Eficiência energética e certificação LEED no Brasil: análise de créditos obtidos por empreendimentos certificados entre 2009 e 2018

Abstract

The recent and growing worldwide movement of sustainable construction has encouraged architects and builders to implement alternative forms and sources of energy in their projects, which has also generated, since the end of the 20th century, the need to classify the performance of buildings through evaluation systems. LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) is the most widely used building classification system in the world, whose principle consists of satisfying prerequisites and obtaining points in environmental categories, which address several aspects of the performance of a construction, such as energy efficiency, among others. This paper aimed to answer the question about how the energy efficiency scores vary in the different types of LEED certified buildings. The objective was to analyze some of the variables that make up this certification, focusing on projects certified by Version 3.0 - in Brazil - in order to provide project managers with subsidies for decision making in relation to the target credits. The methodology used was the quantitative and positivist approach with secondary data. The data were collected in interviews with technical coordinators of the Green Building Council Brazil and from the Green Building Information Gateway (GBIG - www.gbig.org) platform. Then, they were filtered, adequately prepared for sample composition and analyzed using the IBM SPSS Statistics 25 software. The variation of the scores in environmental categories and selected credits was investigated allowing the verification of the performance of the projects from three points of view: the size of the construction, the level of certification and the typology. The results confirm the existence of a correlation between credits associated to the use of local renewable energy and the optimization of energy performance. However, in Brazil, this association tends to be more exploited in small buildings, in the LEED Core and Shell and LEED New Construction. This fact is probably associated with the verticalization of large projects and the consequent reduction of available areas for the installation of photovoltaic panels in their roofs. It was also pointed out the possibility of applying new technologies to maximize the use of glazed façades for the generation of electric energy.