(65b) Evaluation of the up-LEEDing of a Historic Building

As the first historic building in the world to receive two LEED certifications (EB Gold, CI Silver), the Alliance for Sustainable Colorado's Alliance Center is a model of sustainability and collaboration at work. Housing 30 nonprofit tenants all focused on sustainability, including the USGBC's Colorado Chapter, this 100-year old building offered interesting challenges to gain its original LEED status in 2005. Now, five years later, we have launched an exciting new project to take sustainable historic renovation to the next generation.

The Alliance Center will be recertifying its LEED status for its 2011 deadline. The Alliance is seizing this challenge as an opportunity to go further and raise the bar in determining what's economically viable and compelling in ?Historic Green.? As we seek to upgrade from LEED EB Gold to LEED EB Platinum, we will be working collaboratively with key players in business, nonprofit, government and education to take a step back and truly examine what's possible during the recertification process, especially as it applies to historic buildings. We are exploring how we can get to Net Zero energy usage and carbon neutrality with a viable return on investment and how we can capture the process to ensure this is replicable by others? In this presentation we will examine the research completed to date on the project, the nuts and bolts, the challenges and the opportunities of this highly collaborative effort.