WASHINGTON STATE

Washington State House Democrats

HOUSE DEMOCRATS

Going green should be cheaper

The best way to save energy – and the environment – is to make green choices not only the right thing to do, but the smart thing to do.

That’s the message of this article in Slate by Bjørn Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist:

Green Energy Needs to be Cheaper

Instead of relying entirely on rules or laws, change can happen when you make going green not only good for the environment, but good for the bottom line.
PowerLines
This session, Rep. Hans Dunshee (D-Snohomish) pushed for an innovative reform in how the state handles constructing new buildings.

The old way of doing things is to figure out how much it costs to put the building up and sell bonds to finance it. The yearly costs of energy and maintenance don’t figure into the equation at all.

Much of a building’s cost isn’t in the bricks, steel and cement. Over 30 years, taxpayers are paying a surprising amount for electricity, heat, air conditioning and maintenance.

The thing nobody talks about is the price tag for construction is only 25 percent of the total cost of the building.

What’s the other 75 percent? Energy and maintenance. And most of that is energy to heat and cool a structure.

So why not look at total costs over the lifetime of a building?

That’s the idea behind Dunshee’s reform.

Every year, taxpayers spend billions of dollars to construct elementary schools, college lecture halls, prisons and other state buildings. Private businesses spend even more.

Now, we can’t do much about the size of the buildings, unless we have an experimental program to shrink people down to Hobbit size. We can’t pass any laws in Washington state to reduce the price of cement and steel and two-by-fours, because there’s a global market for building materials.

What we can do is this: adapt and innovate when it comes to buildings.

Looking at the total cost of a building is an even more radical change than what our state did earlier, when we passed the Green Building law. That was a pioneering reform.
Yet we can do better.

If you design and engineer a building to use less energy and require less maintenance, the savings add up, year after year. You save money and energy.

Starting with state buildings primes the pump by giving architects, engineers and contractors solid experience working together to construct such a building.
This approach is also smart because it can spread, not via laws and mandates, but because private businesses and other countries can see how it works and why it saves money.