Benchmarking

Developers and owners of buildings with units that earn the ENERGY STAR through the Multifamily High Rise Program must commit to benchmarking their buildings in Portfolio Manager for a period of two years.

Portfolio Manager is a free, online, interactive energy management tool that allows developers/owners to measure and track their building’s energy and water consumption, identify investment priorities, and verify improvements over time. Developers/owners can use Portfolio Manager to track weather-normalized energy use intensity (EUI), energy costs, greenhouse gas emissions, and water consumption. For more information on how to use Portfolio Manager, see the Portfolio Manager Quick Start Guide.

To accomplish this goal, the developer/owner or an entity working on their behalf must be capable of evaluating the utility consumption of the residential-associated spaces independent of any commercial/retail space. These non-residential-associated parts of the building shall be separately metered (or sub-metered) for electricity, gas, fuel oil, water, steam, and hot water for domestic and/or space heating purposes. Also building owners should work with tenants to secure consumption information. If the building is direct-metered for utilities to the apartments, the building owner may need to secure signed releases from individual apartment occupants to allow for benchmarking or find alternative methods to assessing whole-building energy consumption. Potential options might include installing a whole-building meter or asking the utility for aggregated data.

All data uploaded to Portfolio Manager is strictly confidential and only used to estimate the energy performance of the building as a whole, not of individual apartments.

As of September 16, 2014, multifamily buildings can earn the ENERGY STAR for the property through EPA’s Portfolio Manager if they have at least 1 year of actual, whole property energy use data. Portfolio Manager compares a multifamily building’s measured performance against a database of similar buildings to generate a 1-100 score. Buildings that score 75 or above earn the ENERGY STAR. For more information on how multifamily buildings can earn the ENERGY STAR with Portfolio Manager please visit the eligibility criteria for the 1-100 ENERGY STAR score page.