Building Industry Reporting and Design for Sustainability (BIRDS) tutorial for new Low-Energy Residential database

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. Whole building 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 buildings 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.