Los Angeles tops green building list

Los Angeles is the US city with the largest number of energy efficient buildings created in 2008, according to a list released by the Environmental Protection Agency. The city topped the list of 25 top performers that have promoted the Agency's Energy Star certification for energy efficient buildings.

The city qualified 262 buildings, comprising 73.9m sqft of space, in 2008, according to the list. San Francisco, with 192 buildings representing 60m sqft of space, was second. Houston, Washington DC, Dallas-Fort Worth, Chicago, Denver, Minneapolis-St Paul, Atlanta and Seattle followed.

Buildings must score in the top 25 per cent based on EPA's National Energy Performance Rating System to qualify for the Energy Star label. The agency measures energy use in other buildings and ranks them on a scale of one to 100.

LA doesn't fair quite as well on the US Green Building Council's own list of sites. The GBC, which operates its own green building certification system called LEED, provided BusinessGreen.com with a list of its top cities by number of registered LEED projects. LA came in fifth, trailing Houston, DC, Chicago and New York in top place. However, the figures didn't differentiate between LEED rankings (it has different levels of certification based on criteria such as energy efficiency).

"Registered projects are projects that are currently somewhere 'in the pipeline' – either still in the conceptualisation phase or building design and construction phases – and have registered with LEED with the intention of gaining certification upon completion," said GBC spokesperson Ashley Katz.

More than 3,300 buildings got the Energy Star stamp in 2008, bringing the total number to 6,200, said the agency, which added that energy use in commercial buildings and manufacturing plants (the category of building addressed by the scheme) account for almost half of the country's greenhouse gas emissions.