Rating System

LEED O+M: Existing Buildings

Rating System Version

v3 - LEED 2008

Inquiry

The project building is a 3,281,721 SF shopping mall located in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. The facility includes retail tenants, sit-down restaurants and cafes, fast food services in a food court, a community center and art center, cinema, and children\'s play area. Due to its primary designation as a mall, this project is not eligible for Option A - Energy Star Rating. Under normal circumstances, facilities of this type would utilize Option B, which benchmarks facilities against U.S. national average source energy use intensity (EUI) data from building of similar operation types. However, the project team believes that the building\'s location prevents this approach from being accurate due to differences in operating parameters, climate, and building code requirements. As a result, the project team proposes to perform benchmarking via Option C based on the following procedure using the USGBC\'s EAc1_Option_BC_Calculator: 1. Calculate Benchmark Source EUI based on entering a detailed breakdown of spaces. Because the project building contains a greater proportion of floor area designated to restaurants than a typical US mall, itemizing space entries into the benchmarking tool is considered to be more accurately than classifying 100% of the floor area as "Retail-Mall". 2. Normalize the C1 Baseline produced by the calculator to account for the difference between operating hours of US malls and those of the project building. CBECs does not track operating hours for mall facilities, but a survey of 30 US malls shows that facilities are consistently open for business between 72-73 hours per week. By contrast, the project building is open for business 88 hours per week. The ratio of US mall typical operation hours : project building hours will be applied to the EUI baseline established in step 1. 3. Incorporate 3 years of historic energy consumption at the project building into the baseline via standard use of the EAc1_Option_BC_Calculator. This will help to account for the other differences between US-based malls and the project building by incorporating Dubai-specific energy consumption data into the baseline. Please confirm if this approach to demonstrating compliance with LEED-EB:O&M EA Prerequisite 2 and Credit 1 is acceptable to USGBC.