Tools and Resources

The Cash Flow Opportunity Calculator helps inform strategic decisions about financing energy efficiency projects. This document provides an explanation of the calculations and methodology at work behind the calculator.

This study, by the Institute for Market Transformation and the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, analyzes the potential of a national building energy rating and disclosure policy to create jobs and reduce energy-related expenditures in commercial and multifamily residential buildings.

This 12-page paper describes the voluntary ENERGY STAR program policy approach selected to engage and motivate the automobile manufacturing industry to improve its energy performance, and the results of the industry’s efforts to advance energy management as measured by the updated EPI. Most notably, the paper shows that electricity use per vehicle in the best plants improved by 2 percent, while the fuel use per vehicle improved by a dramatic 12 percent.

Read this report from A Better City and Meister Consultants Group, Inc., on behalf of the Boston Green Ribbon Commission’s Commercial Real Estate Working Group, to learn about the benchmarking and disclosure policies that are becoming a trend in major cities across America. This report summarizes lessons learned from the first U.S. cities to implement benchmarking and disclosure programs with interviews from city representatives as well as members of the federal government.

This report is an outcome of a roundtable convened in late 2010 by the IMT and senior policy implementers from 10 states and cities,  national building energy efficiency experts, and leaders from the commercial real estate industry. The purpose was to discuss best practices for implementing commercial building benchmarking and disclosure policies. Many of these approaches have broad applicability both to current policy implementers and to those that may implement rating and disclosure policies in the future.

This report disucsses the carbon emissions reduction potential in the U.S. chemicals and pulp & paper industries by applying CHP technologies

Since the first ENERGY STAR certified building in 1999, ENERGY STAR has worked to bring thousands of organizations in the commercial building marketplace to the forefront of energy efficiency and climate stewardship. This report gives an overview of the first decade of the program from 1999-2009, includes many photos of interesting buildings, and provides brief case studies of notable ENERGY STAR certified properties.

Read this paper, by researches at UCLA, Maastricht University, and UC Berkeley, to learn about the electricity consumption of commercial buildings. The paper looks at a large sample of buildings from California over a 10-year period. The paper discusses the impact of structure quality on electricity consumption, and also explores the role that tenant behavior and tenant incentives play in determining a building’s environmental performance.

This paper explores a 2010 survey conducted by CoreNet Global and Jones Lang LaSalle, which revealed a trend among corporate real estate executives toward sustainability strategies. The report explores the consideration of sustainability when determining location, the willingness to pay more for green space, and the workplace benefits of sustainability, such as employee health and productivity.

The Portfolio Manager DataTrends series is the first-ever analysis of aggregate data stored within ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager, pulled from a pool of hundreds of thousands of commercial buildings across the United States. This fact sheet --- Benchmarking and Energy Savings --- gives the first-ever evidence that buildings that benchmark their energy use on a regular basis tend to reduce their energy consumption by 2.4 percent per year, on average. Other statistics are also presented in an easy-to-read format.