Amongst the items on San Francisco’s Land Use and Economic Development committee agenda this afternoon is an ordinance requiring owners of nonresidential buildings to conduct “Energy Efficiency Audits” of their properties and file annual “Energy Benchmark Summaries.”
Under the proposed ordinance, building owners would be required to annually “benchmark” the energy use of their buildings and conduct energy audits of buildings. Energy reports would be made available to buyers, lenders and the city. The rules would apply first to commercial properties larger than 50,000 square feet starting in October 2011, and then phase in so that by 2013, the rules would apply to all commercial properties 10,000 square feet or larger.
Also on the Committee’s agenda, legislation establishing a Rincon Hill Area Infrastructure Financing District and authorizing up $22 million in San Francisco bonds to finance “public improvements of communitywide significance” related to the development of ten proposed residential buildings within the Rincon Hill area.
∙ Land Use and Economic Development Committee Agenda: 1/24/11 [sfbos.org]
∙ Infrastructure Financing District Ordinance: Rincon Hill Area [sfbos.org]
∙ Rincon Hill Area Infrastructure Financing District Bonds [sfbos.org]
This will be a boost to anyone in the business of conducting energy audits. While I like the idea of encouraging more efficient buildings it would be nice if simple economics could drive changes rather than government ordinance. Probably the issue is that energy subsidies keep prices low and it is hard to phase out those subsidies because it would have a heavy impact on poorer households.
An audit every year? Seems like overkill to me. This assumes that building managers don’t care about energy efficiency. I worked for a company that did such audits, and it was clear that the bigger the building, the more management cared about being efficient. Those costs show up on their bottom line. We rarely found significant deficiencies in large commercial buildings. But residences in San Francisco? There’s low hanging fruit.
> Under the proposed ordinance, building
> owners would be required to anually
> “benchmark” the energy use of their
> buildings and conduct energy audits
Every year there are less and less buildings where the “owner” pays for utilities. If the “tenants” pay for energy the owners are not able to find out anything about energy usage from PG&E unless they have a court order or get written permission from the tenants…