Rating System

LEED BD+C: New Construction

Rating System Version

v2 - LEED 2.2

Inquiry

As a City-owned building in San Francisco, the California Academy of Sciences (CAS) used to enjoy heavily subsidized electricity rates offered through a Public Utility Commission. However, the current building is now being demolished. The new building will be built on the same site. We are not sure if the Academy will be offered subsidized rates in 2008, when the new building is scheduled to open. We do know that for gas, the Academy will be paying market rates for service from Pacific Gas and Electric (the local utility provider). When completing our energy modeling, the results are quite skewed when we apply the subsidized rates for electricity and the market rates for gas. Therefore, we are proposing using the market rates for both gas and electricity (published by the local utility company, PG&E) in order to complete the energy modeling and determine the appropriate strategies to employ in the design of the building to obtain the energy efficiency credits. We propose to use this same energy cost budget (using market rates or both gas and electric) to calculate the PV contribution for the renewable energy credit. Please indicate if it is appropriate for us to use market rates from the local utility company for both gas and electric to calculate the energy cost budget.