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The retail building market is BIG! The retail building community commands more than 67% of the existing buildings market, according to USGBC.

When USGBC's  Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) for Retail is released in mid-2010--one of the available resources will be Green Retail Guide: Integrating LEED into Your Leasing Process, which is being produced by Portland-based Green Building Services.

Leases for retail spaces with sustainability measures, such as sub-metering, written in make the green building sector field more level with greening leases. It's one of the last bastions of commercial building's "business as usual" mentality that separates the responsibility for energy and water from the people who actually use -- or conserve -- these pricey resources.

The new retail leasing guide by Green Building Services is intended to fill a niche that the wide variety of "green" lease guides and templates on the market don't cover.

In the commercial office and residential sectors, leases tend to be pretty standard and renters operate in just one market. HOWEVER... Retail leases vary greatly from site to site and renters often operate across retail sites. As a result, leasors and leasees need to know about the process of greening their facilities and operations.

Green Leasing Guide for Tenants

Large retailers are leading the way toward "green" leases, so the guide is focused on the tenant perspective. Green Retail Guide: Integrating LEED into Your Leasing Process is written for the tenant...but landlords can certainly read it to know how their tenants want to save energy, use natural light, conserve water...and make their employees and customers happier and healthier with a greener building.

We can design our hearts out, but the final results of a building's functionality is up to the people who use the building for their purposes.  And they never ever match the architect or designer's expectations!  The public is "fickle" -- meaning, of course, complex and unpredictable. But in a recent research project to identify the value and impact of a specific green building and people's experience of it, researchers delved in-depth into the likes and dislikes about the Philip Merrill Environmental Center in Annapolis, MD. 

The most liked features of the building included:

• Connection to nature and the bay
• The lunch room
• Views to the outdoors
• Openness of the space
• Daylight
• Sustainable resoruce use
• Overall aesthetics
• Parking
• Location

And the least liked features of the building included:

• Temperature conditions
• Things not working right
• Moving from downtown
• Insufficient storage
• Insufficient meeting rooms
• Glare from windows
• Central vs. local copiers

Intriguing.   People WANT nature, but then don't like natural conditions.  They like overall space and aesthetics, but dislike taking time to walk a bit to use the space.  We like space but want lots of stuff around us.  Yes, Virginia, we are complex beings! 

Maybe the challenge is one of attitude.  Even an attitude of gratitude! How do we design gratitude into building functionality? 

SOURCE:
The Human Factors of Sustainable Building Design: Post Occupancy Evaluation of the Philip Merrill Environmental Center, Annapolis, MD. by Judith Heerwagen, Ph.D.; Leah Zagreus; and prepared for Drury Crawley, US Department of Energy Building Technology Program

Energy efficiency upfits and commissioning such as certification with LEED-EB is very economical in grocery stores for a number of reasons.

• Food stores use a lot of energy
• They use 24/7 refrigeration
• They use extensive energy for cooking and washing in the prepared foods department.
• Grocery stores  use a lot of water
• They occupy a considerable site area.
• Grocery stores have large waste disposal costs
• Many are chains with centralized purchasing, so that many of the LEED-EB programs can be easily leveraged.

One example of a food store chain that has taken advantage of green building strategies to save money and improve their sustainability is Ahold, which has a strong corporate responsibility commitment based on a partnership with customers to build a more sustainable future. Ahold operates 1300 stores along the East Coast, including the Stop & Shop chain.

In 1998, Stop & Shop developed what they called the Low Energy SuperStore (LESS) prototype. Stop & Shop/Ahold set a goal of building a superstore that uses about one-third less electricity than conventional supermarkets.

They focused on strategic savings in
lighting and heating
ventilating, and air-conditioning (HVAC)
super-efficient refrigeration
systems integration
building envelope improvements

Volume LEED Certification

In 2007, Stop & Shop began the USGBC's Volume LEED Certification program, using the LEED-EB program as the base certification program. The 51 Stop & Shop grocery stores in the certified portfolio are part of a larger group of company stores that share many similar characteristics, making them excellent candidates for the volume LEED-EB certification process.

All of the Stop & Shop stores are built with common specificatiosn; and have further selection criteria included in the LEED-EB checklist, they have active ENERGY STAR ratings, share store management/ ownership policies, and have similar age and location in or near New England, giving them similar ecosystem and weather characteristics.

Stop & Shop is the first company and first supermarket chain in the United States to be awarded LEED-EB certification in this manner.

Leverage Matters!

The most beneficial factors in the business case for green building were the ability to use the system as a framework for creating new design metrics and the benefit of reduced LEED certification costs per store.

The switch from single-building certifications to a volume perspective with attractive economies of scale is critical to giving larger retailers cost-effective incentives to comprehensively address their environmental impacts.

Strategic Green Building Tactics for Savings

Energy and water savings were critical elements in both the economics and environmental footprint of the Stop & Shop stores.

Cool Roofs and Insulation of the Building Shell
They used cool, white reflective roof membranes, reducing solar heat gain and therefore lowering the demand for air conditioning, and also added extra layers of insulation to hold heat in during the winter.

Stop & Shop focused particularly on product lighting for energy savings. More efficient lighting and mechanical systems produces less waste heat.

Appliances like ultra-efficient refrigeration and HVAC units. Advanced refrigeration designs more accurately match the specific refrigeration needs of products in different display cases while at the same time minimizing energy consumption.

Waste heat from refrigeration units is used to preheat water for in-store use and to provide space heating.

According to Yudelson, a noted green architect and researcher, "From a macroeconomic perspective, energy efficiency upgrades represent the most cost-effective way to meet growing energy demands. From a microeconomic perspective, recent studies have shown that energy-efficient and certified green buildings merit higher market values, greater rents, and higher occupancies. From a corporate sustainability viewpoint, greening existing buildings is a direct way to reduce a company's carbon footprint. As a result, corporate real estate managers in the United States have begun to decide in favor of greening both owned and leased buildings, seeing many economic benefits from this switch."

SOURCE: 
Yudelson, Markets for Greening Existing Buildings