Environmentally friendly buildings tend to be rated highly but fail to deliver promised results according to a British building consultant.

The disconnect has led to the U.S Green Building Council (USGBC) being named in a US$5 million federal lawsuit case that accuses them of misleading consumers and misrepresenting building energy performance.

"Property organizations have accused the GBC of selling green certification,'' Robert Bunn, principal consultant of Britain's Building Services Research and Information Association told BusinessDay.

''Some people are waking up to the fact they believe they have been miss-sold a rating system that guarantees performance, and the construction industry hasn't been quick to disabuse them of that notion."

Since most "green" buildings use the latest technology, management gets complicated and performance tends to suffer. ''In new buildings, we are trying to drive down energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions, and concentrate on the wrong things," he said.''We are often trying to do it with innovative technology that requires far more attention in design and construction, and needs aftercare support that it does not get.''

Bunn speaks from experience as the editor of the Building Services Journal, the official journal of the Chartered Institute of Building Services Engineers for 16 years wherein he was commissioned by the British government to look into the most famous eco-friendly buildings in Britain.''We found their energy consumption was far too high, systems were not finished off properly, no one knew how to use them and they were misfiring on a whole range of criteria,'' he says.