About Benchmarking in New York City
Why Benchmark?
The energy used in New York City’s buildings is responsible for two-thirds of citywide carbon emissions and costs New Yorkers more than $20 billion every year. Despite this enormous impact and expense, most building owners, managers and tenants do not know how much energy their buildings use. This is very different from our approach to automobiles. We are keenly aware of a car’s fuel consumption and operating cost, but it’s still uncommon to have similar insights into our homes and workplaces.
New York City is working to fill that information gap. The City passed a law that requires all large buildings to measure and report their annual energy use in a process called benchmarking. This benchmarking data is published on the city’s website and annual report. Metered New York allows anyone to explore the data. The interface makes it easy for building owners and prospective tenants to search, understand and interpret energy and water usage.
What does New York’s benchmarking law require?
In 2009, as part of a suit of energy efficiency laws called the Greener, Greater Buildings Plan, New York passed Local Law 84 (LL84) – one of the earliest benchmarking laws in the country and the first to be implemented. This law requires all buildings larger than 50,000 square feet to annual benchmarking their energy and water usage. There is a smaller threshold for city-owned properties. The law encompasses almost 13,000 private properties and 2,350 city owned properties.
In 2016, the city amended LL84 with Local Law 133 of 2016. This amendment lowered the reporting property size threshold from 50,000 square feet to 25,000 square feet. Once it takes effect with 2018 data, this expansion will add roughly 10,000 properties to the benchmarkign data set, increasing the amount of covered floor space to almost 60 percent of New York City's gross square footage.
What are we learning?
New York City’s benchmarking data has provided the first major window into how New York’s building use energy providing crucial energy information to thousands of building owners and managers for the first time. But LL84 also did something else: by requiring so many buildings to benchmark, New York City’s law created a revolution in local energy efficiency data. Unlike data collected from voluntary benchmarking, which tends to over-represent proactive building owners, New York City’s benchmarking ordinance provides a representative sample set of building energy usage.
For a complete breakdown of the findings from LL84 benchmarking data please see The New York City Energy and Water Use 2017 Report, as published by Urban Green Council in partnership with New York City.
Multifamily and office buildings are responsible for 87% of energy use in benchmarked buildings. The office sector is the more energy intensive of the two, using 56% more energy per square foot than the multifamily building sector. But multifamily housing alone make up nearly 70% of total floor area and use over half of all the energy consumed by benchmarked buildings.
What is happening in other cities?
Twenty-two American cities and two counties have passed building benchmarking ordinances as of the start of 2017. Other cities with benchmarking ordinances include Atlanta, Austin, Berkeley, Boston, Cambridge, Chicago, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Seattle. These policies collectively impact over 86,500 properties which encompass approximately 10.7 billion square feet of floor space. Many other cities are likely to pass similar ordinances soon. Find out more: http://www.buildingrating.org