New Tool Offers Inside Look at Climate Change Impact of Buildings
Washington, D.C. – Estimating the carbon footprint of commercial buildings has just become easier. Portfolio Manager, EPA’s on-line energy rating system for commercial buildings, now includes greenhouse gas emission factors. The updated ratings show that Energy Star buildings, which use an average of 35 percent less energy than typical buildings, also emit 35 percent less carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
The emissions factors for carbon dioxide (CO2) are from EPA’s Emissions & Generation Resource Integrated Database (eGRID) and are consistent with those used by major greenhouse gas reporting protocols. With the integration of eGRID into EPA’s Portfolio Manager, businesses can see how the CO2 emissions of their buildings compare to others in their same region and across the country. This allows organizations to assess and address the climate change impact of their buildings according to standardized protocols, prioritize energy efficiency improvements, and lessen the impact on the environment.
For example, a look at a typical office building in the New England region shows that the building contributes 20 pounds of CO2 per square foot. An Energy Star office building in this region contributes just 15 pounds per square foot, a reduction of at least 25 percent. Americans can look for buildings that have earned the Energy Star with confidence, knowing that the building is energy efficient with a smaller carbon footprint.
The Energy Star strategy for superior energy management emphasizes the importance of corporate commitment and helps position companies to address risks from climate change and improve transparency. Companies that have partnered with EPA and use Energy Star tools are now being recognized for their leadership.
EPA started the Energy Star program in 1992 as a voluntary partnership to reduce greenhouse gas emissions through increased energy efficiency. In 2006, American businesses and consumers with the help of Energy Star saved $14 billion on their energy bills and reduced greenhouse gas emissions equal to those of 25 million vehicles annually. Learn more at http://www.energystar.gov.
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bromley
posted on September 29th, 2007 at 3:30 am
If I may, I’d like to chime in with a word of warning about taking floor-area-based benchmarks too seriously. They do give an indication of a building’s energy performance, and can be a good measure of the improvement of any single building as time goes on, but big problems creep in when you try to benchmark one building against another.
The main problem is that there’s rarely such a thing as a “typical” building. Take, for example, two offices that could both be reasonably described as “typical”. Both are the same size, but one has several times as many staff (and, consequently, several times as much computer equipment) packed into the same floor area. Which office is more energy efficient? Well, according to a floor-area-based benchmark, it’s almost certainly going to be the office with less people – this is even likely to be true if the densely-packed office uses more energy-efficient equipment and uses it in a more energy-efficient manner as well.
It fact, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to argue that dense packing of staff is actually more energy efficient, as it means that less heating is needed for the same number of people. But dense packing of staff is just one example of something that can have an unfair negative influence on the floor-area-based benchmark of a building.
Anyway, my point is that, although floor-area-based benchmarking can be great for building awareness of energy consumption (the importance of which should not be underestimated), taking the results too seriously can easily lead to far-from-optimal decisions on how to prioritize investments in energy efficiency.