, but how do you brand “passive?” You could do it, but no one’s really gone that far. Right now, you have a great bunch of really smart builders, advocates and enthusiasts, but that doesn’t translate into a market.

View the original article at DJC Oregon

My hosts, Marija Golubovic of Energo Energy Efficiency Engineering and Mladen Vukanac of Sauter Building Controls, chair and vice chair of the council, respectively, both work in the design and construction industry, so they bring a practical perspective to what I often find is a government, NGO and academic-dominated approach to green building in many countries. I was particularly impressed by a turnout of more than 100 people from Serbia, Croatia, Poland, Russia, Bulgaria, Greece, Montenegro, UK, France, Germany, Switzerland and other countries in Europe. The exhibit hall at the fairly new Belexpo Center in New Belgrade (Novi Beograd) was full, with more than 40 booths, most of them occupied by large international companies.

I have to say that, especially for a first event, the organization by the Serbia GBC was fantastic and certainly should serve as a model for other green building councils just getting started. Serbia is a small country, only eight million people, so organizing a successful first event of this magnitude was a great achievement! I also met with two leaders of the Croatia Green Building Council, Hrvoje Kvasnicka, Snjezana Turalija.

There are now about 10 LEED registered projects in Serbia and, by the middle of 2013, I’m sure a few of them will be certified. I was able to meet with architects and engineers doing one of these projects, including leaders of Arhi.Pro, the leading architectural and engineering firm in Serbia. There’s plenty of opportunity for green building consultants, as the country is just waking up to the promise of green building.

I also met with a wonderful team at Confluence Property Management, operators of the largest shopping center in Belgrade, at the confluence of the Sava River with the Danube. Confluence Property Management is working with Energo Energy Efficiency Engineering, the leading green building consultancy in the country, to secure a LEED for Existing Building O+M certification for the center, which would be a tremendous achievement.

The economic situation in Serbia is difficult, more than one might imagine, but green building is making headway in the Balkans, in Poland and other countries of Eastern Europe! It was also great to meet up with other green building practitioners, including Warsaw-based Devin Saylor of Colliers International and Dominika Czerwinska of the World Green Building Council, a Canadian also based in Poland.

I was also able to visit with relatives of Dick Glumac, chairman of the board of the Glumac engineering firm, originally from Serbia. They gave me a walking tour of the city, including the prominent medieval fortress of Kalemegdan, a remnant of the Turkish invasion and long-term occupation, and treated me to a genuine home-cooked meal!

Walking along the Knez Mihailova, the main pedestrian shopping street in the old city, I noticed more bookstores than bakeries, indicating perhaps that Belgrade residents would rather read than eat!

The record cold had frozen the Danube just prior to my arrival, and the ice breakup was causing a lot of damage to boats moored along the banks of the river. Luckily, the temperatures ranged from about 30 to 45 the whole time I was there, with no snow and only a little rain.

Read the full article at builderonline.com