GE: Smart grid yields net-zero energy home. http://tinyurl.com/ljr8r3

It either has to make sense financially for people to be adopted widely, or our glorious government in all their wisdom will force it upon us via higher energy taxes, anti energy growth policy(no drilling, no nukes etc..) or just plain mandatory energy efficiency laws. I'll choose the former.

With the housing boom slowed to a crawl, people may actually stay in their homes longer here in the US, which would help make energy efficient investment more feasible by being in the home long enough to realize a payback. As stated earlier, why put money into energy efficiency if you a) aren't in the home long enough for payback or b) don't get paid for the upgrade at time of sale by increased equity?

There are the early adopters who will implement this stuff at high prices, God bless em for having the free choice to do so! But they aren't nearly enough to make any dent in usage. The challenge is to deliver more efficient products/systems at affordable prices for the masses. The slowdown has caused the industry to focus much more on innovation, to stand out from the crowd and be more competitive. During the boom, contractors were too damn busy to worry about innovation!

I hope LEED will lead us to more innovation, more efficiency instead of being more of a costly burden with little actual value other than doing paperwork, paying a fee, and getting a fancy certification. I used to be the food business and know that well, it's called Kosher! LOL.

I see the most focus should be on energy efficiency moreso than sustainability. In these times people need to save money and their own a$$es before worrying about saving the planet.

I won't be holding my breath about the market alone being able to solve this without  evil gum'mint intervention on some level.  Even with subsidies it's hard to motivate homeowners to invest in stuff that's NPV+ in six months, let alone six years.  As long as the utility bills are affordable, it pretty much stays off the home-finances radar screen.  All sorts of things that make financial sense still don't get done.

It's demonstrably ineffective when it's all carrot- there has to be some stick.  There's a long history of increasing mandated line-items for all sorts of things in building codes, I don't see how mandating energy efficiency minimums at point of sale is any more abominable than requiring septic systems to meet upgraded standards rather than being grandfathered in forever.

Higher Learning By: Don Procter When the Dr. David Suzuki Public School opens in Windsor in 2010 it will set new standards for schools in Canada. The design team, which is pursuing a LEED Platinum certification, is incorporating a host of green features not normally associated with schools. For starters, the school will be heated by a geothermal system and powered in part by solar panels. It will have a green roof, a living wall, and specialized lighting and ventilation. So what about the building envelope? Studies have shown that some LEED certified buildings don’t place extra emphasis on the building envelope and in instances are less energy efficient than the equivalent non-LEED buildings constructed today. That’s not the case at the Suzuki school, however, says Greg McLean of McLean + Associates Architects, architect of record for the project. The whole Story here: http://tinyurl.com/n77hkv

Bernie Madoff serves sentence in green, LEED-certified federal prison, this is the best use of LEED I have seen so far. Butner is the nation’s first and only LEED-certified prison, meaning it met the U.S. Green Building Council’s standards for sustainable design. The medium-security federal corrections institute took steps early in the building process to be ultra efficient and found that such measures save money and don’t have a major effect on operations.

this seems to be a step in the right direction

<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/business/energy-environment/18codes.html?_r=2&ref=global-home>

Bruce

LEED here in my area is a joke, hardly anyone is aware of the benefits. BUT, having said that, it is the application of good ideas that is lacking. A better standard is Edward Mazria'a Architecture 2030, a set of building codes that will make all new homes much better users of energy than LEED does.
Architecture 2030 is part of the Waxman-Markey bill, probably the only good part...

Leed is fine of thats wat you want. I do think that public buildings that taxpayers pay for should be shooting for something like this, but overall leed isn't for me. I'd rather see a reduced energy bill that pay for a plaque on my house. Leed is ok but has a lot of hype attached to it.