Fool's Gold, Lawsuit against over hype of LEED Gold claims

LEED is marketed as a green building certification by many and has spread to data centers.  Here is a post where a resident of a NY residential building has filed a lawsuit identifying the buildings performance does not match up to claims.

Fool’s Gold? Resident Files Suit Against Developers of LEED Gold Riverhouse For Not Delivering LEED Gold Goods

David Roth | Thursday, May 27, 2010 | no comments

One thing that Battery Park City’s LEED Gold hopeful Riverhouse has never lacked for: publicity. Some of that media attention has been of the brand-friendly kind — Leonardo Di Caprio bought a condo! Tyra Banks bought a condo! These people are very famous! Or at least Leo is! But much of the recent attention directed at Riverhouse has not been very flattering. A series of legal squabbles between the developers – the Sheldrake Organization and the zombie iteration of the Lehman Brothers real estate partnership — were both notably ugly and notably public, although Riverhouse condos continued to sell well during the exchange of lawsuits and accusations and vague intimations of pre-foreclosure legal action.

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The suit’s demand for $1.5 million in damages is kind of a grabber, but Stephen identified something more intriguing — and which could possibly make a bigger impact across the green building spectrum — than the intimation that one high-profile green building didn’t live up to its own hype. “This type of construction litigation is not uncommon, the purchasers also claim that ‘the building’s much-heralded ‘green’ heating system consistently fails to provide adequate heat’ to their unit and that this failure is a condition which is ‘is materially different from those represented by the project sponsor and its principals in the condominium offering plan,’”

it is hard to  identify the performance of a data center given it can take years before the space is build up with load.

Which reminds of a rumor I heard once that Google put a bunch of toasters in its data center.  Why?  To simulate the electrical and heat load on the infrastructure.

I don't think we'll ever see a lawsuit for a LEED certified data center, but it was bound to happen that the over hype of LEED catches up to reality of a buildings performance. 

If the hype of LEED was combine with hype of Smart Grid.  The Smart Grid could be used to prove what LEED buildings perform as expected.