The financial benefits of building ?green? An analysis of New York City high performance law

Sammanfattning: In New York City, in the United States as a whole, and in the rest of the world, there are many projects with high performance features and environmental ambitions already completed or being built. Unfortunately, few projects are consistently followed-up and evaluated, which means that valuable information is lost. For this reason, this research attempts to gather information from high performance building projects in order to analyze and understand the impacts (e.g., both positive and negative) of adopting the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) standards as the criteria of public buildings being planned and/or renovated. The focus of this thesis is to identify the financial costs and benefits of high performance building design prescribed by the proposed law Int. No. 0324-2004 in New York City, U.S. The discussion in this study is based on how the public projects will be affected if the bill is passed by the City Council. The aim is to deliver information for the early stages of new building projects. The analysis results are described in terms of the savings, payback time, and the process behind of project realization. The bill's scenario has been analyzed and evaluated using methods such as life-cycle costing, net present value, and cost-benefit analysis. It is important to state that the study was not strictly focused on the environmental aspects described by LEEDTM Silver certification. In fact, the impacts referred to by this thesis are divided into internal influence (i.e., running costs and maintenance) and the external influence (i.e., the public savings of reducing the water treatment costs).