Within the Canadian Government, DND is the largest building owner with more than 43% of the federal inventory. Consequently, the lifecycle of these realty assets, combined with all other defence activities, makes DND a major contributor to Canada's Green House Gas Emissions. One tactic that DND has taken to reduce its environmental footprint, is the creation and implementation of its Sustainable Development Strategy (SDS). This strategy indicates a percentage of new construction projects will incorporate green building concepts when the project value is greater than $10 million. If new construction exceeds this threshold, it must meet or exceed the LEED Green Building Rating System™ Silver standard. Relevant LEED rating considerations are highlighted in subsequent sections within this paper. A challenge with LEED-type construction is that there is no true lifecycle quantification of modelled performance to justify the front-heavy green building expenses in National Defence applications. To address this void, DND is at the preliminary stages of a study which will quantify green building performance by monitoring the performance of a LEED Gold building. Building monitoring equipment and energy models will quantify building performance and enable researchers to compare it to a nominally identical traditional building baseline. Furthermore, this paper will investigate if a formal green building certification has a measurable impact on the long-term energy performance of a building. This research will provide energy performance data which will be used to provide guidance on DND's green building strategies. To date, no study of this nature has been conducted on DND infrastructure.
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