Best Practices Construction Law : Construction Lawyer & Attorney : Matthew DeVries : Stites & Harbison Law Firm : Green Building & LEED Litigation

According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA), healthcare facility owners and organizations spend nearly $8.8 billion on energy each year to meet patient needs.  To improve energy efficiency, thousands of hospitals rely on the EPA's Energy Star tools to help track consumption and prioritize facilities for energy upgrades.

Last week, EPA released an important update to Energy Star's national energy performance scale methodology for hospitals. The updated performance scale will help hospitals better assess their energy performance and make more informed financial and investment decisions in order to cut costs and improve their energy efficiency.

Energy Star's Portfolio Manager, an online energy measurement and tracking tool, will now include the updated hospital methodology. Over 85 percent of the acute care hospital market has already benchmarked their energy use with Portfolio Manager, making it the most widely used tool of its kind in the healthcare market. The update to Portfolio Manager reflects new survey data provided by the American Society for Healthcare Engineering and the significant changes in how hospitals use energy in recent years.

The updated Energy Star national energy performance scale methodology for hospitals now includes data inputs for the number of MRI machines and personnel and adjustments to weather normalization to reflect the amount of energy used to cool the building. Additionally, the methodology’s 5 million square foot size cap was removed, allowing larger hospitals to take advantage of the online tool.

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The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency yesterday issued a final rule in an effort to reduce water pollution on construction sites. The rule, which is set to take effect in February 2010 over a four-year period, is targeted to improve the quality of water nationwide.  According to a press release by the EPA, the impact is significant: 

Construction activities like clearing, excavating and grading significantly disturb soil and sediment. If that soil is not managed properly it can easily be washed off of the construction site during storms and pollute nearby water bodies.

The final rule requires construction site owners and operators that disturb one or more acres to use best management practices to ensure that soil disturbed during construction activity does not pollute nearby water bodies.

In addition, owners and operators of sites that impact 10 or more acres of land at one time will be required to monitor discharges and ensure they comply with specific limits on discharges to minimize the impact on nearby water bodies. This is the first time that EPA has imposed national monitoring requirements and enforceable numeric limitations on construction site stormwater discharges.

Soil and sediment runoff is one of the leading causes of water quality problems nationwide. Soil runoff from construction has also reduced the depth of small streams, lakes and reservoirs, leading to the need for dredging.

The pre-publication rules (pdf), as well as the EPA's Fact Sheet on the final rule (pdf) are available online.  While it is too early to comment on the draft rule (...primarily because I have not had a chance to digest it all...), it is interesting to note that adoption of the rule came in response to a court order in a lawsuit alleging that the EPA failed to issue certain regulations under the Clean Water Act.  According to the Wall Street Journal, the court requried the EPA to issue the rule no later than December 1, 2009.

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