One Small Button for Man, One Giant Leap for Data Access

Jason Hartke
Vice President, National Policy
U.S. Green Building Council

Today the White House launched the Green Button Initiative, which connects more than 15 million Americans with their utility providers for streamlined access to their energy data. Nine utilities and electricity suppliers initially signed up for this landmark program designed to enable consumers to put their energy consumption into their own hands.
Green Button, elegant in its simplicity, is ultimately about empowering millions of Americans with easy access to the foundational information they need to take action and reduce their energy consumption.

Green Button will create new opportunities to advance green building and provide a valuable, new tool for practitioners. Widespread access to energy use information will help homeowners and commercial property managers understand their electrical energy consumption and create the starting point for concrete steps to reduce wasted energy, save money, improve performance and ultimately create buildings that are better for people and the environment.

As the old adage goes, “You can’t manage what you can’t measure.” Without baseline energy data, home and building owners are unable to benchmark for energy improvements. This data will invariably drive the action we want to make significant reductions in energy use.

It Doesn't stop at the LEED Certification Plaque: Why Ongoing Building Performance Tracking Matters

Kal Wellman
Associate, LEED
U.S. Green Building Council

It has become widely accepted across the commercial real estate world that LEED certification has the potential to add value by presenting a number of benefits including higher rental yields, lower vacancy rates, reduced operating costs and improved employee productivity. The extraordinary growth of LEED over the past decade is clear evidence of this industry-wide understanding.

Receiving the LEED plaque should not be the end of the process for building owners. The plaque symbolizes the beginning of a building performance journey, one where data is at the center of attention. Having the ability to measure, track and benchmark a building’s energy and water data can help pinpoint operational inefficiencies within major building systems and can help the management team set actual reduction targets. Don’t believe us? See how it helped the Christman Company.

Every Penny Counts: Tracking Building Performance to Save Money and Resources

Lauren Riggs, LEED AP
Manager, LEED Performance
U.S. Green Building Council

This post originally appeared on FacilitesNet.

In today's economy, every penny counts. And as building owners and facility managers know all too well, every penny adds up. When the lights in your 30-story office building are left on an extra hour each day, or the brutal summer heat requires an extra blast of air conditioning, your energy consumption escalates and so does your utility bill. That's precisely why building owners and facility managers are starting to "listen" to their buildings to ensure optimal operations.

Inspired by these attentive facility managers, the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) launched its Building Performance Partnership (BPP) in 2009. The organization-wide initiative positions the optimization of building performance as a fundamental goal of the green building movement. BPP engages both owners and facility managers of LEED-certified commercial buildings through data collection, analysis and action. Participants receive annual performance reports, report cards and real-time data interfaces to aid in their building performance goals.

At the end of 2010, 132 LEED-certified facilities, mainly office buildings, had joined BPP. These facilities range in size from 2,000 to 2 million square feet. In 2011, the program grew to include nearly 350 partners, triple 2010's figures. The types of organizations and facilities have grown to include retailers, offices and other building types. These participants are demonstrating their commitment to energy efficiency monitoring and are leading among their peers by sharing their experiences and contributing to the market need for building performance education.

The first year participants represented high-performing buildings from every region of the country. Those buildings eligible for an Energy Star score had an overall average score of 87. Consistent with a high average Energy Star score, BPP participants had demonstrated Source Energy Use Intensity that is on average 41 percent lower than the national averages reported in EPA's Energy Star Portfolio Manager.

Each year will bring new enhancements to the program and offer increased connectivity to other USGBC programs. This year, all participants that share data through BPP will receive their performance report through an online interface, which will contain an analysis of their current performance, from the most recent 12 months of utility data provided, side-by-side with their benchmarks from LEED certification.

To support the increased interest in building performance, USGBC is implementing automation solutions for data collection and transfer, including establishing an automatic data input and output relationship with EPA's Energy Star Portfolio Manager, and will begin work to automate additional benchmarking solutions.

