Washington DC Buildings Average 77 on Energy Star Scale

Large private commercial buildings in the District of Columbia score, on average, 77 out of 100 on the Energy Star scale, according to published data on the energy and water performance of more than 450 of the city’s largest privately owned buildings, covering over 160 million square feet.

The data, which includes energy and water consumption of large commercial and multifamily buildings for 2012 and 2011, resulted from mandatory energy benchmarking. The District is the first jurisdiction in the country that required private buildings to measure their energy performance and the second city (after New York City) to publicly disclose benchmarking data to the public.

Other findings from The Green Building Report for the District of Columbia 2012:

• Efficiency is improving. Buildings over 200,000 gross square feet reported data for 2010-2012 that showed a reduced energy usage by 6 percent on average over that period.
• There is substantial variation in performance. The least-efficient office buildings use over 235 percent as much energy as the most efficient ones.
• Age has no impact. Contrary to popular belief, there is zero correlation between the age of a building and its energy performance.
• High Compliance Rate. To date, over 83 percent of buildings required to report energy benchmarking data to DDOE have done so.

This year, Washington, DC’s benchmarking requirement expands to all privately-owned buildings over 50,000 gross square feet.