On February 10, 2011, ASTM formally published its Building
Energy Performance Assessment (BEPA) Standard - E 2797-11. This
standard will enable users to measure the energy performance of a
commercial building in connection with a real estate transaction.
Regulatory drivers spurred the development of the BEPA standard,
even in the midst of a construction recession. In the past few
years, several states and local governments passed mandatory
building energy labeling and transactional disclosure regulations.
These disclosure regulations, combined with some building codes
that are now requiring specific energy-efficiency improvements,
triggered the development of a standardized methodology to assess
and report on a commercial building's energy use. The
BEPA's passage arrives at a crucial time when building
certification standards face increased scrutiny, both in the market
and the courtroom.
The ASTM BEPA standard includes the following five components: (1)
site visit; (2) records collection; (3) review and analysis; (4)
interviews; and (5) preparation of a report. ASTM is not creating
or implying the existence of a legal obligation for the reporting
of energy performance or other building-related information.
Rather, the BEPA offers certain guidelines to the industry to
promote consistency when collecting (and perhaps reporting)
buildings' energy usage data, such as:
- collecting building characteristic data (i.e., gross floor area, monthly occupancy, occupancy hours)
- collecting a building's energy use over the previous three years (with a minimum of one year) - including weather data representative of the area where the building is located;
- analyzing variables to determine what constitutes the average, upper limit, and lower limit of a building's energy use and cost conditions;
- determining pro forma building energy use and cost; and
- communicating a building's energy use and cost information in a report
One of the options available to users of the BEPA standard is to
identify government-sponsored energy efficiency grant and incentive
programs that may be available for any energy efficiency
improvements that could be installed at the building (thereby
increasing its value, and making it more attractive to potential
buyers).
Building benchmarking (i.e., comparing a building's energy
output to its peers) is not part of the ASTM BEPA standard's
primary scope of work, but rather a "non-scope
consideration." The BEPA certainly could be used in
conjunction with building certification tools already in the
marketplace, such as ASHRAE, Green Globes, and U.S. Green Building
Council (LEED), to name a few.
However, as the economic noose has tightened in recent years, green
building standards have received increased scrutiny. Indeed,
builders and landlords who sell their properties with the promise
that they have some green certification (which can be expensive to
obtain), and that promise for whatever reason fails to translate to
the economic savings contracted for, could face liability.
The Gifford v. USGBC lawsuit currently pending in the
United States District Court for the Southern District of New York
crystallizes the debate over green building certification (in this
case - LEED). The core allegations in the lawsuit prompt this
author to see significant value for stakeholders to use ASTM's
BEPA as a supplement to applying rating and benchmarking systems
like LEED.
Gifford's primary complaint is that LEED-certified buildings
are not as energy-efficient as advertised. Support for this
contention rests on Gifford's analysis of a 2008 New Buildings
Institute (NBI) study comparing predicted energy use in
LEED-certified buildings with actual energy use. In the study, NBI
concluded that LEED buildings are 25-30% more energy-efficient
compared to the national average. To the contrary, Gifford
concluded that LEED-certified buildings use 29% more energy than
the national average. He further emphasized that the NBI results
were skewed in part because the NBI study compared the median
energy use of LEED buildings to the mean energy use of non-LEED
buildings.
The purpose of this article is not to comment on the merits of the
Gifford lawsuit or criticize LEED. But this
apples-to-oranges argument articulated by Gifford magnifies the
proverbial elephant in the "green" room - the need for
sufficient objective data to accurately compare the energy use and
energy cost of buildings against their relevant peer groups. With
such data in hand, the benchmarking and rating systems already in
place can be buttressed with a greater measure of consistency and
transparency (a big issue for detractors of green building
certification, like Gifford). Furthermore, the more stakeholders in
the real estate industry (buyers, sellers, lenders) understand how
a building's energy performance was determined, the better
equipped they will be to put a price on the economic and
environmental benefits of green buildings.
In sum, the ASTM BEPA standard is expected to become the standard
for building energy use data collection. It can be used to quantify
a building's energy use as well as its projected energy use and
cost ranges, factoring in a number of independent variables (i.e.,
weather, occupancy rates), by way of a transparent process.
Finally, the BEPA building energy use determination can complement
compliance reporting under applicable building energy labeling or
disclosure obligations. In the end, ASTM's BEPA can provide the
foundation by which an apples-to-apples comparison can take place
in evaluating commercial building energy performance determinations
and certifications.
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