January 19th, 2009 - Posted By: Brad Liljequist

zHome is being built in accordance with stringent environmental benchmarks.  These are actually contractually established between the City of Issaquah and Howland Homes.  You can  read the benchmarks here if you would like to delve into these further (all 14 pages of them!).  You can see for yourself exactly what design criteria have been established for the project.   

So why benchmarks?  To me it goes back to the graph shown on the Why Green Homes? portion of the site.  In big picture terms, zHome is about looking at the cold hard numbers of building’s hefty environmental impacts, and taking those numbers as close to zero as possible.  There is something pure about a numeric driven design process:  set your goal, and let the design process figure out the most efficient way to get there.  It’s not that dissimilar to a gas or carbon tax – get aggressive, and then get out of the way and let the people involved figure out how to respond.  I also think there is something powerful about giving a number to what you’ve achieved, as opposed to some more qualitative measure – I think your average person can get it better.

And then there’s accountability and integrity.  The zHome benchmarks are all subject to verification by the City.  In some cases our other partners are involved in this process as well.  For example, Howland Homes’ energy model (done by Stantec) has been vetted and reviewed both by the City and the WSU Energy Program.  We feel that if you’re going to make strong claims (such as the project is achieving zero net energy), there should be integrity and transparency behind those claims.  Very few of the projects that are claiming zero net energy have actually undergone energy modeling to verify the claim, and fewer still have been verified by outside parties.  And many projects and builders that use the term “zero energy” are actually talking about it conceptually, in terms of it simply being a goal or good idea, or being part of a long term program to achieve zero net energy sometime in the future.  I feel that that dilutes the power of the name because it implies this very difficult goal is being met regularly.  Certainly our goal should be zero energy, but when it comes to individual projects, zero energy terminology should be used carefully and transparently.

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