Washington, D.C. — The Core Performance Guide, newly developed and released by New Buildings Institute (NBI), includes a set of strategies that, when taken together, provides a prescriptive path for designers, builders, building owners and others to design and construct buildings that operate as much as 30 percent better than national building standards.

The U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) has adopted the Advanced Buildings Core Performance program as a prescriptive option for up to five points under LEED-NC v2.2 Energy and Atmosphere Credit 1: Optimize Energy Performance. The prescriptive path is offered as an alternative to energy modeling requirements in LEED-NC.

“Core Performance is simply the best prescriptive option for designers and building owners who want to get significant energy savings in new commercial buildings,” said Dave Hewitt, executive director of NBI. “We [are] very excited about offering Core Performance as the cornerstone of our Advanced Building program and believe this tool will be critical to help increase the energy performance of new commercial buildings.”

New Buildings Institute is a nonprofit organization working to improve the energy efficiency of new commercial buildings. Advanced Buildings is a suite of technical information, training and other resources that utilities can offer to customers as part of their energy efficiency programs. The Core Performance program can be used on building projects by interested building owners and designers even if the local utility is not currently participating in Advanced Buildings.

The program presented in the guide is based on extensive analysis of multiple building prototypes and system configurations in climate zones across the country. More than 50,000 energy modeling runs were developed and analyzed to define the program and identify anticipated energy savings.

While the Core Performance design process can be applied to any building, it is ideal for the vast majority of commercial projects that are 70,000 square feet or smaller. Small to mid-sized buildings tend to incorporate less complicated heating and cooling systems and other features that lend themselves easily to a prescriptive path without the need for energy modeling. LEED will accept Core Performance as a prescriptive option for most building types up to 100,000 square feet.

The Core Performance Guide was developed based on Benchmark, NBI’s previous design guide. The new Core Performance Guide has been reorganized to facilitate its use and updated with advances in new technologies and practices. For more information about Core Performance and its relationship to LEED, visit the Advanced Buildings website at www.AdvancedBuildings.net.