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