Scaling Up Engagement with Net-Zero-Energy Goals

Both the Living Building Challenge (LBC) and the 2030 Challenge have energized progressive designers and owners with aspirational goals that are famously hard to achieve. (See How to Succeed with the Living Building Challenge: 12 Teams Share Tips and Progress on 2030 Goals, Ten Years Later.) New policies announced on March 8, 2017 are intended to remove unnecessary barriers and scale up engagement with their reporting and certification programs.

Living Building Challenge meets the real energy world

LBC's Energy Petal requires that projects demonstrate net positive energy use through a year of actual performance data, using onsite renewables and without any onsite combustion. That's a stretch for small buildings with normal process energy loads and good solar exposure, but it’s simply not possible for certain project types.