New Study Exposes Green Building Costs & Benefits

Recently a study was published by Good Energies, a global energy efficiency and renewable energy investment company, that analyzed nearly 150 green-built buildings in 10 different countries to try to get a handle on the truth about the additional costs and benefits of building green. There were some surprising conclusions. Among them:

• On average, the "public" perceives the additional costs to build green at about 17%.
• In reality, the median additional costs for building green proved to be less than 2%.
• Over half of the buildings studied had a green building payback period of less than five years from energy and water savings alone (let's put that another way: a five year payback is a 20% return on investment. Where else can you find an investment which will pay 20%, year after year, forever?)
  
• Up front infrastructure development costs in "conservation developments" can be reduced by 25%, or approximately $10,000 per home.

And there is much more... here is the link to the press release.

My own take on this is that there are two significant barriers to widespread green building adoption that we have to overcome.

The first barrier is perception: "Green building costs significantly more." While this study (and many others like it) should render that perception moot, the truth is that most builders and developers either won't believe it or won't ever see it.

The second barrier is training: Even if perceptions can be brought more in line with reality, the people designing, developing, paying for and - most importantly - building these buildings do not understand or know how to implement green building science and techniques. Certainly new tricks can be learned, but there are a lot of old dogs out there who are pretty set in their ways. As a result, I believe that it will take the better part of a generation until green building techniques become mainstream; that is, until these old dogs retire and are replaced by the new crowd of builders and developers who have grown up with green building.

So, for now, we in the green building community can only keep pushing forward, continuing to get out the message and spread the knowledge.