Governments not in the LEED, say experts

Local, regional and federal governments didn't get a lot of love today from a group of green building experts in San Francisco.

'Help us, or get out of the way,' was a recurring theme on a panel organized by Astia, formerly the Women's Technology Cluster.

Panelists welcomed government incentive tax credits in solar, and production tax credits for wind, biofuels and waste-to-energy, but said when it came to leadership in green building design, governments have been lagging.

Indeed, the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) scorecard program, formally instituted by the U.S. Green Building Council in 1999, was held up as a shining example of private sector leadership.

"What is LEED? It was just a bunch of trade manufacturers that came together and created a standard," noted Jeffrey S. Lesk of law firm Nixon Peabody.

Robyn Beavers, coordinator for corporate environmental strategy at Google, lamented that outdated building codes and other local regulations unnecessarily inhibit green builders.

"They're basically like a gate. The gate's either open or it's closed," she said.

Beavers recounted her team's problems with local planning officials earlier this year when designing and installing the massive solar array at Google's headquarters in Mountain View, California (see Google to install biggest corporate solar power system in the world.) The issues were ultimately resolved.

"I didn't expect this in California, to be honest. But now that the project is done, they send out flyers bragging about how Mountain View is solar."

Nor did others expect government leadership.

"From the investor perspective, we're not banking on the government to solve our problems. We're really looking to technology and private sector solutions," said Rob Koch of NGEN Partners.

"At the end of the day, it's a worldwide problem. I don't think the emerging technologies of China and India are going to adopt solutions that are more expensive just because they produce more CO2, so we have to work on the economics."

While building green might sound expensive, it only adds 1 percent to 4 percent to the cost of a project on average, Nixon Peabody's Lesk told the group.

And that premium could very well go away with some sort of carbon cap and trade program, said Serious Materials CEO Kevin Surace.

Carbon capping and trading was a move that many on the panel characterized as the most significant initiative any country's government could make. Surace suggested a government-mandated carbon trading system would initially raise the price of raw building materials, but it could ultimately be good for prices.

"In a way, it's an incentive for entrepreneurs—government mandated, in a way—to come up with new, less expensive building materials and new processes to replace these old things."

As far as new opportunities for entrepreneurs in green building, panelists said they are seeing more people coming forward with energy efficiency company ideas, noteably in daylight harvesting (for instance, see Axis Technologies introduces new daylight harvesting ballast) and other new lighting technologies.

"The government is pushing all of us to compact fluorescents, but there are quite a number of interesting opportunities in the next generation beyond that in solid state LEDs," said NGEN's Koch.

Nixon Peabody's Lesk was very clear on what excited him most.

"If I was an entrepreneur in the audience listening for opportunities out of this discussion, I'd hear that there was clear demand for certain green building products, but that there was also demand for green metrics," he said, holding up performance monitoring startup Fat Spaniel as an example of a company that helped green builders quantify their returns on investment.

Event organizer Astia helps build women leaders and accelerates the funding and growth of women-led technology startups.

Cleantech developments making news in the past 24 hours

• New year money goes to biofuels
• VeruTEK completes new green chemistry remediation project

View the last week of cleantech developments here | Subscribe to full feed