How much energy does your office building use? Knowing the answer can give you a better understanding of how your building is performing and whether or not you should make investments in energy efficiency.
Cities around the country are passing building energy benchmarking and disclosure laws to address the opaqueness of building energy performance. By requiring buildings to measure their energy use, cities, such as Boston; Chicago; New York; Philadelphia; and Washington, D.C., are giving buildings the equivalent of a miles-per-gallon rating or an EnergyGuide label similar to what you’d find on your hot-water heater. Building owners and occupants in these cities can now better understand whether their building is an SUV or a hybrid.
Best of all, these ordinances are driving investments in energy efficiency and are maintaining and creating construction and manufacturing jobs.
The Great Recession hit the construction sector the hardest. Between 2006 and 2010, employment in that sector fell by 28.8 percent. The manufacturing sector saw a decrease of 14.6 percent between 2007 and 2009. Investments in energy efficiency have driven an uptick in employment.
According to the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, for every $1 million invested in energy-efficiency retrofits, 20 construction jobs are created. A report by the Center for American Progress and the Political Economy Research Institute puts the number at 11.9 jobs per $1 million invested in building retrofits. What’s even better, the contractors are installing energy-efficient technologies, like LED lighting, efficient motors and building controls that are manufactured in the United States, creating even more domestic jobs.
So what does this mean for cities that have enacted benchmarking and disclosure ordinances?
New York City’s Greener Greater Buildings Plan is estimated to create 17,800 jobs in energy auditing, retrocommissioning and building retrofits. A few companies in New York began hiring additional staff as a result of the Greener Greater Buildings Plan:
• The Steven Winters Associates Inc. consulting firm has quintupled in size since 2008 to its current size of more than 50 staff.
• FS Energy, a local energy-management firm, , more than tripled in size between 2009-12, growing from three employees to more than 10, and managing 40 retrofit projects in New York City.
• Ecological, an energy and sustainability company, added 400 clients and doubled in size as a result of New York’s ordinance. Quoted in Building Energy Performance Assessment News, Ecological’s CEO and Executive Vice President Lindsay Napor McLean said: “When clients get their benchmarking results, they start asking questions—‘Why did my building get this score and what can I do to improve it?’ Buildings with poor results really want to see what they can do to change those results before they’re published.”
In Chicago, where the city expects the benchmarking ordinance will result in $250 million in energy-efficiency investments, Mayor Emanuel said: “Good data drives markets and innovation. This ordinance will accelerate Chicago’s growth as a capital for green jobs by arming building owners, real-estate companies, energy-service companies and others with the information they need to make smart, cost-saving investments.”
So what’s the potential for job creation in the rest of the country? One study by the Political Economy Research Institute and the Institute for Market Transformation estimates that a national building energy benchmarking and disclosure policy would result in 23,000 new jobs by 2015 and 59,000 by 2020. Another report by the Energy Future Coalition and the Center for American Progress noted retrofitting 40 percent of America’s commercial and multifamily buildings during the next 10 years would result in 625,000 jobs, or 6.25 million job-years.
With these opportunities for local job creation, it’s no wonder cities across the country are passing benchmarking and disclosure ordinances.