Since 2009, New York Local Law 84 mandates that owners of New York City’s large buildings submit benchmarking reports of their energy and water use. Now, the New York City non-profit Urban Green Council is taking the city’s energy benchmarking data and organizing it into a user-friendly website - Metered New York. Although the benchmarking data is required to be publicly available, a blog posting on Dagher Engineering’s site says that up until now, that data has been in a database that’s hard to access and hard to understand.
The Metered New York site allows users to simply enter the address of a building to find out how it ranks compared to other buildings as well as its energy and water use, GHG emissions and projected energy savings. It also shows how the building’s energy use has changed over time. Metered New York provides the kind of transparency needed for customers and tenants to favor more energy-efficient buildings.
The Energy Department recently released two resources to help stakeholders analyze the energy, non-energy, and market transformation impacts of building energy benchmarking policies and programs. The first is a handbook that provides methodologies for jurisdictions to use to analyze the impact of their benchmarking policies and programs. The second resource demonstrates the methodologies using real data from New York City’s benchmarking ordinance, Local Law 84.
