Overview: Background
The Minnesota Legislature required the Departments of Administration and Commerce, with the assistance of other agencies, to develop sustainable building design guidelines for all new state buildings funded by bond money after January 15, 2004. According to the legislation, the guidelines must:
- Exceed the energy code in effect in January 2004 by at least 30 percent
- Achieve lowest possible lifetime costs for new buildings
- Encourage continual energy conservation improvements in new buildings
- Ensure good indoor air quality
- Create and maintain a healthy environment
- Facilitate productivity improvements
- Specify ways to reduce material costs
- Consider the long-term operating costs of the building including the use of renewable energy sources and distributed electric energy generation that uses a renewable source of natural gas or a fuel that is as clean or cleaner than natural gas.
To achieve these goals, The State of Minnesota Sustainable Building Guidelines (MSBG) build on previous local and national efforts. The guidelines are designed to be clear, simple and easily monitored with explicit documentation that will record progress. They are designed to be compatible with national guidelines such as LEED™ while maintaining regional values, priorities and requirements. Most importantly, the guidelines set up a process that will eventually lead to a full accounting of the actual costs and benefits of sustainable building design. The State has further clarified the scope of the guidelines to focus on new office and higher education classroom facilities, although many of the guidelines are suitable for other building types and renovation projects. Version 1.1 of The State of Minnesota Sustainable Building Guidelines was released in July 2004 and tested on several pilot projects. Version 2.0 reflects improvements based on lessons learned from the pilot projects.
Sustainable design is a means to reduce energy expenditures, enhance the health, well-being and productivity of the building occupants, and improve the quality of the natural environment. All of these can contribute to high-performance State buildings with lower life cycle costs. To move toward ensuring these outcomes, the guidelines attempt to quantify the human, community, environmental, and life-cycle economic costs and benefits for each project.
The guidelines are a part of the Buildings, Benchmarks & Beyond (B3) Project. Project management and delivery is led by LHB, Inc.; the guideline development process is led by the Center for Sustainable Building Research (CSBR) at the University of Minnesota; and public building benchmarking is led by The Weidt Group. Benchmarking will identify the energy performance of existing public buildings in order to direct energy conservation improvements where they are most needed and most cost-beneficial. As new state-funded projects are constructed and operated in accordance with the new sustainable guidelines, more detailed information on energy and other sustainable performance factors will also be tracked.