Home Innovation Research Labs Recognizes Triangle Area's Outstanding Green Certification Program Partners for 2011

Chapel Hill, NC. - Yesterday, during a ceremony at the Briar Chapel Community Center, six Triangle-area companies were recognized for being 2011 Home Innovation Research Labs Green Partners of the Year. The awards were presented for the companies’ outstanding contributions to advancing green building in the local community and commitment to voluntary, market-driven, third-party certification of high-performance homes.

The casual awards ceremony was a follow-up to Home Innovation Labs’s announcement earlier this year of its 40 Green Partner Award winners from across the country. About a third of the award recipients were from North Carolina – and almost half of those were from the Triangle area, underscoring the local concentration of dedicated green building advocates helping to transform the residential market.

The local award recipients include:

Three Raleigh-based builders – Homes by Dickerson, M/I Homes of Raleigh, and Saussy-Burbank. Combined for 2011, these three builders completed 133 homes certified by Home Innovation Labs to the ICC-700 National Green Building Standard (NGBS).
Two local builder associations – the Home Builders Association of Durham, Orange & Chatham Counties and the Home Builders Association of Raleigh-Wake County – that have a joint council known as the Green Home Builders of the Triangle. NGBS certified homes within the jurisdictions of these two associations account for nearly half of all the certifications Home Innovation Labs has done in North Carolina to date.
Southern Energy Management (SEM), a sustainable energy company based in Morrisville that serves the Southeast and Mid-Atlantic regions. SEM has 19 individual employees who are Home Innovation Research Labs-accredited green verifiers – they have combined to verify 462 NGBS certified projects to date, and have another 145 currently in progress.

“We’re proud of the way our members have explored and adopted green building,” said Britney Wallace, president of the HBA of Durham, Orange, and Chatham Counties. “We appreciate the support we’ve gotten from Home Innovation Research Labs as we’ve built our program and look forward to greater success as the overall housing market improves.”

This is the first year since Home Innovation Labs began offering certification services to the NGBS in 2009 that it has presented awards to recognize the significant commitment to green certification, innovation in building science, and leadership in the residential construction industry that its program partners have displayed. “We are awed by what these companies and individuals are achieving in the field,” said Michael Luzier, Home Innovation Research Labs president.

The National Green Building Standard (NGBS), while structured similarly to other rating systems, is the first residential green rating system to be approved by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). The NGBS is widely considered the most rigorous and credible system available by virtue of the fact that it went through a true consensus process and ANSI scrutiny during its development. It is also the only rating system that requires consecutively higher point thresholds in each of its six green categories in order to attain a higher level of certification – so a project’s highest possible level of certification is limited by its lowest category score. Despite its certification rigor, the NGBS is also very flexible in allowing builders and remodelers to select the green features and products that are most appropriate for their local climate, market, and price point.

For more information on the National Green Building Standard or Home Innovation Research Labs’s certification program, visit www.nahbgreen.org/certification.

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