The goal is for the annual performance reports to act as a helpful reminder to facility managers that their building's performance matters and benefits the bottom line. Armed with comprehensive green building performance data, BPP will enable standardization of reporting metrics and analytics and establish new performance benchmarks, ultimately transforming the way the world views building operations and maintenance.

For more information about BPP, visit usgbc.org/bpp.

Seattle 2030 District: The NEXT Big Thing in Green Building

Brett Phillips Director of Sustainability, Unico Properties Board Chairman, Seattle 2030 District

Brian Geller Executive Director Seattle 2030 District

The green building movement has made great strides in recent years, but it’s not enough. In order to put up a good fight against ever-increasing environmental and economic pressures, we need a united front of the public and private sector, and to approach issues at the city — or district — scale.

District sustainability currently experiences the same limited level of awareness that individual green buildings did a decade ago, when the U.S. Green Building Council announced its first 12 LEED Certified projects, of which there are now over 11,000.

Get ready for a paradigm shift.

The Seattle 2030 District is an innovative, private-sector led project attempting to create a groundbreaking high performance building district in downtown Seattle. The project is already gaining national attention; earlier this year, the 2030 District was selected by the U.S. Department of Energy to represent Seattle — along with the cities of Los Angeles and Atlanta — as a “Place-Based Ally” to launch President Obama’s Better Buildings Challenge. By 2020, this program aims to reduce commercial building energy consumption by 20 percent nationwide.



The 2030 District model of private-sector engagement and aggregated goals is unique among the three selected cities, and will serve as a guide for other cities to follow. The District has key support and partnership from the City of Seattle and King County, but is being led largely by the private sector: property owners, managers, developers, engineers and design professionals who believe that setting aggressive energy performance targets at the district level is the key to elevating our region’s economic and environmental potential.

Working together, civic leaders adopted the goals from the 2030 Challenge for Planners, which adds reductions in water consumption and vehicle miles traveled, to the energy and fossil fuel building reduction targets of the 2030 Challenge. These goals, to be met by 2030, include aggregated district-wide reduction targets of 60% reduction in energy from new construction, 50 % reduction in energy from existing buildings, 50% reduction in water, and 50% reduction in carbon emissions from auto and freight.

These voluntary commitments are not empty promises. District members are required to share, under proprietary agreements, building energy, water, and transportation data, join the Seattle Climate Partnership, enlist in ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager, and submit LEED buildings to USGBC’s Building Performance Partnership. In return, the Seattle 2030 District is delivering innovative financing vehicles, sharing critical industry tools and best practices, and creating joint education opportunities to participating property owners and developers.

Improvement districts are not new — but the Seattle 2030 District takes a novel approach to the concept. District-wide reduction goals for energy use, water use, and CO2 emissions translates directly to using less power, water and fuel. While this may be hard to conceptualize, it yields tangible results: less traffic, better indoor and outdoor air quality, a more pleasant and desirable urban environment, a healthier Puget Sound and greater economic activity. These are the changes that Seattle and other growing urban areas must make in order to maintain vibrant and competitive cities in an era of population growth and resource overconsumption.

But don’t environmental priorities run counter to economic ones? Not always.

Take energy use, for example. Buildings use approximately half of all energy consumed in this country. Reducing that use will take human energy: conservation managers, building auditors, manufacturers and installers of more efficient equipment — in other words the green jobs we’ve all been hearing about.

For decades, it’s been cheaper to displace human labor with fossil fuel energy in the U.S., and we’ve followed that trend to its logical economic conclusion: high unemployment and rising energy prices. Yet thanks to those rising energy prices, projects to make buildings resource-efficient can more convincingly provide faster financial paybacks and higher asset values for building owners and investors. These conditions, paired with the right partnerships, technologies and financing solutions increases our ability to scale efficiency projects more broadly. The Seattle 2030 District aims to be the catalyst to make that scale reality.

There is no one-size-fits-all prescription to achieve the performance goals necessary to survive and thrive. Property owners and managers should be free to pursue the most innovative solutions to generate the best financial returns or other desired benefits for their property.

