Overview
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 by January 15, 2003. According to the legislation, the guidelines must:
- Exceed existing energy code 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 human, community, environmental, and life-cycle economic costs and benefits of sustainable building design.
The guidelines are organized into the following categories: Performance Management, Site and Water, Energy and Atmosphere, Indoor Environmental Quality, and Materials and Waste. Guidelines are required when they clearly contribute to the desired human, community, environmental, and life-cycle economic outcomes. Some guidelines are recommended rather than required until their direct financial benefits to the State can be clearly demonstrated. However, in some of these cases, the team is required to evaluate implementing the guideline.
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.
This version of The State of Minnesota Sustainable Building Guidelines is referred to as Version 2.0.