Builders, Verifiers, and Green Building Champions Applauded for Helping Promote High-Performance Home Building.
Chapel Hill, NC – Last week, during a ceremony at the Briar Chapel Community Center, six Triangle-area companies were recognized for being 2011 NAHB Research Center Green Partners of the Year. The awards were presented for the companies’ outstanding contributions to advancing green building in the local community and commitment to voluntary, market-driven, third-party certification of high-performance homes.
The casual awards ceremony was a follow-up to the Research Center’s announcement earlier this year of its 40 Green Partner Award winners from across the country. About a third of the award recipients were from North Carolina — and almost half of those were from the Triangle area, underscoring the local concentration of dedicated green building advocates helping to transform the residential market.
The local award recipients include:
- Three Raleigh-based builders — Homes by Dickerson, M/I Homes of Raleigh, and Saussy-Burbank. Combined for 2011, these three builders completed 133 homes certified by the Research Center to the ICC-700 National Green Building Standard (NGBS).
- Two local builder associations — the Home Builders Association of Durham, Orange & Chatham Counties and the Home Builders Association of Raleigh-Wake County — that have a joint council known as the Green Home Builders of the Triangle. NGBS certified homes within the jurisdictions of these two associations account for nearly half of all the certifications the Research Center has done in North Carolina to date.
- Southern Energy Management (SEM), a sustainable energy company based in Morrisville that serves the Southeast and Mid-Atlantic regions. SEM has 19 individual employees who are NAHB Research Center-accredited green verifiers — they have combined to verify 462 NGBS certified projects to date, and have another 145 currently in progress.
“We’re proud of the way our members have explored and adopted green building,” said Britney Wallace, president of the HBA of Durham, Orange, and Chatham Counties. “We appreciate the support we’ve gotten from the NAHB Research Center as we’ve built our program and look forward to greater success as the overall housing market improves.”
This is the first year since the Research Center began offering certification services to the NGBS in 2009 that it has presented awards to recognize the significant commitment to green certification, innovation in building science, and leadership in the residential construction industry that its program partners have displayed. “We are awed by what these companies and individuals are achieving in the field,” said Michael Luzier, NAHB Research Center president.
The National Green Building Standard (NGBS), while structured similarly to other rating systems, is the first residential green rating system to be approved by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). The NGBS is widely considered the most rigorous and credible system available by virtue of the fact that it went through a true consensus process and ANSI scrutiny during its development. It is also the only rating system that requires consecutively higher point thresholds in each of its six green categories in order to attain a higher level of certification — so a project’s highest possible level of certification is limited by its lowest category score. Despite its certification rigor, the NGBS is also very flexible in allowing builders and remodelers to select the green features and products that are most appropriate for their local climate, market, and price point.
For more information on the National Green Building Standard or the NAHB Research Center’s certification program, visit www.nahbgreen.org/certification.
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About GHBT: The Green Home Builders of the Triangle is a joint program of the HBA of Durham, Orange & Chatham Counties and the HBA of Raleigh-Wake County. Launched in 2006, the program’s primary purpose is promoting building techniques and materials that produce homes which consume less energy and other resources, facilitate better indoor air quality, and provide a more durable product requiring less maintenance. GHBT actively promotes green building in the Triangle through an annual Green Home Tour, a wide variety of green building educational programs, and by partnering with the NAHB Research Center in its National Green Building Certification Program.
About the NAHB Research Center: The NAHB Research Center, located in Upper Marlboro, Md., promotes innovation in housing technology to improve the quality, durability, affordability, and environmental performance of homes and home building products. Created nearly 50 years ago as a subsidiary of the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB), the NAHB Research Center has established itself as the source for reliable, objective research, testing, and certification for the residential construction industry. Through its various testing and certification services, the Research Center seal is internationally-recognized as a mark of quality and an assurance of performance.
NAHB Research Center VP Tom Kenney, SEM’s Jamie Hager and HBA of Durham, Orange & Chatham Counties Executive VP Nick Tennyson.
