By Juliet Pagliaro Herman, Johnson Controls
Preparing my presentation for an ENERGY STAR panel discussion at the Air-conditioning, Heating and Refrigeration (AHR) Expo gave me a chance to reflect on why we’ve been able to use the ENERGY STAR® program for buildings and plants to help ourselves and our customers reduce their energy consumption and costs.
Some background: ENERGY STAR for buildings and plants helps building owners save money and protect the environment through energy efficient products and practices. It allows energy efficient buildings to earn the same ENERGY STAR label that you see on dishwashers, TVs and refrigerators.
In December, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency celebrated the 10thanniversary of the ENERGY STAR label for buildings. The first ENERGY STAR label was awarded to Ridgehaven Green Building in San Diego in 1999, and now, over 90,000 buildings are participating in the program, and nearly 10% have earned the ENERGY STAR label for exemplary energy performance.
I know firsthand the benefits of an energy-efficient, high-performance workplace – because I work in one. The Johnson Controls Brengel Technology Center in Milwaukee was one of the first buildings to earn the ENERGY STAR label in 1999. Our building is an example of what you can do with integrated, optimized systems. It exemplifies our goal of creating safe, comfortable and sustainable building environments. If you want to learn more about the building and what makes it both energy efficient and a great place to work, you can take a virtual tour, let our award-winning facilities director, Ward Komorowski, tell you about it himself in his “Ward Online” video series, or download this case study.
In addition to using ENERGY STAR to evaluate our own buildings, Johnson Controls has been helping our customers use the ENERGY STAR benchmarks to assess their buildings’ energy performance. In the last 12 months, we have benchmarked over 700 buildings for our customers.
For me, one of the best things about the ENERGY STAR for buildings and plants is that it demystifies the idea of “energy performance.” You don’t need to know what a BTU or a kWh or a GHG is to make sense of it. You don’t need to know how to do “weather normalization.” You enter some basic data into the ENERGY STAR portfolio manager and your building is graded on a curve that ensures it is compared to similar buildings in similar climates. All you need to know to interpret the results is the concept of getting scored on a scale from 1-100 – and most of us who went to school understand that all too well. 100 is an A+, 80 is a B, 50 is barely passing, and under 50 – well, you’ve got some work to do. A score of 75 earns the ENERGY STAR label – literally a plaque that you put on the front of your building to let people know your building is in the top 25% of energy performers.
There’s something really empowering about giving people both information about how much energy their building consumes, and showing them how they compare with similar buildings. It gives people an idea of where their building stands and lets them decide what they want to do about it. It also isn’t holding them to a standard that might be perceived as unachievable or unrealistic, like net-zero energy. It’s comparing them to their peers – making the possibility of improvement seem more real, more attainable.
For example, I’ve heard of one building that scored a 60. Being so close to 75 motivated the owners to start looking at what they could do to earn the label. Owners of another building that scored a 40 determined that going from 40 to a 75 would generate $160,000 a year in energy savings. That’s a lot of money to drop to the bottom line, especially in a down economy.
Others are using ENERGY STAR as part of efforts to LEED®-certify their buildings – the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED Rating System for Existing Buildings: Operations and Maintenance ratings system uses ENERGY STAR as the primary way for buildings to earn points for energy efficiency. The Empire State Building’s sustainability program – a collaboration between the Clinton Climate Initiative, Johnson Controls, Jones Lang LaSalle, and the Rocky Mountain Institute – is a prime example of this.
Yet others have chosen to participate in the ENERGY STAR challenge, which recognizes buildings that make a 10% improvement in energy performance, regardless of their score. If you’re a 5 and you go to 15, it still counts. Any way you look at it, the ENERGY STAR program provides powerful information that can help people overcome organizational barriers to improving their facilities.
Governments are starting to recognize the power of this information and leverage it in their own programs to reduce building-related greenhouse gases. Several state and local governments – including the states of California and Washington, and the cities of New York and Austin, Texas – have all enacted legislation requiring commercial buildings to benchmark their energy performance using ENERGY STAR and disclose that information to potential buyers, tenants and lenders. In addition, other states require ENERGY STAR benchmarking as part of tax credit and other energy efficiency incentive programs. And Section 204 of the Waxman-Markey climate change legislation includes a provision for a national building performance labeling program.
There are many building performance benchmarking standards out there. However, ENERGY STAR for buildings and plants continues to be one of the most accessible and easy-to-understand ways to measure building performance. And, as the old adage goes, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” Understanding where you stand is the first step toward making buildings more energy efficient. And energy efficiency in buildings is one of the first and most important steps a business can take now to reduce costs, make their business more competitive, and help the environment.
