What parameters are considered for Green Rating a building?
Green buildings have been in the limelight for a long time. Have you ever wondered what is a green building? How it differs from other buildings? How can a building be rated green? Who gives this rating?
What is Green Building?
A structure that makes efficient use of natural resources like water, energy, building materials and other resources for sustainable development of environment is called a green building. Using energy efficient lighting system like CLFs and LEDs, technologies like sensor system for air conditioning and lighting to save energy and reduce emission of carbon dioxide, appliances that consumes less energy and reduce the usage of water and other water saving technologies makes a building green and make it different from other conventional buildings.
What is Green Building Rating?
Green building rating is certification of a building as green on the basis of sustainable performance in several areas like site development, resource utilization, selection of material, maintenance and environment quality of predefined rating systems.
Rating System In India:
In India, there are three primary rating systems, namely:
GRIHA (Green Rating for Integrated Habitat Assessment): GRIHA is jointly developed by TERI and the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy, Govt. of India. It is India’s own rating system. It consists of 34 criteria divided in four sections namely site selection and site planning, Conservation and efficient utilization of resources, Building operation and maintenance, and Innovation. GRIHA has a three tier process for rating any building.
IGBC (Indian Green Building Council): IGBC is a non-profit research institution formed by Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) in 2001. IGBC has licensed the LEED green building rating standard from USGBC. LEED-INDIA approach for green building is divided into five key areas namely, 1) Sustainable site development, 2) Water saving, 3) Energy efficiency, 4) Material selection and 5) Indoor environment quality.
BEE (Bureau of Energy Efficiency): BEE has developed a rating system of its own. It gives rating on a scale of 1 to 5 stars on the basis of energy efficiency of a building. The unit of Kilo watt hours per square meter per year is the Energy Performance Index(EPI) for rating any building.
Rating Parameters For Green Building
There are several parameters on which a building is evaluated before being given a green rating:
- Efficiency of site planning and building design.
- Conservation of soil and protection of top soil during construction.
- Reducing demand of conventional energy by optimization of building design and structure.
- Incorporating renewable sources of energy and renewable energy based systems such as solar water heater to reduce the use of conventional energy.
- Efficient water and waste management for reducing water usage and waste.
- Enhancement of indoor environment quality like indoor air and thermal quality.
- Efficiency in selection of sustainable materials for construction.
- Optimization of operation and maintenance.
