The 2017 summary of the AIA 2030 Commitment

Two weeks ago, at Greenbuild 2018, the American Institute of Architects (AIA) released its annual progress report: The 2017 summary of the AIA 2030 Commitment.

First, if you are not familiar with this initiative, read about it here: The 2030 Commitment - Are you up for the challenge?

"The mission of the AIA 2030 Commitment is to support the 2030 Challenge and transform the practice of architecture in a way that is holistic, firm-wide, project based, and data-driven. By prioritizing energy performance, participating firms can more easily work toward carbon neutral buildings, developments and major renovations by 2030."

LHB, the firm I work for, signed on to this initiative in 2016. By the way, LHB has been a firm member of USGBC since 1997! You can see all the participating firms listed here: 2030 Commitment signatory firms.

You can download the 2017 report here.

Additionally...

Here is a related article on the AIA website: AIA 2030 Commitment by the numbers

"The AIA 2030 Commitment program offers architects a way to publicly show their dedication and track progress toward a carbon-neutral future. Since 2009, participants in the Commitment have reported the performance of their firm portfolios over each calendar year. The data, collected via the 2030 Design Data Exchange (DDx), includes building type, area, baseline energy performance, and predicted energy performance."

Here is a quote from page 29, in the report:

"The AIA 2030 Commitment continues to encourage more energy modeling as the only way to track predicted energy improvements above and beyond energy code."

In addition to things like continued growth of the initiative, page 31 provides a nice graphic showing the top 3 tools used by 1) Architects, 2) MEP Engineers and 3) Energy Modeling Specialists.

Autodesk has been a big supporter of the AIA's 2030 Commitment. For example, Autodesk Insight, their cloud-based energy analysis tool, has the ability to report directly to the AIA 2030 DDx.

I think it is very interesting to see that while Sefaira (from Trimble) is still showing the most popular tool for Architects (they’ve been in the market since ~2010), Insight has gone from basically nowhere (it didn’t exist until ~1 year before this reporting period) to now showing a pretty strong second.

If you follow this blog, or search it for Insight and Sefira, you will see I have a bias for Insight, for a multitude of reasons. But either tool is MUCH better than not using one at all!

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