The bottom line is that the private sector must take the lead in transforming our economy away from fossil fuel dependency. More than 60 organizations, and over 23 million square feet of building space (30 percent of downtown Seattle) are participating in the Seattle 2030 District, a model that can lead the country in that transformation. It’s time to join forces; 2030 is right around the corner.

Tools for Tracking Building Performance on College Campuses

Kal Wellman
Associate, LEED
U.S. Green Building Council

Increasing utility costs and tightening budgets have led many colleges and universities across the country to rethink the way they manage their energy consumption. Take Western Michigan University for example: Their facilities team has installed 718 sub-meters across 151 campus buildings, allowing the team to closely measure, track and analyze their energy and water consumption on a building-by-building basis. They even went a step further and created an online dashboard which displays this data to the public for added transparency. Pretty impressive, to say the least.

For a number of reasons, not all higher education institutions have the capacity to install sub-meters on campus buildings. The majority of institutions use one or two central meters to track total campus energy and water consumption. However, it doesn’t matter whether your energy management strategy involves tracking performance data at the building level or at the campus level. There are a number of free online tools available to help you along the way. Check out the tools below to get started.

Cities and States Take on Energy Benchmarking: New Report Highlights Opportunities and Needs for Building Energy Benchmarking

Lauren Riggs, LEEP® AP
Manager, LEED and Building Performance Partnership
U.S. Green Building Council

We have heard the old adage “You can’t manage what you don’t measure,” more and more over the past few years. In line with that message, cities and states throughout the U.S. have begun to require measurement and reporting building energy consumption. With the right tools and strategies, we can leverage the focus on energy consumption to encourage action towards increased building operation efficiency nationwide.

Regulations for public disclosure, disclosure to government or tenants, and/or point-of-sale disclosure are currently in place in Austin, DC, NYC, San Francisco, Seattle, California and Washington (point-of-sale only). The momentum that these regulations have built is tremendous and is a driving force behind market discussions on the clarity and support needed around energy data collection. Last week, the Institute for Market Transformation (IMT) released a report that dives into current building energy rating and disclosure policies in the U.S. This report will provide the basis for the support the market has been looking for, and will open the door to other support efforts around the country.

The IMT report communicates the availability of best practices that will help building owners comply with regulations in their locale. The report elaborates on best ways to approach outreach and education through activities such as partnering with local organizations and conducting benchmarking trainings. Projects certified under the LEED for Existing Building program and buildings participating in USGBC’s Building Performance Partnership (BPP) have already taken their first steps in complying with energy rating policies by using ENERGY STAR’s Portfolio Manager.

Most of USGBC’s BPP partners are in a unique position to act as role models where disclosure policies require access to their energy consumption data, because BPP offers two options for data confidentiality (confidential or disclosed). We hope that participants will enjoy streamlined compliance with energy rating and disclosure policies if they choose to disclose their data through the program. Participants are demonstrating their commitment to energy efficiency monitoring; they are in a position to share their experiences with their peers and contribute to the market need for education.

In support of IMT’s recommendation that jurisdictions develop and implement outreach and education programs on data disclosure and benchmarking, anyone who is interested in developing a local outreach and education program may take advantage of Building Performance Participant Handbook and an advocacy handbook (under development) as free resources. We will post additional resources and links to usgbc.org/bpp over the course of program development.

I hope that the market will view programs like BPP as aids in complying with energy rating and disclosure policies. These types of programs will help in identifying additional procedural guidance and support owner accountability, as the IMT report suggests. As discussions progress, it is likely that many data collection and performance monitoring programs in the market will come together to streamline the reporting processes nationwide.

I encourage all potential and current LEED building owners to consider the content of IMT’s report and to identify ways that they are able to lead their communities and help local policy implementers by complying with energy rating and data disclosure policies in their area.

You Can’t Manage What You Can’t Measure: Building-Level Metering

Lauren Riggs
Manager, LEED Performance
U.S. Green Building Council

As the Manager of USGBC’s Building Performance Partnership and Recertification programs here at USGBC, I spend my time thinking over and over again about which aspects of building operations should be regularly monitored and which make the maximum contribution to the continuous high-performance of each building. We have to figure out how to encourage building operators to look at the holistic performance of their buildings and act based on the full story – So, how do we do that? What do we ask them to monitor? How do we work with thousands of building operators to tell the story?

