Abstract
The standards of energy and environmental design are improving day by day, are flexible enough, and in continuous change. The designers are the first ones which introduce the inputs into the system in order to improve it. The overall city should be planned as a socio-natural hybrid system. The LEED program has been developed in the US since 1998. It has been adopted in almost 40 countries and it is widely used by public. The LEED standards are based on reducing overall impact rather than on a specific issue or topic, trying to be green as much as possible. The reliance to outside sources (programs and standards) is also important in order to enlarge the expertise area and the variety of subjects. The green city should be well planned and well documented since the early stage of design, reducing the costs and synchronizing the work of different systems that operates within the building. The LEED standards involve the environmental, economic, and social impact, regardless at this point the standards are socially neutral. The city planned according to LEED standards is a socio-neutral hybrid one. On the other hand, BREEAM is established since 1990 in the UK and certifies the sustainability of buildings. For each environmental certification, there exist differences between various criteria related to building energy efficiency. The evaluation of the performance improvement over specified baseline requirements is the common point of the two building standards. The sustainable assessments such as BREEAM or LEED can be applied or adopted in any region of the world. The Albanian case does not adopt any of them. Based on EPC (energy performance certificate), the building is considered to be in compliance with the minimum performance requirements of energy, aiming to achieve optimal levels of energy consumption for a typical use of the building. The building is considered as zero energy building when the ratio of the total energy consumption of the current building per sqm of the surface is equal or be less than 50% and the ratio of renewable energy produced in the building during a year compared to the consumption of total energy of the current building for one sqm of the surface. Expressed as a percentage is equal to or greater than 50%.
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Acknowledgements
Table 3.1 Reproduced from “A political ecology of the built environment: LEED certification for green buildings” by Klodjan Xhexhi, with permission from “J. Cidell”.
Figure 3.1 Reproduced form “The Approval of the Procedures and Conditions of the Energy Performance Certification of Buildings and the Model, Contents of The Registration Conditions of the “Certificate of Energy Performance of Buildings” by Klodjan Xhexhi, with permission from “Albanian Council of Minister decision no 958” (free to share).
Table 3.5 Reproduced form “The Approval of the Procedures and Conditions of the Energy Performance Certification of Buildings and the Model, Contents of the Registration Conditions of the “Certificate of Energy Performance of Buildings” by Klodjan Xhexhi, with permission from “Albanian Council of Minister decision no 958” (free to share).
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Xhexhi, K. (2023). LEED and BREEAM Building Standards and Albanian Law Related to Building Thermal Performance. In: Ecovillages and Ecocities. The Urban Book Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20959-8_3
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