Keller district campus is plenty green, but what about that wind turbine?

The story behind a story is often more interesting, but too often, we forget to ask questions needed to learn it.An example: The Keller school district is rightfully proud of its energy-efficient Timberview Middle School off Old Denton Road in Fort Worth. With its fruit and vegetable garden, geothermal heating and air conditioning, rooftop solar panels, white roof to absorb less heat, and waterless urinals, the year-old structure is billed as a school of the future ....

Another component of the campus is its lone wind turbine, next to the athletic field by the concession building. Paid for with voter-approved bond money, the Skystream turbine is billed by its maker as a product that can "produce electricity in your own backyard.""It's the first compact, user-friendly, all-inclusive wind generator (with controls and inverter built in) designed to provide quiet, clean electricity in very low winds," a brochure says.

The turbine cost $16,000 to install, the district answered. The payback in electricity savings would come in "roughly 26 years."

West acknowledges that the money involved is minute in a multimillion-dollar budget but points to a bigger principle."When you're asking your population for a tax rollback election, it's a bad idea to spend something that sticks above a school and won't make money for 26 years," he said."It's going to need maintenance. I bet it needs thousands of dollars in maintenance, which push off the profit."The turbine could be looked at as a symbol of government public relations puffery versus reality.

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Wow, a guy that gets it. This school is really well designed, but architects will puff up the price of the design fighting to get LEED credits - basically a pat on the back from the enviro crowd.

Confession time - I am a LEED Accredited Professional (AP).

The LEED trickles down from the top. Just about any building project these days has to meet some LEED rating...some cities even require it. Ergo, architects won't hire me unless I'm LEED.

You get LEED AP by paying them alot of money and taking a test. The test is actually very difficult - because it does not test conceptual knowledge or problem solving. Rather, you turn your brain into a mimeograph machine and memorize hundreds of point tables. It makes little sense, since this information is already in tabular form, and easy to look up....but these LEED people are not really ‘higher level’ thinkers.

I'm known for being the company grouch, when it comes to environmental BS....but I didn't want to blow the company's money by failing the test. So, I studied, and got the highest score anyone in the company ever had. (BTW, many of the landscape architects and environmental champions at my company had to retest several times - in addition to not being higher level thinkers, memorization skills also seem to be lacking).

The cost to the company to maintain my LEED credential is approximately 12 times that to keep my engineering license...and it is a very incestuous system where I have to purchase classes from them (and them only) to ‘continue’ my education. Its kinda sorta a racket.

What do I think about LEED? Some of it is pure garbage. Some of it actually improves the environment of cubicle dwellers in the building - points are given for having more natural light, exchanging conditioned air on a more regular basis, having individual control over HVAC in your area, etc.

Some of the LEED requirements will ultimately cause a cost savings. There is always a decision to be made about initial cost vs operating cost, when you are looking at mechanical equipment for a building. Usually it is more cost effective to spend more on initial cost, to reduce long term utility costs. However this is rarely done, because of the way buildings are leased to tenants - the owner really doesn't care about reduced utility costs. LEED reverses this notion, and tenants in a LEED building should have lower utility costs.

What do I think about the long term future of LEED? It is a racket. The requirements to maintain accreditation are constantly changing, and non-sensical. The process for getting LEED approval on a building is very centralized - all reviews and approvals go through one place. All other aspects of construction and professional licensing is done at the state or even more local level. I can already see that most architects resent this set up. There are also competitors to LEED....other similar groups who want to set up their own protection racket style approval process. Ultimately, I think infighting will be the death of LEED.

Thirty years from now, only the ‘old timers’ will even know what that LEED plaque in the lobby is supposed to mean. The system will not stand the test of time.

I have been watching LEED for years, and have decided that it has a few noble goals, starting up front with building design.

The LEED points seen ... arbitrary. I am working on a project that has 29 LEED points in the building design, but the cost to go to 30 LEED points and a Gold Medal is ridiculous.

I have actually quoted several pieces of AV equipment that lower energy use and extend lamp life, but it doesn't count since we haven't paid the fees to allow LEED to certify them.

LEED points for natural lighting? Great, until there is no way to darken rooms enough to allow front projection systems so everyone can see the image, and AC costs (this is Texas after all) explode since someone decided to eliminate expensive window treatments to stay under budget.

I get the stated goals behind LEED, and am all for making our building designs work to keep the ROI of building systems high.

But it started as a racket, and only continues to grow worse. It is the difference between “stated goals” and the underlying true goals that destroys the program.

In Europe, the Communists became Green Party members very quickly, and that trend exists over here, especially in universities.

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