With commercial demand response credit, LEED meets smart grid

The incorporation of the smart grid with the the world's most prominent green building certification system is advancing another step.

Cleantech consulting firmSkipping Stone, efficiency firm Schneider Electric and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory announced on Monday that they would form a committee tasked with building out the current Demand Response LEED Pilot Credit to enable commercial building owners to earn credit for enrolling in utility or wholesale demand response programs.

The credit has historically been a bit more difficult than others, because the credit requires coordination with smart grid stakeholders, such as utility companies.

The committee will provide demand response definitions, participation options for buildings, and implementation and documentation requirement guidelines. It will also study participation across markets, adoption criteria, load reduction scenarios, utility service territory benchmarking and implementation technology drivers.

The importance here is that a "green" building is increasingly defined as such by how it is integrated with the rest of the community -- specifically the rapidly changing though nebulous "smart grid."

The revised Demand Response LEED Pilot Credit will be published later this spring and will be formally included in the next version of the LEED rating system in 2012.

For now, the U.S. Green Building Council -- the folks behind LEED -- will launch a series of utility service territory market pilots, with Skipping Stone as manager. Insight culled from the pilots will help shape the final credit.

This post was originally published on Smartplanet.com