On the Money: Keeping Track of Your Building's Energy Scores

Take, for example, Concord Village. In 2012, the co-op was approved for a grant from the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA). The grant required that the co-op reduce energy use by 15 percent. Concord Village met this goal by replacing its indoor and outdoor lights with LEDs on timers, sealing doorways in the staircases so heat wasn't sucked out, and switching from master meters to submetering. (Habitat reported on these efforts in "Conserving at Concord Village" in December 2014.)

On Metered.nyc, you can see the dramatic reduction in their energy usage.

"If you're a member of a co-op," says Russell Unger, executive director of the Urban Green Council, "and you want to see how the neighbors are doing, or see how you're doing year to year," you can.

How It Works

Simply click through to http://metered.nyc and search for an address. If a building has been complying with Local Law 84, a page is produced with several graphs and charts breaking down its energy usage over the last couple of years. Information from 2012 and 2013 is available for residential buildings. "Data for 2014 has been filed by owners, but it needs to be cleaned and will not be publicly available until September 2015," says Christina Anjesky, director of development and communications for the Urban Green Council.

Performance

In addition to the progress graph, the performance section for a given building will show how its energy usage, water usage, and greenhouse gas emissions compare to similarly sized buildings. The example below comes from the Metered.nyc page for Concord Village, which can be seen here.

Unger points out that seeing an omission — such as the missing water usage figure in the above example — could be a red flag, but boards and residents should reach out to their managing agent or whoever was designated to report their benchmarking statistics to find out why information was omitted.

The last figure in that list could be the trickiest for boards to parse. Despite appearances, it's not a projection of monetary savings; instead, according to Anjesky, "it's an estimate of the percentage of energy that could potentially be saved if energy efficiency measures were employed." So, in the case of Concord Village, after it achieved its 15 percent reduction in energy use from 2012 to 2013, Metered.nyc projects that additional energy efficiency measures could give them an additional 13 percent reduction in energy use. (It's important to note, however, that Concord Village may have already implemented additional energy-saving features and reached this new goal, since data for 2014 has been submitted but not yet published.)

For more information, you can try Metered New York yourself or read about the Urban Green Council online.

Benchmarking data is also publicly available through the Office of Sustainability in the form of several large Excel spreadsheets. Each year's benchmarking scores are reported in a separate sheet.