Many news outlets reported last week that as part of the President’s slimmed down budget, the Environmental Protection Agency is facing a $5B operating budget cut and elimination of all climate programs, including the very successful Energy Star program. This includes the elimination of Energy Star Portfolio Manager, which over the last 20 years has become the standard for tracking and sharing energy data across assets.
Anyone involved in commercial real estate operations, management, or investment should be tracking these developments and understand implications for acquisitions, leasing, green rating programs and local audit laws. If you work with Energy Star Portfolio Manager to benchmark your building, you should immediately take action to secure your data. Gridium benchmarking clients can relax a bit, Gridium will download your data once a month on your behalf.
Gridium’s Independence, Your Data Security
First, let’s address the operational continuity for Gridium users. While we actively support our customers in leveraging Portfolio Manager for Energy Star certifications and mandatory benchmarking compliance, our core data processing, analytics, and savings delivery are not dependent on the platform’s availability. Gridium utilizes direct data connections with utilities to power our insights, and does not use Portfolio Manager in any element of our data model. Should Portfolio Manager experience disruptions, your access to Gridium’s tools and the ROI data we provide will remain uninterrupted and robust.
Beyond the Score: Why Energy Star Matters Deeply to CRE
Although Gridium won’t be directly affected, losing easy access to Portfolio Manager would be far more impactful than simply losing the ability to generate Energy Star score. Energy Star as a program and brand is a remarkably successful public-private partnership, a high-ROI engine that has demonstrably driven billions of dollars in energy savings for businesses and consumers across the nation and is recognized by 90% of US consumers. Portfolio Manager’s data collection and sharing ability is the envy of international property owners; we frequently hear from our customers with European portfolios how much they wish a similar, universally understood benchmarking software program existed there.
What happens if Portfolio Manager disappears? The impact is much bigger than you might think, as the platform has become the dominant data platform that investors, tenants, and others built upon. Here’s a look at ten essential functions that would become difficult or impossible if portfolio manager disappears:
- Get Energy Star Certified: The foundational benefit. Certification itself is a key achievement, unlocking marketing value and access to specific programs or tenant requirements.
- Market Your Performance: Those widely recognized blue Energy Star plaques and window stickers aren’t just decorative. They are trusted signals of superior energy performance to tenants, investors, guests, and leasing prospects, instantly communicating quality and efficiency. What other brand has 90% recognition that could even hope to step in?
- Lower Operating Costs: Gridium constantly sees how a low Energy Star score will spur a property into action. Teams are suddenly motivated to find opportunities to reduce energy waste, leading to lower operating costs, and higher NOI.
- Meet Tenant Mandates: Securing leases often hinges on certification. High-profile tenants, most notably the federal government’s GSA (the irony!), frequently mandate specific Energy Star scores or certifications as a condition of the lease. Increasingly, corporations with their own ESG goals have similar requirements.
- Fulfill Benchmarking Ordinances: Dozens of cities and states now mandate annual energy benchmarking and disclosure, and the vast majority rely specifically on Energy Star Portfolio Manager as the required submission tool. Failure to file means non-compliance and potential fines.
- Access Whole-Building Data: Portfolio Manager provides a standardized (if sometimes cumbersome) channel for utilities to provide aggregated, whole-building energy data, which often includes tenant consumption. This is crucial for accurate benchmarking and identifying efficiency opportunities beyond common areas.
- Standardized Benchmarking: The simple 1-100 score, while not perfect, provides a widely understood, nationally normalized metric to compare a building’s energy performance against its peers and track progress over time.
- Achieve LEED Certification: For existing buildings pursuing LEED O+M certification, Portfolio Manager data is integral. Achieving a minimum Energy Star score (currently 75) is a prerequisite, and higher scores contribute significantly towards the valuable Optimize Energy Performance credit (worth up to 18 points). Disruptions jeopardize LEED pursuits.
- Gain Audit Exemptions: In many jurisdictions with mandatory energy audit laws (like Local Law 87 in NYC or San Francisco’s Audit requirements), achieving a high Energy Star score often provides an exemption from the more intensive audit requirements, saving time and money.
- Streamline Due Diligence: During property transactions, an asset’s Energy Star score and history provide a quick, standardized indicator of energy performance for potential buyers, lenders, and appraisers, facilitating faster assessments.
Clearly, this is far more than just a label. Portfolio Manager functions as a critical piece of data collection, sharing, reporting, communications and operating costs reduction system for the entire industry.
Taking Control: Download Your History
Given the potential risks, downloading your historical data is a prudent and necessary step. The process varies slightly depending on portfolio size and data needs. To help navigate this, Gridium has prepared a concise Guide: Downloading Your Complete Portfolio Manager History.
Our guide walks through the steps for small and large portfolios, differentiating between summary downloads and the crucial Custom Download feature needed for raw, meter-level history in original units. It also covers Custom Reports for metric-level analysis and highlights important data (like attached PDFs) that cannot be downloaded automatically.
Looking Ahead, How you can help
Our industry has been here before, with a threatened shutdown in 2017 that was thwarted due to an outcry. If your organization belongs to ULI, USGBC, Real Estate Roundtable or BOMA, support those efforts to communicate to the administration. Congress has a long history of bipartisan authorization for Energy Star, so call your representative to voice your support for Energy Star.
We’ll continue to monitor developments related to Energy Star and keep our community informed. In the meantime, take control of your data – it’s one of your building’s most important historical records.
