Green Building : Research

Investments in green building strategies consistently result in significant benefits for organizations today.

The REGREEN Program and the REGREEN Guidelines are about products and process, about synergies and unintended consequences.

In this report, the Secretariat of the Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC) recommends that North American leaders make green building a foundational driver for environmental, social, and economic improvement in Canada, Mexico, and the United States.

This paper defines four factors for determining relative data center greenness. These metrics enable energy and power consumption benchmarking and continuous improvement processes.

The pattern of energy use in buildings is strongly related to the building type and the climate zone where it is located. The level of development also has an effect. Today, most of the energy consumption occurs during the building’s operational phase, for heating, cooling and lighting purposes, which urges building professionals to produce more energy-efficient buildings and renovate existing stocks according to modern sustainability criteria.

The 2006 study shows essentially the same results as 2004: there is no significant difference in average costs for green buildings as compared to non-green buildings. Many project teams are building green buildings with little or no added cost, and with budgets well within the cost range of non-green buildings with similar programs.