QR Code 5.1
Stormwater Examples at Serenbe
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While Earthcraft certification is only available in the southeast region of the US, there are many other certifications including LEED, Energy Star, and more. To learn about some of the other certification options in the US and abroad see the resources below.
LEED; https://www.usgbc.org/leed
Energy Star; https://www.energystar.gov/
BREEAM; https://breeam.com/
Living Buildings Challenge; https://living-future.org/lbc/
Green Globes; https://thegbi.org/greenglobes/
National Green Building Standard; https://www.ngbs.com/
WELL Building Standard; https://www.wellcertified.com/
GreenGuard Certification; https://www.ul.com/services/ul-greenguard-certification
Nabers; https://www.nabers.gov.au/
Green Star; https://new.gbca.org.au/green-star/certification-process/
QR Code 5.3
More about the many obstacles communities face when trying to move to geothermal energy.
The largest obstacle is lack of awareness by new home owners to request it and the lack of mortgage companies to recognize the value due to more expensive up front costs.
No matter the amount of education presented, people tended to choose to keep luxury items over geothermal when value engineering the building costs. Bankers would not fund of spec buildings to include geothermal when building a house for future sale because appraisers did not tend to recognize geothermal as a feature the increased the value of the house . We ask our local EMC if they would like to install the wells and infrastructure for geothermal as part of there service as a utility company, but after studying it for three months they declined. We soon realized the only way we could make geothermal mandatory was to form the utility to install the infrastructure that supported the home geothermal HVAC system. And so, we created and funded the utility.