According to the City’s 2015 Greenhouse Gas Emissions Inventory, 77% of emissions in St. Louis came from buildings. The national average is 40%. That’s why the Building Energy Awareness bill has been signed into legislation by the outgoing Slay administration.
This bill will require buildings 50,000 square feet or larger to benchmark their energy use – an important start to reducing energy consumption.
Buildings smaller than 50,000 square feet can also benchmark using Energy Star’s helpful Portfolio Manager tool, which provides useful information and handy tips for all sorts of buildings to reduce their impact.
This little blue logo is more than an assurance of efficient equipment – Energy Star provides tools to reduce your energy use.
As they say, “you can’t manage what you don’t measure,” and benchmarking can compare buildings to other similar buildings, allowing users to understand where they have opportunities to improve. One building is not necessarily the same as another, and one business is not going to have the same baseline as another – this is why accurate comparisons are so important.
Restaurants, for example, tend to use more energy than other types of buildings, due to the need for refrigeration, which is why they must compare their baseline to similarly sized buildings in order to better understand how to reduce their use. On average, restaurants use up to 4-7 times more energy per square foot than other, similarly sized buildings.
St. Louis has a goal to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by 25% by 2020, which will help the city save money that can be recirculated in our economy while reducing our use of fossil fuels. This tactic has helped other American cities, like Chicago requires benchmarking for large buildings, and they saw a 7% decrease in greenhouse gas emissions from 2010-2015. Through benchmarking, Chicago determined they could save up to $77 million dollars per year in energy costs.
From cityofchicago.org
Benchmarking buildings is a huge first step in reducing our overall emissions in St. Louis – check out Energy Star’s website to see how you can save on personal energy costs, and take the 25 x 20 pledge to participate in St. Louis’s energy reduction plan!
