Building Industry Reporting and Design for Sustainability (BIRDS) commercial database technical manual:

Abstract

Building stakeholders need practical metrics, data, and tools to support decisions related to sustainable building designs, technologies, standards, and codes. The Engineering Laboratory of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has addressed this high priority national need by extending its metrics and tools for sustainable building products, known as Building for Environmental and Economic Sustainability (BEES), to whole-buildings. Wholebuilding sustainability metrics have been developed based on innovative extensions to life-cycle assessment (LCA) and life-cycle costing (LCC) approaches involving whole-building energy simulations. The measurement system evaluates the sustainability of both the materials and the energy used by a building over time. It assesses the "carbon footprint" of buildings as well as 11 other environmental performance metrics and integrates economic performance metrics to yield science-based measures of the business case for investment choices in high-performance, green buildings.Building Industry Reporting and Design for Sustainability (BIRDS) applies the sustainability measurement system to an extensive whole-building performance database NIST has compiled for this purpose. In addition to the database developed for previous versions of BIRDS, the updated BIRDS Commercial database now includes energy, environmental, and cost measurements for 17 100 new commercial and non-low rise residential buildings. These buildings cover the 15 building prototypes based on the PNNL Commercial Prototype Building Models in 228 cities across all U.S. states for study period lengths ranging from 1 year to 40 years. The sustainability performance of buildings designed to meet current state energy codes can be compared to their performance when meeting four alternative building energy standard editions to determine the impact of energy efficiency on sustainability performance. The impact of the building location and the investor's time horizon on sustainability performance can also be measured.