U.S. EPA Announces Initiatives to Advance Building Performance Policies

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on Jan. 21 announced new initiatives that will help lower greenhouse gas emissions and improve the energy efficiency of commercial buildings. These actions support President Biden’s climate agenda.

EPA and its ENERGY STAR program represent a fundamental tool for reducing carbon and achieving industry standard construction efficiency, as well as for generating effective policies to face the climate crisis. The agency noted that the program has provided simple, verifiable, and reasonable information for decades to industrial, commercial, utility, state, and local organizations to help develop affordable, energy-efficient solutions for climate protection. This program has made it possible to achieve significant savings in energy consumption and costs.

The new actions advanced by the agency include:

• Supporting state and local governments in developing appropriate building construction policies based on EPA’s guidance. Analysis and recommendations of metrics, best practices, including the Benchmarking and Building Performance Standards (BPS) policy toolkit, and peer networks, are some of the policies developed by the Agency.
• Optimization of the ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager® tool that is widely used by building owners to evaluate energy and water, as well as management of waste and GHG emissions.
• Determine the emissions generated by buildings based on different performance standards to establish an adequate operation of new facilities with the environment.
• Enhanced transparency into the data for buildings in the ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager® platform.

The agency is committed to maintaining the technical assistance and software adjustments necessary to help state and local governments grow in climate protection.

In February of this year, the operation of a new tool on the web, called ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager Building Emissions Calculator, which will allow building owners to use their energy benchmarking data to assess emissions under local building efficiency standards. Further, this tool will have the capability of projecting the impact of changes on emissions over time; these changes pertain to the building’s efficiency, fuel selection, renewable energy use, and GHG factors.

Another improvement that the EPA will offer this year is the launch of a new system that will facilitate access to anonymous and aggregated energy information from the Portfolio Manager® program. This action will allow building owners, legislators and users in general to quickly and easily understand the energy requirement according to the type of building, location, functions, and other factors.

These actions are intended to promote the agency’s climate goals. The reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, the construction of energy efficient buildings, the generation of local jobs, are some of the premises of the EPA to address the climate crisis.