Although commercial and institutional buildings vary greatly from one to another in size, use, and type of construction, there are general recommendations for creating energy-efficient commercial buildings in a hot and humid climate.
This toolkit from the EPA is meant to support jurisdictions seeking to decarbonize their building stock through policy. The toolkit includes four sections, each with their own focus: an overview of benchmarking and transparency, an overview of building performance standards (BPS), coordination of benchmarking and BPS for state and local governments, and data access. EPA staff encourages policymakers and other relevant players to get in touch for support - particularly concerning data access and Portfolio Manager use in BPS.
This landing page includes resources for developing benchmarking policies and building performance standards (BPS), including guidance for getting started and considering complementary policies, as well as technical assistance for benchmarking policies, utility data access, setting goals and evaluating impacts, and developing BPS frameworks, metrics, and targets.
This document describes EPA's recommendations for building performance standards (BPS) metrics to reduce energy use and greenhouse gas emissions. Additionally, it discusses normalization methods for these metrics, and outlines future resources EPA will produce to support BPS policy design and implementation.
This white paper provides a framework and supporting analysis to help policymakers and commercial and multifamily building stakeholders understand the key differences among performance metrics and choose those best suited to building performance standard policies. The paper also proposes a complementary zero-carbon building recognition.
This Life-Cycle Energy Performance Framework for Cities provides policymakers a tool to look across building codes, incentive and utility programs, and post-occupancy/operations policies, to identify potential policies and triggers that can be deployed to impact building energy use.
The standards experts at NBI explain how building owners and developers can get ready for ambitious clean-energy ordinances happening in cities and states throughout the U.S.
This document from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) establishes a standard method for monitoring and reporting on the energy performance of commercial buildings.
Overview of EPA’s ENERGY STAR certification for buildings and a description of the energy performance standards set by EPA.
Overview of the scorecard that offers a quick snapshot of a building’s energy performance, displaying either the building’s 1-100 ENERGY STAR score or site EUI.
EPA’s Benchmarking and Building Performance Standards Policy Toolkit aims to inform and support state and local government decision makers who are exploring policies to reduce energy use and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from existing commercial and multifamily buildings in their communities. This section of the toolkit focuses on building energy benchmarking and transparency policies. It provides information about what is needed for these policies, lists key considerations for success, and demonstrates how government leaders have used benchmarking as an initial step for enacting building performance standards. The toolkit includes four sections—each intended to build on the previous section— that focus on different aspects of policy development