Telus House (the 1st major office development south of Toronto’s railway tracks in more than a decade) was launched as a LEED Gold AAA standard Smart Building, 60% more efficient than comparable traditional buildings.

Now in 2015 the 30-storey smart building, owned by Menkes Developments Ltd., will become the first Canadian building to employ a LEED Dynamic plaque - the latest development by the United States Green Building Council (USGBC) on their Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification program.

According to USGBC, “The LEED Dynamic Plaque assesses facility performance in the categories of energy use, water consumption, waste output, occupant transportation and human experience, aggregating data to provide an overall performance score that reflects the LEED rating system — the world’s most widely utilised green building rating system and recognized standard for leadership in sustainability.”.

The LEED Dynamic Plaque is an add-on to existing LEED certifications. It introduces an ongoing performance element to the traditionally static system. It's a platform — both physical and virtual, publicly displayed on an existing LEED building's site — that's designed to help property owners monitor, benchmark and update their LEED scores in five key areas: energy, water, waste, transportation and occupant experience.

While a building's official score is recorded just once a year based on a recertification schedule, the Dynamic Plaque updates as frequently as it receives new information. For example, if your building has a LEED score of 72 but you think it could be higher, you might send out transportation and occupant experience surveys and or perform a waste audit to look for potential improvements. After improvements are made, you can provide the platform with new data and the LEED score will be recalculated instantly.

Already set up in 15 to 20 buildings in the US, LEED Dynamic Plaque will be installed in Toronto’s Telus Tower this summer by Honeywell Building Solutions with the support of the USGBC and Canada Green Building Council.

“We are committed to pushing the boundaries of smart buildings, identifying new methods to leverage connectivity and improve our facilities,” said Sonya Buikema, Menkes’s vice-president, commercial property management. “Honeywell’s technology and services complement our philosophy, and expand the ways in which we’re able to drive performance and better serve our customers”.

[contact-form-7 id="3204" title="memoori-newsletter"]

In addition to the LEED Dynamic plaque, the building will also use Honeywell’s Attune Services, a cloud-based building automation system (BAS), which employs software to connect buildings to advanced analytics, allowing building managers to develop action plans to improve energy and operational efficiency.

USGBC only recently announced its partnership with Honeywell who will integrate their BAS with the Dynamic Plaque. “Given our mutual focus on developing smart, intelligent buildings and improving the user experience through technology, working with USGBC is a natural pairing”, said John Rajchert, president, Honeywell Building Solutions. “Together we’re helping transform the possibilities and expectations of facility performance and sustainability”.

For a quarter of a century the BAS industry has been working hard at delivering full connectivity across all the different building services. They have been somewhat successful in achieving this goal but the solutions have been expensive, lacked flexibility and robustness and whilst they improved the optimization of the buildings performance they could not be fully automated - an excerpt from our recent report “The Transformation of BAS into the Building Internet of Things”. However, the addition of such a monitoring system can elevate BAS to another level.

The combination of LEED Dynamic plaque and Honeywell’s Attune has been compared to "human healthcare monitoring", but for buildings. Where Dynamic plaque will take the building’s pulse and temperature, for example, creating real time health reports, Attune will allow for immediate action, targeted treatments and general optimization.

“We can hook you up to the plaque and see how you’re doing and with Attune we can help drive some optimization strategies to improve your performance, ultimately improve your operating efficiency, lower your energy costs and create a better environment for your occupants”, said Debra Gondeck-Becker, Honeywell Americas construction industry leader.