IMT Releases Building Energy and Disclosure Policy Report

The United States, which has been lagging behind Europe – and, surprisingly, China – for most of the last decade in regard to building energy efficiency, has received a boost this week from the Institute for Market Transformation, or IMT, which issued a report that represents a comprehensive review of building energy efficiency measures to date. IMT is a nonprofit NGO vested in energy efficiency, “green” building, and environmental protection.

Entitled Building Energy Transparency: a Framework for Implementing U.S. Commercial Energy Rating and Disclosure Policy, the July 27th analysis – a first-ever national review of building energy rating and disclosure – is available in full (at a daunting 80 pages), as an executive summary, as a press release, and even as an abbreviated user’s guide.

This latter, developed in cooperation with CB Richard Ellis, the world’s largest real estate services firm, is called the Guide to State and Local Energy Performance Regulations, and outlines building energy benchmarking and disclosure policies from Austin, Texas to Washington State.

The review itself is the fruit of a November 2010 discussion – the Roundtable on Implementing Benchmarking and Disclosure Policy – in which senior policy representatives, building energy efficiency experts, and commercial real estate industry leaders from ten states and cities met to conduct the first coordinated discussion of building efficiency rating and disclosure practices.

As the IMT notes, making building energy use and costs more transparent through these kinds of ratings, or disclosures, will also promote building energy improvements, provide a framework for best practices, overcome barriers to implementing policy, and provoke market demand for greater energy efficiency. All of which will lead, in turn, to President Barack Obama’s clean and secure energy future.

As IMT’s Building Energy Rating Program Director Andrew Burr notes:  “Rating and disclosure policy is the first step we need to take down that road.”

The entire endeavour revolves around the Energy Star building benchmarking tool called Portfolio Manager. Energy Star rating is a cooperative effort between the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Department of Energy.

The data plugs into the Portfolio Manager to obtain a building energy efficiency rating which is based solely on inputs of the building’s character -- features including the factory, office building, and storage space -- plus figures relating to the number of employees and utility bills over the past year.

According to Burr, the program is easy enough to use that building managers will feel comfortable with it, though many are also hiring companies to perform the evaluation. Ratings are delivered as a score from 1 to 100.

Burr sees very positive effects. “There is a tremendous amount of momentum in the U.S. toward greater building efficiency, and it’s happening very rapidly.” A statement backed by a recent survey which shows 70 percent of building managers and owners strongly favor energy efficiency.

This, even though measuring building energy efficiency is a fairly new concept in the U.S., with most of the activity taking place only within the past five years, and in less than a dozen cities. A disappointing result, given that the federal government’s CBECS (Commercial Buildings Energy Consumption Survey) program has been around since 1979, with the last measurements taken in 2003.

By contrast, the EU’s building energy efficiency policy (Energy Performance of Buildings Directive) was put in force across all 27 EU member states plus the Netherlands and Turkey in 2002.  

The best news? As Burr observed: “We are finding that rating and disclosure policy is good jobs policy. In fact, in talking to businesses vested in energy efficiency, we are finding that some businesses have seen their workloads increased by 30 percent or more, with some businesses adding hundreds of new clients.”

Finally, the report provides both lessons and practical advice on how to coordinate policies, which makes it an invaluable tool for advancing building performance metrics in terms of energy efficiency rules designed to take effect this year.