Energy and Greenhouse Gas Savings for LEED-Certified U.S. Office Buildings Using Weighted Regression

In this study, we studied the energy consumption and greenhouse gas emission performance of LEED-certified office buildings. We obtained the 2016 energy consumption and greenhouse gas emission data for 4002 office buildings from nine major US cities, including 522 buildings that we identified as LEED-certified. We discovered that LEED buildings used significantly more electricity percentagewise as their energy source. We also discovered that the locations and ages of buildings have significant effect on their performance. We removed the effect of locations and building ages using weighted regression. Our result showed that LEED office buildings used 11% less site energy, 9% less source energy, and emitted 9% less greenhouse gases. Comparing to results from our previous study that didn’t account for building age, LEED-certified buildings’ source energy and greenhouse gas savings are significantly higher when accounting for building age, while site energy saving stays the same