Insights
Jun 27, 2023 _ insights
What’s Your Building’s MPG?
How many miles to the gallon (or, for you EV owners, watt-hours per mile) does your car get? Is it better or worse than the average vehicle? I bet you know. Now, how about your office building or home? How do we even calculate that? At GBBN, we believe good design is sustainable design, so we love sharing the strategies and tools we use to help our clients achieve buildings that offer a lifetime of excellent energy performance. It all starts with understanding Energy Use Intensity (EUI).
EUI is a gauge of the energy efficiency of a building’s design and operations. Often called “the miles per gallon rating of the building industry,” EUI is a building’s total annual energy use relative to its gross area. We use EUI to understand energy performance in our designs and completed buildings. By measuring an existing building’s actual, metered energy consumption, we can compare it to the average annual energy use of similar building types and in similar climates. Understanding a building’s EUI helps us work with our clients to set energy use goals for their projects, estimate how different design solutions will perform through energy modeling, and move forward with the best approach.
We created a brief primer with more detail on how we set targets, measure, and model the Energy Use Intensity of projects. As a signatory of the American Institute of Architects 2030 Commitment, we pledged to design all our buildings to be net zero energy by 2030. But we want to do more than make good on this pledge through our work; we want to grow a culture of energy advocates among our clients, partners, and in our communities.
Access our primer here.
Tiffany Broyles Yost AIA, LEED AP BD+C, Fitwel Amb., is an associate principal and director of sustainability & resilience at GBBN. Tiffany provides strategic leadership for sustainable design across the firm’s portfolio of projects, manages the research of the firm’s Sustainability Action Network, oversees our Sustainability Action Plan, and spearheads related educational initiatives. Her work includes sustainable design on projects at all scales from international tower mixed-use buildings to single story existing building renovations. Tiffany serves on several non-profit boards and committees including, the Greenbuild Summit Advisory Board, the Fitwel Advisory Council, the Louisville Sustainability Council, and the Green Umbrella/Cincinnati 2030 District Health Strategy Committee.
