By the end of 2013, over 1,400 New York City buildings will have to comply with Local Law 87: Audits and Retro-commissioning, the second in a series of laws that make up the Greener, Greater Buildings Plan (GGBP).  In requiring buildings 50,000 SF or greater to perform periodic energy audits, the city hopes to encourage energy efficiency retrofits that typically result in significant energy and cost savings.

Buildings that need to comply with LL87 in 2013 must submit Energy Efficiency Reports demonstrating compliance by December 31, and every 10 years thereafter.

Last year, Urban Green created a Local Law 87 Compliance Checklist and User’s Guide to help property managers and owners understand the steps required to comply and get the most out of the process.  With support from NYSERDA and Con Edison, we’ve presented this information free of charge to over 1,000 building owners, managers, and operators.  That’s a lot of people but it’s not nearly enough.  We’ve undertaken a second round of outreach to more effectively pinpoint  property managers and owners who may need added support in complying with the law and re-tuning their buildings.

Here’s what we did:

For a similar educational program on Local Law 84, which required the same group of large buildings to benchmark their energy and water use, we reached out to owners and property managers overseeing the greatest amount of square footage. This methodology was carried over into LL87 outreach but with some slight modifications using lessons learned from the city’s Benchmarking Report  released last year.
First, we looked in detail at compliance rates for benchmarking and found geographic areas where compliance was much lower than the overall rate of 75%. We then reached out to Business Improvement Districts, various Chamber of Commerce locations, and neighborhood associations within these areas.

In addition, we looked at compliance rates by building sector and reached out to associations serving sectors with below-average compliance.

We’re optimistic that our combined efforts will improve compliance rates for LL87 in 2013 and subsequent years (10% of 13,500 affected buildings are required to report each year).

We continue to deliver presentations and share information about the law through our fantastic volunteer speakers bureau and Checklist mentioned above.  Please contact us if you need to find out how to comply.

The GGBP laws are truly a win-win, as they encourage building practices that reduce energy use and carbon pollution, lower operating costs, and create “green” jobs for New Yorkers who specialize in building audits and commissioning.  We think the tools we’ve developed go beyond helping property managers and owners comply with the law, adding value to the process. With an additional 12,000 buildings affected by LL87, we have our work cut out for us!

For more information on Local Law 87 please click here or email us to request an onsite presentation.

Today, the NYC Mayor’s Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability released the first annual New York City Benchmarking Report. This landmark effort is required by Local Law 84, the first law enacted by the Green, Greater Buildings Plan (GGBP), and covers 12,565 private properties (municipal buildings began benchmarking a year earlier and their first report was issued in November 2011).

The report is the result of a foresighted and heroic effort. According to the report, of all the buildings benchmarked by law in the US, Local Law 84 alone accounts for about 61% of the impacted square footage! The data will eventually be available publicly (although the first year of data collection for each building type – municipal, non-residential, and residential – is not), which will be a treasure trove of information for the analysis of the built environment. Overall, the report is a fantastic 30,000-foot view of the city’s large buildings, boiling down complexity into clear, easily digestible chunks.

Buildings’ energy use ranges widely – even within similar building types

Among the more fascinating analyses in the report is a consideration of the factors that contribute to energy consumption. Multifamily building energy use intensity does not vary much, perhaps because they have more similar use patterns to each other. On the other hand, building use intensity for office buildings varies widely.

Several factors appear to correlate with office energy use intensity. For example, higher density of occupants and longer operating hours correspond to higher energy usage. Larger office buildings tend to use more energy per square foot than smaller ones, but it’s not immediately clear if this is due to the intrinsic nature of large building construction (inability to use natural ventilation, simultaneous heating and cooling, and complex systems) or other factors.

Another correlation is with construction date. The report splits building ages by twenty-year increments, and finds that energy intensity has steadily increased over each 20-year period. In fact, offices built since 1990 use almost 40% more energy per square foot than offices built before 1930!

There are a few possible reasons why this might be the case:

1. Tenant Profiles

Tenants with high computer use or other advanced technology needs might select newer buildings. If so, actual end uses would have to made more efficient to see improvements. Building infrastructure changes wouldn’t be the answer. In commercial buildings, since 70% of energy use is typically from tenant spaces, this warrants serious future study.

2. Increase in building system capacity

Newer building systems tend to have more lighting and HVAC than older ones do. A 1920s-era office building may struggle to keep up with HVAC needs on a hot day, whereas a brand new office building may have overcapacity all the time, causing AC units to run less efficiently. This can be improved in new construction through better building load projection during the design process, ensuring the building is geared to actual loads and not “rule of thumb” overestimates, as addressed by the Green Codes Task Force recommendation EE-2 Improve Analysis of Heating & Cooling Needs During Design).

3. Building system complexity

New buildings are more complex than older ones, with computer management systems controlling advanced, interrelated technologies. Sometimes these advancements save energy, but paradoxically, these complex buildings sometimes perform worse than their simpler brethren. Programs like GPRO, Building Operator Certification, Building Performance Institute Multifamily, and others address this maintenance and operations issue. In this case, we do have a hope of improving these buildings over time, as more emphasis is put on energy-efficient maintenance and operations. Benchmarking can help in this regard, since as tenants become more informed and look for the energy score of prospective spaces before leasing, owners will hopefully respond and attempt to improve their buildings’ performance.

4. Building envelope

Building envelope styles change over the decades. Newer buildings with high vision glass curtainwall construction may exhibit worse energy performance than older, masonry buildings with less window area. And though window energy performance has improved over time, we’ve given back those gains through greater increases in vision glazing area. This is one of the reasons the Green Codes Task Force is hoping to address new building envelope u-values in recommendation EF-3 Limit Heat Loss Through Exterior Walls).

More on this topic may become clear when benchmarking data is released in September. Nevertheless, the fact remains that there is a wide variability in energy use intensity, due to age and many factors, even among similar building types. This demonstrates the improvement that is possible in the City’s building stock – although as the report’s authors state, the City as a whole is not currently moving fast enough to meet the 2030 goal of 30% citywide greenhouse gas reduction.

It’s impressive how much work went into the report. The benchmarking data will be a great source for analyses that will ultimately help New York City and the nation create and implement strategies to cut energy use and greenhouse gas emissions. Congratulations are due to all who contributed to this effort.

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!