Well, houses can indeed achieve LEED certification, just like commercial buildings; however, seeking residential LEED certification is the decidedly less-traveled road. At this point, only a handful of residential construction firms nationally have on-the-ground experience in the many options for building green homes. “There’s a lot of information available,” says Doug Selby, president and co-founder of Meadowlark Builders in Ann Arbor, one of the few construction companies that specialize in green building. “But it’s hard to put it all together and create an action plan.” Selby’s customers tend to be highly motivated, willing to experiment, and eager to get involved in their construction project.

In the end, economic stewardship is reason enough to build green, but as Herman Miller and other companies have discovered, there are some potent economic motivators as well. Meadowlark Builders recently renovated an 1837 historic home that achieved LEED Platinum certification The monthly bill for heating and cooling this 1,850-square-foot home? $42 per month on average, and it uses 70 percent less water than conventional homes.

Straw bale house, anyone?

Herman Miller will be heading to Phoenix, Arizona for the Greenbuild International Conference and Expo held on November 11-13, 2009. Hosted by the US Green Building Council, the annual conference—the world’s largest of its kind—offers attendees information on the latest advances in green building practices and design. As a sponsor of the event, Herman Miller is excited about the opportunity to share our progress towards achieving a zero operational footprint by 2020 as part of our environmental advocacy. Join us on Twitter for real-time updates on what’s new in “green” and what’s happening on the show floor.

Horst is the senior VP for certification at the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC). It’s the nonprofit that administers the LEED program. Measuring a building’s performance once it’s built is an “absolute priority” for Horst and the USGBC. Speaking to The New York Times, he said, “Ultimately, where we want to be is, once you’re performing at a certain level, you continue to be recertified.”

The emphasis on measuring a building’s energy performance follows the release of the LEED v3 standard earlier this year. It requires that all new projects report actual performance data. Until v3, LEED certification was based solely on models that predicted the building’s energy performance. How to bring those existing certified buildings into the measurement fold is a thornier question that will take time for the USGBC and its members to sort out.

Meantime, the USGBC is walking its talk. Its recently completed headquarters building in Washington, DC, uses Herman Miller’s Convia products. They measure, monitor, and track the building’s energy consumption in real-time. Another way others are measuring is with Energy Manager. It controls two of the four circuits of power in a cluster of Herman Miller workstations, turning anything plugged into them off when people leave.

Tools like these are essential if LEED is to address a problem its own study uncovered last year. Of 121 new buildings certified through 2006, 53 percent didn’t qualify for the Environmental Protection Agency’s Energy Star label.

By Randall Braaksma