ENERGY STAR News:
Business and Industry Edition

Fall 2009

Choose an article

• EPA Unveils New Portfolio Manager Reports
• 2009 Small Business and Congregations Awards: Winners Announced!
• Celebrate Energy Awareness Month
• EPA’s Green Power Partnership Honors ENERGY STAR Partners
• Houses of Worship Can Now Earn the ENERGY STAR
• Two New Fuel Types Added to Portfolio Manager: On-Site Solar and On-Site Wind
• Rate Plant Energy Performance on a National Basis with New ENERGY STAR Energy Performance Indicators
• EPA Signs Agreement with American Foundry Society to Benchmark U.S. Metalcasting Plants through ENERGY STAR

EPA Unveils New Portfolio Manager Reports

Portfolio Manager users now have access to enhanced reporting of building and portfolio data with a new interactive tool: Portfolio Manager Reports. The new reporting feature will allow you to easily extract and display tables and graphs about your commercial buildings and their energy and water performance. Use it to prioritize activities and investments, establish more robust benchmarks, report to other groups, and conduct comparative analysis.

Want to customize your data tables? You’ll be able to manipulate tabular data by expanding or hiding columns, sorting, or creating sub-groups. Want to see a visual representation of your data? View building information on a bar chart or line graph to see the big picture. Prefer to parse your data a bit more? You’ll be able to instantly export your data in Excel, XML, CSV, or PDF format.

To access the new reporting feature, log in to Portfolio Manager go to "My Portfolio," and click on "NEW! Generate Reports and Graphs," located on the right side of the page.

Back to Top

2009 Small Business and Congregations Awards: Winners Announced!

In September, EPA named the 11 winners of the 2009 ENERGY STAR Small Business and Congregations Awards. This year’s winners demonstrated effective energy management practices and innovative efficiency solutions. They are:

Small Businesses

• Elephants Delicatessen (Portland, Ore.)
• Finger Lakes Institute at Hobart and William Smith Colleges (Geneva, N.Y.)
• MAINTCO Corporation (Burbank, Calif.)
• Old Town Trolley Tours (San Diego, Calif.)
• Preston Hood Chevrolet (Fort Walton Beach, Fla.)
• RCC Associates (Deerfield Beach, Fla.)
• South Coast Mold, Inc. (Irvine, Calif.)

Congregations

• First Baptist Church of Springdale and Shiloh Christian School (Springdale, Ark.)
• First Baptist Church of Dallas, Texas (Dallas, Texas)
• Idlewild Baptist Church (Lutz, Fla.)
• Swarthmore Presbyterian Church (Swarthmore, Pa.)

Together, these award-winning organizations reduced annual carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by more than 8,500 tons, equivalent to the emissions from the average electricity use of more than 1,000 homes. Financial savings for this year’s winners totaled more than $895,000 annually. The energy saving efforts of the winners include lighting upgrades; improved insulation and sealing; installation of ENERGY STAR qualified appliances and equipment; installation of solar arrays; and new energy-efficient construction.

By strategically managing the energy performance of their facilities, small businesses and congregations can cut utility costs by 25 percent or more without sacrificing features, convenience, style, or comfort, while making significant contributions to a cleaner environment.

Read full profiles of this year’s small business and congregation award winners.

Back to Top

Celebrate Energy Awareness Month

October is Energy Awareness Month, and there is still time to celebrate with your employees, tenants, and community.

• Visit the Bring Your Green to Work with ENERGY STAR Web site for lots of fun information and activities to get everyone thinking about energy.
• Order free publications and tip cards to hand out at your organization’s energy awareness event.
• Sponsor a contest to see who can come up with the best energy-saving idea.
• Need to brush up on your own energy awareness? Download our Fast Facts about energy use in buildings.
• Sign up your organization for the ENERGY STAR Challenge and commit to helping us improve the energy efficiency of America’s commercial and industrial buildings by 10 percent or more.
• Encourage individuals to take the ENERGY STAR Pledge to reduce their own environmental impact.

Commercial and industrial buildings account for nearly half of our nation’s greenhouse gas emissions. When lights are left on and the heating and cooling system runs in an unoccupied building, energy is wasted. When this happens, a power plant down the road burns fossil fuels to generate that energy and sends emissions into our environment. Although energy-saving solutions are at our fingertips and opportunities are documented in study after study, awareness is still one of our biggest obstacles to overcome in the fight against global warming. As an ENERGY STAR partner, you are uniquely positioned to carry the message to those in and around your organization. Rise to the challenge this October and help EPA take energy awareness to new levels!

