LL84 Energy and Water Benchmarking Scores Released
This is the second year NYC has required buildings to report on their energy and water consumption and the first year large apartment buildings have had to do so. Local Law 84 (LL84) covers the biggest buildings in NYC–24,000 that are over 50,000 square feet. Recently, the city released the 2012 energy and water use data for all properties required to annually benchmark under LL84.
This means that you can, for the first time, go online and see how much energy and water large apartment buildings use per square foot and how that compares to similar buildings in NYC. You'll be able to do this every year going forward.
NYC is the first to publicly disclose energy consumption of multifamily buildings — Chicago and Washington, D.C., will require it within a few years. The data shows that NYC's apartment buildings use about the same amount of energy as the national median and that a small percentage of buildings are the biggest energy users. Buildings built in the 1970s use the most energy, and the data shows that for all large NYC buildings only 2 percent of them are responsible for more than half the city's greenhouse gas emissions.
Highlights from this year's report:
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Although NYC's buildings are about the same as others in the Northeast on efficiency, they are more efficient than the national average.
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The reason could be that buildings in this part of the country tend to be older and therefore more solidly built. Older buildings have been shown to be even more efficient that new LEED-certified ones.
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Retail businesses range greatly in energy use, with the most energy-intensive ones using five times the energy per square foot. Large apartment buildings, on the other hand, don't vary much in energy use between the most and least intensive users.
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NYC raised its median ENERGY STAR score from 64 to 67 in the past two years — the benchmark used to compare jurisdictions across the country.
The NYC building energy consumption data can be found by clicking here.