Audits and Retro-commissioning of Base Building Systems: privately-owned buildings have to conduct energy audits every 10 years and implement renovations recommended by the audit. The building's benchmarked score is part of the audit. Buildings can avoid having to do the audit if they meet either of two criteria:
- Earn an Energy Star Label, indicating the building is more efficient than 75% of comparable buildings, for two of the three previous years, or
- Earn a LEED for Existing Buildings/ Operations and Maintenance 2009 rating within four years of the deadline for filing an audit.
In addition to completing the audit, city-owned buildings are required to complete retrofits that have a simple payback of seven years or less. The New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) will pay for half the audit as part of a statewide initiative.
Going Nationwide
The NYC legislation may accelerate the move to voluntary benchmarking nationwide. Many organizations with facilities in NYC also have national portfolios. Those organizations will have to devote someone on the team to learn how to benchmark. Once they have mastered that skill, they are in a position to benchmark the rest of the portfolio, says Michael Bobker, director of the CUNY Building Performance Lab, which helped NYC schools benchmark their energy use.
Increasingly, benchmarking is also seen as good public policy. It addresses a central challenge of national efforts to reduce energy use: the need to improve the efficiency of existing buildings. "Existing buildings have to be addressed," says Antonoff. "Unless we're dealing with the existing buildings, we can't address energy efficiency and greenhouse gas reductions."
In NYC, existing buildings of over 50,000 square feet account for 45% of the city's energy consumption; 85% of buildings that will be in use in 2030 already exist.
What's more, in the context of the national debate about the costs of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, benchmarking is an inexpensive approach to improving energy performance that could be fairly easily adopted in other jurisdictions.
"Speaking broadly, there is huge competition among municipalities to be the greenest and do the most," says Cliff Majersik, director of the Institute for Market Transformation, which advocates for energy efficiency and green measures. "It's particularly attractive in the current budget crisis. This is something even cash-strapped municipalities can do to address the market failures holding back their cities."
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This article is adapted from NYC to FMs: Show Us Your Energy Use, Building Operating Management magazine.
