Building Construction Costs For A Green Home
The cost for someone to build a good quality green home is some what more that it would cost to build a home in the traditional way. In fact in the US alone more than 500,000,000 sq ft of green buildings are either being designed or in the development stage or have been completed. In fact there are many reasons as to why building construction costs for a green home are only a little more than those for a traditionally built one.
During the last few years various bodies have looked at just what the building constructions costs are involved when building a green property. Certainly many have only found that in fact it is only nominally more expensive to build a home that is environmentally friendly.
Certainly one of the most current and certainly the most reference studies to have been carried out was performed in 2003. This was carried out by a group of more than 40 California state government agencies and was known as California’s Sustainable Building Task Force. They looked carefully at not just the building construction costs but also the financial benefits which could be gained from building a green property compared to using more traditional methods.
In fact this study was the first of its kind to fully look at the building construction costs and benefits from building a green (environment friendly) building and focused specifically of 25 office projects and 8 school buildings. All of which had either actual or projected completion dates between 1995 and 2004. These particular building projects were selected as they had relatively solid cost data available for both those that were green design and those that were of a conventional design. All the costs for each project was based on modeling as well as detailed cost estimates provided by the constructors.
At the end of the study and on completion of all the construction projects it was found that the average premium for all of the 33 green buildings which were studied was slightly less than 2% of the cost of the conventional buildings. This equates to around their building construction costs being between $3 and $5 per sq ft less.
0 Comments