LEED Certification for Existing Buildings- Metering requirements
Energy consumption is one of the most important factors that LEED uses in their certification process. And the owner’s capability to track usage and identify potential savings.
Generally most conventional buildings have simple meters provided by the utility company for billing purposes but the advanced standards for LEED certification require more vigorous and more precise monitoring ability.
The intent of this credit is to support energy management and identify opportunities for additional energy savings by tracking Building-level and system-level energy use.
Base Building Metering
Any commercial building that is newly constructed or being significantly refurbished wishing to certified with LEED BD+C v4 must install new or use existing base building-level energy meters, or sub-meters that can be aggregated to provide base building-level data representing total building energy consumption.
In addition, building developer must require to sharing their monthly usage data to the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC).
In order to meet the minimum certification credit points, the data should be gathered from the utility’s meter every month.
However, in order to meet the requirements of advanced certification and qualify for additional credit points, many more energy usage parameters are needed to be monitored.
Advanced Energy Metering
LEED’s advanced energy metering requires a lot more than manually observed data gathered from the utility’s billing meter alone. In addition, individual end uses must be submetered if they acquire 10% or more of the building’s total energy consumption for the year.
In order to meet the advanced energy metering requirements, power meters requires many features.
Meters must be permanently installed, and record data at intervals of one hour, and they could able to transmit data to a remote location. Electricity meters must record both consumption and demand factor also. The data collection system must use a local area network, building automation system, wireless network. The system must be capable of storing all meter data for at least 36 months. Also all meters in the system must be capable of reporting hourly, daily, monthly, and annual energy use.