Abstract

There is a general perception among the developers and clients that green buildings shall incur additional costs. For the same reason, they always prefer conventional buildings over green buildings. If at all they are going for green buildings, they always tend to go for lower rating levels. Most of the clients and contractors are either ignorant or unaware of the possibilities of a higher certification level without much increase in the total cost. Suppose they are educated about the possibilities of going for a higher certification level, cost of doing so and also a budgeting methodology for controlling the cost, it will definitely be an incentive for clients, owners, designers, and users to develop and promote highly sustainable construction practices. In this paper, a building that has attained a particular certification level in LEED India v1 is evaluated using LEED v4 to estimate the rating that it could achieve under LEED v4 and to determine the possibilities of upgrading the building to higher certification levels within v4. Credit wise evaluation has been done to determine the elements required for up gradation and also the cost of up gradation (in the Indian context) and on the basis of this evaluation as well as some literature review, a budgeting methodology is developed.