What Multifamily Operators Need To Know About Building Energy Performance Standards

What are Building Energy Performance Standards? In January 2022, the Biden Administration launched the National Building Performance Standards Coalition, with a timeline of implementing these standards and policies by Earth Day 2024. These regulations require commercial and multifamily property owners to measure and report a building or property’s environmental impact, typically measured by greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions or energy use intensity (EUI), with the goal of reducing that impact by a certain percentage. These Building Energy Performance Standards (BEPS) regulations are a continuation of benchmarking compliance laws, which typically precede BEPS and are the mechanism for local governments to collect energy data for analysis and establishment of carbon emission reduction goals. “Benchmarking compliance is a rolling mandate that obliges property owners to file whole building energy use, and in some cases water use, data with Energy Star Portfolio Manager (ESPM) for the entire fiscal year so that a property owner can continue building the EUI trend of a specific site,” Dimitris Kapsis, VP of Sustainability & Energy Management at RealPage®, explains. “Then, BEPS regulations come in after that to set targets for energy usage reduction, and in turn greenhouse gas emissions reduction, driven by viable energy conservation projects and electrification.” Although relatively new, BEPS-based regulations are building momentum across the country, with eight states and Washington, D.C., already enacting policies across twelve jurisdictions. Of these 12 locales, only four have currently published actual reduction targets, deadlines and associated fines for noncompliance. The jurisdictions that have BEPS policies in place, their initial building reporting timing and the related compliance deadlines are listed below. The three cities that have published targets with near-term, compliance-by dates are in red: California: Chula Vista...