by Brianna Crandall — April 27, 2015—On April 20, the Atlanta City Council unanimously passed pace-setting legislation that will use cost-effective energy efficiency opportunities to spur local economic development, create thousands of jobs, improve public health, and reduce the city’s overall environmental footprint, according to the City Energy Project, a national initiative from the Institute for Market Transformation (IMT) and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).
Under the Atlanta Commercial Buildings Energy Efficiency Ordinance, the city aims to meet these goals by collecting (or “benchmarking”), reporting, and sharing energy use data for the city’s commercial buildings, along with periodic energy audits and potential improvements to existing building equipment and functions (or “retrocomissioning”).
Using these tools, the city projects that the ordinance will drive a 20 percent reduction in commercial energy consumption by the year 2030, spur the creation of more than a thousand jobs annually in the first few years, and cut carbon emissions in half from 2013 levels by 2030. NRDC notes that the ordinance is “tailor-made” for Atlanta, culling best practices from other cities and refining them to meet local needs.
According to the City Energy Project, buildings currently account for 66 percent of Atlanta’s total energy use. The new ordinance addresses energy use in private and city-owned buildings over 25,000 square feet in size. This includes 2,350 buildings that, as a whole, represent 88 percent of the city’s commercial sector.
How It Works
Participating buildings will be phased in, starting with municipal buildings in 2015 and expanding to include private buildings in 2016. Under the legislation, owners of the designated buildings will be required to annually benchmark and report to the city their properties’ energy use via a free online tool.
Building on this data, building owners will then be asked to complete an energy audit once every 10 years. An energy audit is a detailed assessment of how a building could improve its performance through upgrading its equipment and systems, explains the group. Additional building tuning (or “retrocommissioning”) efforts, which ensure that existing equipment is operated as designed for efficiency, are optional but recommended under the new ordinance.
In addition, building performance data collected under the benchmarking initiative will be made transparent to the public to allow the market to recognize, reward, and drive increased demand for high-performing buildings.
The Atlanta Commercial Buildings Energy Efficiency Ordinance is part of the city’s work under the City Energy Project initiative that is developing locally tailored plans and programs to create healthier, more prosperous, and more resilient cities by reducing carbon pollution from their largest source: buildings.
Other participating City Energy Project cities include Boston, Chicago, Denver, Houston, Kansas City, Mo., Los Angeles, Orlando, Philadelphia, and Salt Lake City. By investing in building energy efficiency programs and policies, together the participants are projected to cut pollution equivalent to taking 1.4 million cars off the road and save residents and businesses a combined total of nearly $1 billion annually on their energy bills.
