Today marks the official unveiling of Taipei 101 as the first skyscraper to
achieve a Platinum rating under the U.S. Green Building Council's LEED EBOM (Existing
Building Operations & Maintenance) certification protocol. The project, at a cost of $2 million
US, took almost two years to complete under the guidance of an international team comprised
of Siemens Building Technologies, which led the retrofit of Taipei 101's energy and building
management control systems; architect and interior designer Steven Leach Group; and EcoTech
International, the LEED advisory firm headed by international green certification expert Rob
Watson.

While Taipei 101, at 1671 feet (509.2 meters), is one of the world's tallest and most complex
office/retail complexes, its LEED Platinum retrofit appears to have produced highly cost-effective
results that demonstrate the financial value of energy-efficient commercial building upgrades.
The annual energy, water and waste management savings associated with Taipei 101 are
substantial, totaling some $700,000 US per annum. On a $2 million US investment, the payback
for the project will take place in under three years.

What's little understood by many real estate owners and urban policy experts, however, is that
green office retrofits are typically highly cost-effective. My recent book, Retrofitting Office
Buildings to be Green and Energy-Efficient, provides case studies of 13 green building retrofits
from around the globe, and provides investment and payback evidence from the first generation
of LEED-certified retrofits. The case study data indicate that green retrofits are typically
designed to pay back in less than five years. In addition, many retrofits that concentrate on
operational and less-capital intensive approaches can pay back in compressed time frames. A 25
building sample provided to me in September 2008 by the Green Building Finance Consortium
and Envision Realty Services, for example, took an average of 17 months to pay back the up-front
investment costs.

Of course, larger data sets are needed to persuade investors and lenders that green retrofits make
good business sense, but Taipei 101 shows that even a capital intensive LEED Platinum retrofit
generates near-term savings that can be taken to the bank by property owners and their capital
providers.

Tomorrow, we'll find out why the ownership of Taipei 101 decided to pursue LEED Platinum
certification, and how Siemens, Steven Leach Group and EcoTech achieved their results. Today,
Siemens hosted an international group of journalists and management from Siemens' Asia
operations to set the stage for event. In attendance were real estate managers and journalists
based in Hong Kong, Korea, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Switzerland and the U.S.
Together, we cover a wide swath of the globe, both as professionals in the energy-efficient real
estate sector and reporters who closely cover commercial real estate and green building trends.

I'd like to share the highlights of today's preparatory discussions because they shed light on the state of the worldwide real estate and green building industries.

Key trends include the following:

• While commercial real estate development and construction are influenced significantly
by local requirements, general market trends are increasingly global in nature. The
professionals with whom I talked today—who hailed from four continents— all stated
that their immediate markets declined substantially starting in 2008, and that ground-up
construction has been confined primarily to completing projects already in the pipeline.
All believe that the bottom of the market has probably been reached, but that real estate
activity continues to trend at reduced levels. No one felt that a significant uptick has
been realized, although all look forward to better days ahead. What is striking is the
uniformity of these conclusions—likely the result of the increasing interconnectedness of
global markets, the standardization of financial decision-making and the centralization of
capital flows.

•  Sustainability is increasingly driving commercial real estate construction and retrofit,
particularly for large, Class A properties. Green certification is occurring more
frequently worldwide, although the dominant certification systems vary by nation and
by region. LEED, the voluntary standard first introduced by the U.S. Green Building
Council, is the dominant green building certification system in the U.S, while the Middle
East utilizes both LEED and BREEAM (BREEAM is the sustainable certification system
created by the British Research Establishment, and has been used widely in parts of the
European Union, in the Middle East and in some parts of southeast Asia.) Asian nations,
including China, Singapore, Korea and Taiwan, have introduced government-sponsored
green building certification systems, which are frequently used alongside LEED or
BREEAM.

•  As of 2011, building owners and contractors are focusing on energy-efficiency as the
key component of sustainability. There is also keen interest in developing the metrics
needed to quantify the effectiveness of green building strategies, whether in financial
savings or the reduction of carbon emissions. While there is general agreement that the
commercial real estate industry wants to 'do the right thing' by the environment, current
financial constraints mandate that projects deliver measurable results.