Chicago Benchmarking Ordinance requires building owners/managers of properties 50,000 square feet or greater to measure & report energy use annually

Written by Ken Kramer. Posted in Blog

The 2017 Chicago Energy Rating System

The City of Chicago has committed to the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement, including a 26-28% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2025. The City is 40% of the way to meeting that goal.

The initial Chicago Energy Benchmarking ordinance, adopted in 2013, raised awareness of energy performance through information and transparency, with the goal of unlocking energy and cost savings opportunities for businesses and residents. In November 2017, the Chicago City Council voted to update the existing benchmarking ordinance. The 2017 updates will create a new Chicago Energy Rating System that makes energy use information for large buildings easily accessible to residents while encouraging energy savings. The new system is a zero to four star scale rating and is based on existing and publicly available energy data, alongside recent energy improvements to buildings. Each building over 50,000 square feet will be required to post their rating in a prominent location on the property, and share this information at the time of sale or lease listing. Chicago is the first US city to assign buildings an energy performance rating and require properties to post their rating.

Building owners or managers of properties 50,000 square feet or greater are required to measure and report whole-building energy use once a year, and have the data verified once every three years. All work can be done in-house and there is not a requirement to hire a third party. eAuditPro is a turnkey building and auditing tool developed by building code and building energy experts can help you achieve code compliance. For more information contact eAuditPro at www.eauditpro.com.

Energy benchmarking is associated with energy improvements. Buildings that have benchmarked and reported 3 years in a row save 4% of energy, on average, saving over $11 million/year in energy costs. Those that have benchmarked and reported 2 years in a row save 2% of energy, on average, saving over $6 million/year in energy costs. (Energy savings are weather normalized and take into account annual changes in weather.)

eAuditPro is ‘do it yourself energy auditing’, enabling you to become the expert. Meet compliance standards, improve operational efficiency with our turnkey building and auditing tool developed by building code and building energy professionals to help you achieve code compliance and improve return on investment. eAuditPro allows owners, operators and potential buyers of buildings to track energy use in a single building or a portfolio of buildings.

See the Chicago Energy Benchmarking home page for more information: www.CityofChicago.org/EnergyBenchmarking

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What is California AB 802, and what does it mean to you?

Written by Ken Kramer. Posted in Blog

California AB 802
The Building Energy Use Benchmarking and Public Disclosure Program

This program applies to non-residential buildings above 50,000 gross square feet of floor area and multi-family buildings over 50,000 gross square feet with 17 or more utility accounts. These are known as “disclosable” buildings and must submit Annual Energy Benchmark Reports to the California Energy Commission (CEC). The ordinance also applies to government buildings.

The Energy Benchmark reports are due annually for “disclosable”, commercial buildings starting on June 1, 2018 and for “disclosable”, multi-family buildings beginning June 1, 2019. The results of the Energy Benchmarks will be made public a year after the first Benchmark reports are due.

AB 802 requires utilities to provide the required energy consumption data (13 months of energy-use data) for applicable buildings to the building owners upon request. The utility will provide “whole building” (aggregated) energy-use data to building owners without obtaining tenant authorization – if the number of utility accounts in the building meet the required minimum.

Cases in which tenant authorization will be required, include:

Buildings with fewer than three commercial utility accounts
Buildings with fewer than 5 residential utility accounts
Buildings with fewer than a combination of 5 residential and commercial utility accounts
Buildings in jurisdictions that already have an Energy Benchmark reporting requirement will not have separate reporting requirements to the State. It is anticipated that local jurisdictions will provide the report data to the state.

Building owners who do not comply (as well as those submitting incorrect or incomplete data) may be subject to civil penalties. The CEC will notify the offending party of the violation and provide 30-days to correct the violation.

Some reporting exemptions apply:

The building did not have a certificate of occupancy during the 12-month reporting period
The building is scheduled to be demolished with one year of the reporting data
The building is covered by an approved local building energy-use, benchmarking program
The building has more than half of the gross floor area used for scientific experiments requiring a controlled environment or industrial purposes.

For more information about the ordinance, visit the California Legislative site.

eAuditPro makes energy auditing and energy benchmarking easy. Track your properties and records in one location. Collaborate with your team while complying with laws such as AB 802 and the City of Los Angeles Existing Building and Water Ordinance. Reduce hours of reporting time and save thousands of dollars with this reporting tool. Schedule a free demo today!

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