For a long time, money was the basic value to express any product, work, or consumption. The environment is a system of interactions and several components that are related to each other and can’t be separated. The environmental balance is the best way to describe the right environmental relations that exist by default if no human disturbance, and should be achieved. To determine environmental balance achievement using monetary terms, the environment components become commodities, and nothing indicate their whole role they were created for, besides their impact and relations to the other environmental components, for example; the waste cost value is zero in spite of its negative impact on the environment. The research encourages the use of energy values to express the environmental components and achievements towards sustainability, as it relates the inputs and the outputs into certain cycles, and can express the environmental balance through the law of energy conservation. Sustainability, then, can be expressed as a zero energy result. Building environmental assessment methods had emerged to help buildings being sustainable, but researches whom studied developing these methods quickly turned to study the way of minimizing the cost of their achievement, rather than their environmental benefits over the time, considering that many important assessment credits depend mainly on the achieved economic savings. The aim of the research is to encourage the use of energy values in the building environmental assessment methods instead of monetary values. Thus, this research paper focuses on the differences between money and energy as values of expressing the building environmental efficiency. A comparative analysis was used to do so.

Sustainable Development, Environmental Equilibrium, Energy Conservation, Environmental Assessment Methods of Buildings, Exergy