Back to Top

EPA’s Green Power Partnership Honors ENERGY STAR Partners

On September 14, EPA's Green Power Partnership (GPP) honored six ENERGY STAR partners at the Ninth Annual Green Power Leadership Awards ceremony in Atlanta, Georgia. These award-winning organizations were recognized for their commitment and contribution to helping advance the nation’s voluntary green power market. GPP recognized the following ENERGY STAR partners in three award categories:

Green Power Partner of the Year
Kohl’s Department Stores

Green Power Purchasing
Foulger-Pratt Management, Inc.
Motorola, Inc.
Shaklee Corporation

On-Site Generation
Applied Materials, Inc.
Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. / California and Texas Facilities

These ENERGY STAR partners, along with 11 other winning organizations, were judged on their green power purchase, leadership, overall green power strategy, and impact on the green power market.

EPA’s Green Power Partnership works with more than 1,100 partner organizations to voluntarily purchase green power to reduce the environmental impacts of conventional electricity use. Green power is generated from renewable resources such as solar, wind, geothermal, biogas, biomass, and low-impact hydro.

EPA co-sponsors the Green Power Leadership Awards in conjunction with the U.S. Department of Energy and the Center for Resource Solutions. Visit the Green Power Leadership Awards Web page to learn more about the awards and how your organization can apply for a 2010 Green Power Leadership Award.

Back to Top

Houses of Worship Can Now Earn the ENERGY STAR

Houses of worship can now receive an ENERGY STAR rating, in addition to using Portfolio Manager to measure and track energy use. Eligible houses of worship can earn the ENERGY STAR for superior energy performance. Any buildings previously defined as “Other—Religious Worship” were automatically transferred to the House of Worship category, but these spaces have been assigned default values for four new input categories: seating capacity, weekdays of operation, presence of cooking facilities, and number of commercial refrigeration/freezer units. If your portfolio includes any houses of worship, please log in to Portfolio Manager and provide actual data for these categories. By entering these data, you will ensure that your facilities receive the most accurate ratings. If your house of worship achieves an ENERGY STAR rating of 75 or higher, you now can apply for the ENERGY STAR.

Back to Top

Two New Fuel Types Added to Portfolio Manager: On-Site Solar and On-Site Wind

EPA has added two new fuels to Portfolio Manager: on-site solar and on-site wind. The addition of these fuels will help you track and manage energy associated with renewable energy installations you may have at your facility. This enhancement enables a more comprehensive assessment of the true energy performance of a building, provides a clearer connection between building energy use and associated greenhouse gas emissions, and adds tracking for renewable energy certificate (REC) transactions. RECs represent the environmental, social, and other non-power-related qualities associated with a unit of renewable energy, and you can purchase RECs regardless of whether or not your building has onsite renewable energy.

You can find additional information on these changes at the ENERGY STAR Web site. To learn more about green power, visit EPA's Green Power Partnership Web site . If you have any questions, please contact buildings@energystar.gov.

Back to Top

Rate Plant Energy Performance on a National Basis with New ENERGY STAR Energy Performance Indicators

EPA is pleased to announce the availability of four new ENERGY STAR plant energy performance indicators (EPIs). These new EPIs, developed in cooperation with industry, rate the energy performance of four types of U.S. manufacturing plants: flat glass, container glass, frozen fried potato, and juice. 

The new EPIs are the first opportunity for these industries to determine how a plant’s energy performance ranks on a national basis. An EPI is an external yardstick that enables plant owners and operators to assess how efficiently a plant uses energy relative to similar plants nationwide.  Knowing whether a plant ranks among the highest or lowest performing plants is important for companies that are trying to improve energy efficiency and allocate resources to achieve the greatest benefit. EPIs are part of the overall ENERGY STAR approach recommended by EPA to help organizations manage energy effectively. ENERGY STAR EPIs and energy management resources help companies set realistic goals for improving plant energy performance and identify steps to take to improve energy efficiency.

ENERGY STAR plant EPIs score energy performance on a scale of 1–100. Plants receiving an EPI score of 75 or higher are eligible to earn ENERGY STAR recognition. The new EPIs may be downloaded at www.energystar.gov/epis.

Back to Top

EPA Signs Agreement with American Foundry Society to Benchmark U.S. Metalcasting Plants through ENERGY STAR

This August, EPA and the American Foundry Society (AFS) signed an important agreement to promote increased industrial energy efficiency among U.S. metalcasting companies through ENERGY STAR. The agreement supports activities aimed at assisting these companies to initiate and implement a productive energy management program; adopt clean, energy-efficient technologies; and achieve continual improvement of their facilities’ energy efficiency and energy use intensity. EPA and AFS believe that energy efficiency offers a cost-effective opportunity to reduce energy use and costs and will work together to ensure existing information and tools are readily accessible to metalcasters to improve the energy efficiency of their operations. Through outreach efforts and sharing of resources, both organizations will reach a greater number of metalcasters, help them progress toward greater energy efficiency, and establish systems capable of delivering and sustaining energy savings in the long term. At the same time, EPA will develop advanced energy management tools (such as an ENERGY STAR plant EPI) for the metalcasting industry in the United States.

Back to Top