The Commercial Observer April 20 edition includes an article outlining the very short payback of several local green retrofitting programs.  As Tony Malkin noted at Urban Green Expo regarding the retrofitting of the Empire State Building, “I’m not doing this to save the world.  I am doing this to make money.”  All of which tracks, of course, with loads of research conducted in the last couple years, including our own NYC Cost of Green study, conducted on our behalf by Davis Langdon.  Our study found that there was no statistical difference between the first cost of LEED and non-LEED projects of the high rise residential and commercial interior types (there was not enough data on other building types to conduct a statistical analysis.)  Stats are great but it’s also nice to see the sort anecdotal evidence noted in the Observer piece- actual projects in buildings you might be familiar with are sometimes more persuasive than bar graphs and pie charts.  So the payback is short and the results improve your position in a shaky market.  What are you waiting for people?

A 2004 study conducted by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Portland Energy Conservation, Inc. and the Energy Systems Laboratory found that for existing buildings, commissioning costs were 27 cents per square foot, with the end result an energy savings of 15 percent, translating to a payback in seven months.