LEEDing the Way

By Shannon Cavanaugh

This week the Energy team (a.k.a. LEED team a.k.a. Sustainable Buildings team) combed through a lot of data and asked a lot of questions (along with an existential crisis surrounding our team name), but by breaking big questions into smaller, more manageable ones we were able accomplish a lot and discuss our goals for the rest of the quarter.

At the beginning of the week we conducted background research about LEED v4 certification requirements, which allowed us to compare Pauley Pavilion’s 2014 LEED Scorecard to current standards.  This required a lot of reading, cross-referencing, re-reading, and deciphering of painfully technical language. However, by splitting up the work and facing each credit one at a time we were able to get good base knowledge of LEED standards and Pauley’s performance on its initial certification.

With a 9×66 spreadsheet of Pauley LEED data under our belt, we met with our Primary Stakeholder Todd Lynch and our UCLA Rec contact Katie Zeller. They were able to answer the many questions we had come across in our research and provided us with valuable information and resources for our project moving forward. In addition to offering technical and logistical advice, we were able to make more long-term goals as a group and begin our next phase of data compilation and analysis.

In the coming weeks, we hope to construct a comprehensive list of documents required by LEED, organize and analyze utilities data, and investigate any gaps in the efficiency of Pauley. Though we’re still going by “Energy Team,” our findings may present sustainability issues other than energy for us to consider in the future.