Greenbuild 2011 in Toronto is complete! The closing plenary on Friday was a pleasant mixture of inspiring presentations, rousing calls to action and jokes about Canadian accents.  Fortunately, the Canadians were the ones doing the joking so no international tension was sparked.

The session started with a bang for me on a personal level.  Judith Webb, USGBC Vice President for Marketing introduced Scot Case from UL Environment (a major sponsor of the conference) and she explained that she met Scot at Speak Green, the June conference I organized while I was at Urban Green Council.  She even spent a sentence describing what the conference was about.  I was pretty thrilled to have something I played a central role in lauded in front of the entire Greenbuild conference.

For his part, Scot Case gave one of the only sponsor speeches I can remember that seemed heartfelt and didn’t include a laundry list of accomplishments.  He told us why he was excited to be in the room (because many of his heroes had stood at the same podium) and why UL Environment wanted to support the event (because they want to be at the forefront of certifying the impact of materials and products for buildings.)  Kudos to UL for letting him do it his way.

Four speakers comprised the closing plenary, or to be exact, four speakers, one video and one pinch hitter.

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Benchmarking!  Energy Use Intensity!  Just saying them out loud gets me pumped!  In some ways Greenbuild is a full-on geekfest.  The more technical and the deeper into the weeds a session promises to go the more excited most of us are for it to begin.  Today’s lunchtime roundtable on Benchmarking is a case in point.  Measuring your energy and water use.  Reporting it online and comparing the numbers to your peers.  It’s not exactly Cirque du Soleil but if you understand the challenges that confront our building industry you know that just knowing how much energy you use is the first baby step in reforming the performance of our buildings.

The roundtable today brings together experts on the subject from New York City and Canada to compare and contrast the systems used, share the lessons learned in each system and discuss the potential challenges that remain and what can be expected in the near term.  It was an impressive collection of folks, including representatives of the NYC Mayor’s office, US EPA, Canadian Green Building Council, Natural Resources Canada and many others.

The Canadian benchmarking program is similar to the US EPA Energy Star program.  It’s voluntary, for instance, and some of our discussion focused on the impact if NYC’s Greener, Greater Buildings Plan- which mandates benchmarking.  On the one hand, voluntary benchmarking has, of course, low participation.  But mandatory benchmarking, while creating a much greater data pool, may encourage gaming a system that is, by necessity, a self reporting process.  Obviously, because I am familiar with the NYC program I found the Canadian program the most interesting.  They have been through a couple rounds of reporting and are starting to see the returns on retrofits.

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This past Friday, the NYC Department of Buildings posted its 15-page rule implementing Local Law 84. Most of the rule (a good seven pages) is about how to collect and estimate energy consumption and what to do about incomplete data.  And if it takes that long to explain, it surely means compliance will require a substantial effort.

For those who would like step-by-step compliance instructions, check out our Benchmarking Compliance Checklist & User’s Guide.  It should help you determine which steps are required for your building, and which can be ignored.

Long term, there could be another way. The benchmarking law is about energy and water consumption. Yet of the 15-page rule, it takes only two sentences to explain how to input water data. How’s that? It’s that easy because those sentences explain that the Department of Environmental Protection will automatically upload the water consumption information to Portfolio Manager.

Because we don’t have a similar process for utility energy data, 24,592 private-sector buildings are or will be running around to get this information themselves. This is by far the biggest compliance burden for Local Law 84.

For many owners, benchmarking is part of “green stuff” and the easier we can make compliance, the greater their willingness to accept future regulations. Local Law 84 could be much easier to comply with if we had automatic uploading of utility data. So working with the city, Con Edison, National Grid, and the real estate industry to make this happen is at the top of our policy agenda.

This past Monday, the Mayor’s Office issued a statement that effectively extends the deadline for compliance with Local Law 84 in 2011 from May 1 to August 1. It only applies for 2011 while owners get used to the new requirements; we don’t expect extensions in future years.

The statement also announces the launch of a benchmarking hotline on March 31st that will be staffed by trained CUNY graduate students. It’s available via 311 Monday-Friday 10:00 AM – 4:00 PM.

Even though we don’t need to benchmark anything, the extension is a relief to us. As you may know, Urban Green Council is leading educational outreach to owners on the Greener, Greater Buildings Plan at the request of the Mayor’s Office. Now we have some much-needed breathing room before the first deadline hits!