Green Business Certification Inc. (GBCI) recently announced a new technology organization called arc. The announcement was made during the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) International Summit held at the 2016 Greenbuild International Conference and Expo.
Officially launching later in 2016, arc will aim to further the performance of the green building industry and the built environment as a whole.
Scot Horst, USGBC’s chief product officer, has been named arc’s incoming CEO. He will transition from his role with USGBC and LEED at the end of 2016.
“As the leaders of the green building movement over the last two decades, USGBC and GBCI have gathered more green building data and its related business intelligence than any other organization in the world,” said Rick Fedrizzi, CEO and founding chair of USGBC. “Through this data we have begun to measure, monitor, and score building performance in real time. We developed arc as a way to provide new and more transparent ways to share this information.
“Scot’s leadership of this new venture is a testament to his expertise and vision. He’s led LEED’s continued evolution through LEED 2009 and v4, its globalization, and its shift from a design tool to a performance metric. We welcome him to his new role,” continued Fedrizzi.
According to GBCI, arc is a state of the art platform that will allow any building to participate and immediately start measuring performance, make improvements, and benchmark against itself. The goal of arc is to support the missions of USGBC and GBCI.
LEED certified buildings can use arc to improve and benchmark against other certified buildings around them. Buildings that have not certified yet will be able to use arc to make incremental sustainability improvements and eventually achieve LEED certification.
“The LEED rating system revolutionized the design, construction, and operations of green buildings more than 16 years ago,” said Horst. “Arc’s goal is to transform green performance technology and bring data, mobility, and the most disruptive technologies available today to support a holistic approach to building our future. It will connect actions through a single platform that delivers a higher quality of life.”
Officials said the arc platform is a complement to LEED and other green building rating systems, standards, protocols, and guidelines and allows buildings and spaces to connect to the built environment in a new way by comparing performance metrics and connecting them to green building strategies. The goal of Arc is to eliminate complexities and barriers to behavioral change.