Benchmarking - It's The Law
23 October 2010
All building in NY City, over 50,000 square feet, are required to benchmark their electricity and fuel consumption this coming spring for 2010 consumption. The results of these 22,000 buildings will be publicly available on-line. The law is one of a few recently established under the Greener Greater Building plan which is part of PlaNYC. PlaNYC sets out the goal of reducing NY City's CO2 output 30% by 2030.
As the saying goes, "if you can't measure it, you can't manage it". The city is clearly making information available with the hope of enabling market forces to drive a reduction in energy consumption. The performance of a building relative to its peers is a reflection of the state of its condition, and that has a direct relationship with the cost to maintain it. The lever that will expose a building's efficiency to the public will probably be landlords and real estate managers as they tout their energy management prowess. We wouldn't be surprised to see measurements become part of real estate listings.
Should market forces fail to materialize to drive reductions, all the data necessary to legislate and manage energy reductions will be in place. Energy reductions will happen one way or another. For residential buildings in particular, heating fuel is the major source of energy. Installing a Fuel Economizer would immediately get a building at least a third of the way to the 2030 goal.
