By Lena Babaeva Coradini

Interesting news for the building community: "Green Buildings Drive BIM Adoption," according to a new report from McGraw-Hill Construction:

The report, “Green BIM: How Building Information Modeling is Contributing to Green Design and Construction“, produced in collaboration with the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), the Mechanical Contractors Association of America (MCAA), Autodesk, and 13 other industry organizations, finds that the industry is only now tapping into the potential of BIM to meet their ‘green’ goals.

Case-in-point: The report finds that only 17 percent of Green BIM practitioners are currently realizing more than 50 percent of BIM’s potential for their green goals, but 78 percent of survey respondents who aren’t currently using BIM for their green building projects expect to within the next three years.

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According to the report, as green building become a larger share of construction, the benefits provided by BIM will also be more widely recognized. As a result, the use of BIM will increase as it delivers a more efficient way to leverage digital models for design, construction and operation of projects, according to the report.

Another finding shows that nearly half (49 percent) of Green BIM practitioners use BIM for more than 50 percent of their projects, compared to 28 percent of non-Green BIM companies. Green BIM practitioners are also more intensive users of the software since they both create and analyze models more frequently than non-Green BIM companies, according to the report.

McGraw-Hill Construction studies have found that energy efficiency is the most often cited green building benefit, yielding significant cost savings over a building’s full lifecycle.