New ENERGY STAR Resources for the Multifamily Housing and Entertainment Industries
The multifamily housing and entertainment industries have another incentive to make energy efficiency a New Year's resolution: EPA has unveiled new resources to help both industries achieve superior energy performance.
Last year, EPA added a multifamily housing space type in Portfolio Manager, the online energy management tool, allowing owners and operators of multifamily communities to assess and improve the energy performance of their buildings. With more than 50 million Americans living in 24 million multifamily units, this sector presents vast opportunities to reduce energy consumption and associated greenhouse gas emissions. Energy efficiency not only reduces operating costs, increasing net operating income, but also represents an important marketing niche as the demand for green living increases. To take advantage of these benefits, the ENERGY STAR program offers free live and recorded training sessions to help partners measure and track the energy use of their multifamily housing portfolios. The newly launched ENERGY STAR for Multifamily Housing provides additional tools, resources, and up-to-date information to help multifamily industry professionals start the new year by saving energy and money through improved energy performance.
Since the beginning of 2009, EPA has been working with owners and managers of stadiums, museums, convention centers, and other entertainment facilities to promote the benefits of energy efficiency—to facility owners and operators, as well as the visiting public. In a series of Webinars, EPA helped more than 70 organizations understand the value of benchmarking energy use with Portfolio Manager. Because of this success, EPA launched ENERGY STAR for Entertainment, which provides tools and resources for the entertainment sector, including a Quick Reference guide to benchmarking, information on communicating the value of energy efficiency, and a collection of success stories describing how industry members have leveraged ENERGY STAR and energy efficiency as the first step in "going green."