Hours of thought and numerous discussions bring me back to what many of us have always known: Start with what is accessible. For most buildings, the easiest place to start monitoring performance is at the energy meter; knowing that energy consumption data is accessible to most building operators through existing meters or utility bills, it seems fair to ask folks to start monitoring their energy performance. If you’ve got water meters, start monitoring water use performance too – remember, we’re working towards a picture of holistic performance.

Green building professionals may not know that some buildings don’t even have energy meters, or a way to differentiate one building’s consumption from multiple others on a single campus … I struggle with finding a way to motivate these buildings to begin to track their individual energy use. How much does it cost to clamp on a data logger, or install and connect building level meters to a central system as a part of planned facilities upgrades? It won’t break the bank, which makes it absolutely feasible to track the performance of every building. Not one building owner will reap the benefits of energy or water savings without monitoring and trend logging, even at the building level.

Building level performance monitoring is something every building can do. You have to know where to start in order to reach the finish. The holistic picture, the full story, can only be created if you have all of information needed to complete it. USGBC offers tools, such as the Building Performance Partnership, to help buildings begin to tell their story. We will work with them to complete it and improve on it each time the story is told. We hope that our programs will lead to meters in every building (whole building and sub-system), followed by high performance achievement in every building. We will learn to walk, then run - together.

Fine-Tuning our Buildings for Optimum Performance

Lauren Riggs, LEEP® AP
Manager, LEED and Building Performance Partnership
U.S. Green Building Council

The notion that green building is a process and not just an event is something that is often overlooked. Much like the life cycle of a building, the green building process is one that takes a building from merely a sustainable “vision” to a sustainable structure.

The LEED rating system centers on sustainable operations and providing verification through LEED certification. The first phase in the green building process is called integrated design, which requires a team of professionals who understand that the use of the building, its indoor and outdoor conditions, will vary over its lifetime, and the team must plan for every reasonable contingency.

Will the building be used in the same way forever? Will a coffee shop open on the first floor? Will the ventilation system satisfy the requirements of any potential tenant? The building must perform optimally in a variety of future scenarios. The first phase team will envision, complete and test the building before ushering it into a second phase (i.e., ongoing operations and maintenance) and a new team, with different skills and goals.

LEED drives this integrated approach building by asking teams to identify and simulate the best combination of design strategies for an energy efficient, healthy performing building and occupants. However, the green building process and LEED cannot rely on performance simulations alone – merely simulating building operations will not ensure high performance operations.

The only way to ensure high performance operations is to listen to the building. Operators must collect useful feedback from the building while it is in use and fine-tune all the building systems based on an understanding of the inherent capabilities of the design and the needs of the occupants. Are the occupants comfortable? Or, do the lights stay on far after the last person leaves for the night? Operators should always be asking questions and getting answers – fine-tuning - in order to keep the building performing at its design potential.

Every time a building goes through the tuning process, the design performance information gives the user an idea of how their green building should perform. Operating teams can use the tools that LEED provides – LEED for Existing Buildings, Building Performance Partnership, etc. - to track, benchmark and verify energy use, water use, occupant satisfaction, transportation and other key aspects in ongoing building performance. USGBC empowers the teams that use these tools to fully understand the operating intent of the building, to fix issues they identify, and to educate and inform occupant behavior in their building. The act of collecting and understanding the operating data produced by green buildings and their occupants is the best way to make sure the building continues the green process.

When starting out with LEED, think of each phase of the green building process as a new stage of life; many buildings will experience growing pains, adjustment periods and identity crises. If the building does not receive the attention it needs, its support systems (e.g., ventilation and water systems) may function improperly and the building will suffer. Maintaining awareness of the building’s systems - tracking their ups and downs - is the longest phase of the green building process and should never end. USGBC recognizes that this phase of the green building process is critical to ongoing efficiency and continues to devote time to supporting teams in their operations and maintenance efforts.