The Urban Land Institute Greenprint Center for Building Performance reports that commercial properties in San Francisco are using less energy. The reduction is attributed to conformance with San Francisco’s Existing Commercial Buildings Energy Performance Ordinance.
The report – which was a collaboration by Greenprint and the San Francisco Department of the Environment – found a 7.9 percent reduction in energy use across 176 properties that were tracked since 2010. A wider review of 817 buildings found that energy reduction measures could save tens of millions of dollars over the course of years.
The press release says that more than half of greenhouse gas emissions in the city come from 197,000 residential and commercial buildings. Energy use is the largest controllable variable in buildings, and thus represents the quickest and most accessible and efficient way to reduce emissions. The group claims that less than $61 million in energy efficiency investments identified by local engineers would generate a gain of $170 million in net present value.
On the other side of the country, about 30 percent of buildings in Washington, D.C. had not filed the required building benchmarking paperwork with the D.C. Department of Energy and the Environment as of mid-September. Fines of $100 per day were due to start late in the month.
