Seattle Building Owners: Energy Disclosure Required Beginning This Week

Seattle is days away from enforcing the first stage of its Energy Benchmarking and Reporting law, Council Bill 116731, requiring nonresidential and multifamily building owners to annually report and disclose EPA ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager benchmarking data and performance ratings.

Currently, 26% of the city of Seattle’s carbon emissions come from buildings and the ordinance’s intent is in support of the Green Building Capital Initiative goal to reduce energy consumption in existing building stock by 20%. Additional goals of the ordinance are to lower energy costs to owners and tenants, decrease greenhouse gas emissions, inform better building management and design practices to allow an informed market to drive energy efficiency improvements, and to create job opportunities in the green economy.

The Seattle energy disclosure law expands on Washington state’s energy disclosure law, more information on which can be found here.

Buildings Required to Disclose Energy

Commercial and multifamily building owners will be required to annually report and disclose EPA ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager benchmarking data and performance ratings according to the following schedule:

• October 1, 2011: Commercial Buildings over 50,000 SF (must have current benchmarking results entered into their Portfolio Manager records)
• April 1, 2012: Commercial Buildings over 10,000 SF, Multifamily Buildings and Mixed Use Buildings with five or more dwelling units

Building owners should leave ample time for utilities to comply with their requests for energy consumption data – utilities have up to 60 days to comply with requests.

Continue reading the GlobeSt blog here.