by Brianna Crandall — August 12, 2013—The sixth U.S. city to require mandatory energy use disclosure, the City of Philadelphia, has sent compliance notices regarding its new Building Energy Benchmarking Law , which was signed into law in August 2012 and is now in effect. The legislation requires owners/operators of buildings with more than 50,000 square feet of indoor floor space (or mixed-use buildings where at least 50,000 square feet of indoor space is devoted to commercial use) to disclose annual energy usage and water consumption, which will be made available online.
The City has launched a new Web site that describes the energy benchmarking law and associated regulations in full, including detailed reporting requirements. The compliance deadline for reporting building energy and water consumption data for calendar year 2012 will be October 31, 2013.
In order to establish data that will help drive a concerted, citywide effort to make energy efficiency improvements, the Building Energy Benchmarking Law was passed as a key step in Mayor Nutter’s Greenworks Plan. Designed to reduce citywide building energy use by ten percent in 2015, benchmarking and disclosure of building energy data will drive building energy improvements, promote transparency in the commercial real estate market, and produce potential savings for building owners and tenants, says the City.
To facilitate and ensure efficient, accurate measurement and reporting of building energy usage, building owners and operators will use the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) free, user-friendly Portfolio Manager tool. With the tool, building data, such as age, size, type and use, are combined with utility consumption data to generate energy performance scores based on the building’s performance relative to similar buildings nationwide. The City of Philadelphia and the Energy Efficient Buildings Hub (EEB Hub) will collaborate on detailed, in-depth analysis of results to ensure data integrity. Fines for failure to comply will go into effect after October 31, 2013.
Philadelphia became the sixth city in the United States to require mandatory benchmarking in 2012, joining Austin, New York, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington, D.C. Since then, Minneapolis and Boston have passed similar laws. Since 2008, the number of ENERGY STAR-certified buildings has reportedly more than doubled in Philadelphia, and the region ranks 11th in the United States of metro areas with the most ENERGY STAR-certified buildings (174). The Mayor’s Office of Sustainability has already benchmarked more than 300 City-owned facilities and will issue a report later this year with the findings, which they will use to inform strategic investments.
Last year, the EPA published the largest analysis of energy benchmarking to date, based on more than 35,000 buildings, that revealed an average of seven percent energy savings over three years of compliance. For example, a study of New York City buildings after the first year of compliance with its benchmarking law indicates that even moderate improvements to the worst-performing buildings could result in significant citywide energy savings of 18 to 31 percent. So despite the extra work to submit the data, facilities owners and managers citywide should quickly see an improvement in the bottom line.
