On a recent trip to New Mexico, I visited several off-the-grid and water-conserving green buildings. This experience highlighted a serious issue that may cause a setback in the movement to green buildings if not addressed. It is an issue that the Government, Business, and Neighborhood Segments might want to address collectively.

The expansion of green building will bring neophyte owner-operators into the market. The expanding market will attract designers, builders and installers who are inexperienced in the complex technologies involved. This opens the opportunity for serious mistakes to be made that could give the green building industry a bad reputation. In particular...

A reference base of comprehensive and reliable information on how to design, build, install, operate, and maintain green systems does not appear to be readily available.

Building codes, which traditionally involve a checklist of acceptable features, are not well suited to ensuring the performance, ease of operation, and durability of green systems. Such traditional codes will tend to inhibit design creativity and innovation, yet offer no guarantee that systems which pass the code will actually deliver as expected. The remedy maybe to shift to performance verification as the measure of compliance. However, this is much harder for building inspectors to hadle since it would require verification by either detailed analysis and/or demonstration, which places a great burden on the inspector.