Sustainability & Risk / Green Building

What-If Analysis and Certification Scoring

You may wish to establish rating projects for what-if analyses and enter scores and associated costs that reflect each scenario. You can then compare these rating projects against each other or against a rating project that stores your official scores or current self-scores.

Since costs, annual savings, and payback periods can be associated with each criteria (credit), be sure to enter meaningful cost and savings data. Researching your cost and savings data for each credit will take time and analysis. However, the more accurate your projected cost and savings data, the more complete and useful an analysis you can make.

Some typical what-if analysis scenarios are:

• Establish rating projects for meeting different certification levels, and enter scores and costs required for attaining these levels. Perhaps you will find that you can easily move to the next level with minimal changes to your building.
• Working within the goal of a particular certification level, experiment with different configurations of scores to determine how you can most easily achieve certification. For example, the LEED standard offers some credits for which you can earn a range of points. For these credits, enter different scores within the range. If you can inexpensively achieve 5 out of 5 points for one credit, perhaps you can still achieve certification by striving for only 1 point on a credit that is harder and more expensive to implement.
• Compare your current building under multiple certification standards. Perhaps you can more easily and readily achieve certification under one standard than another.
• Define rating projects for different portions of your building. For example, the BREEAM certification can cover just a portion of your building; what are the costs and probability of certification for just a portion of the building? You can start by certifying just this portion, and them move on to certifying an older portion of the building that requires more improvements.

The below is a typical procedure for what-if analysis:

Procedure

1. Define rating projects for storing your what-if data. For example, you could set up one rating project for which you will enter the scores required for a Good certification and another rating project with scores required for an Excellent certification.
2. For each what-if scenario, enter the scores required for reaching this certification level. Be sure to enter the capital cost for making changes to meet this criteria, and estimated savings that you will achieve by meeting this mandate. This financial data is vital for assessing your what-if scenario.
3. Additionally, you can optionally:

• upload documents to support your protected costs
• enter notes about your costs

4. For each what-if scenario, calculate your point total.
5. Analyze the results of your scores using the Building Score and Payback Period reports. What is the capital cost of improvements that will bring you to the next level? What is the payback period for making these improvements? Perhaps you can make some simple improvements that will raise your score and qualify you for a higher level of certification. See the rating project comparison reports in Analyzing your Certification Scoring Efforts.
6. Repeat steps 2 through 5 using different values for your scores. Continue experimenting with different configurations until you arrive at a scenario that you can afford to implement and that matches your desired certification and level within this certification.