Office Buildings outside the U.S. should use the Energy Star Portfolio Manager to benachmark their energy performance. Do the energy consumptions entered to the protfolio manager have to include user electricity (for computers etc.) or does the Energy Star look at consumptions of the main building operation only? This would have a strong influence on the benchmarking result.
How would energy consumptions in multi tenant buildings be tracked? Is it common in th U.S., that the building owner /property manager has access to the consumptions of his clients?
Jenny Carney
Vice PresidentWSP
LEEDuser Expert
657 thumbs up
October 11, 2010 - 3:50 pm
The energy inputs into Portfolio Manager must include 100% of all energy consumed by the building, whether for base building loads, tenant plug loads, etc.
For multitenant buildings, it can be a little tricky accessing the information. Sometimes a building will have a main meter for the tenant electricity in addition to tenant submeters (you really just need to know overall consumption, so in this case you could just look at the main). In other buildings, there might only be a tenant-level meter and no building-level meter for electricity going to tenant spaces. In this case, the building owner has to ask all the tenants to share their information. Some US utilities will make it easy for the building owner by aggregating all the consumption from tenants within the building. So, I'd recommend starting first with the utility to see if they will provide the aggregated info, otherwise you may need to request utility info form each tenant individually.
Joerg Schlenger
Dr.-Ing.Drees&Sommer Advanced Building Technologies GmbH
8 thumbs up
October 12, 2010 - 2:53 am
Thanks for your reply, Jenny!
Very often the tenants have their own contracts with different energy suppliers and no overall meters are present. So as you said, we will have to start asking the tenants to share their information.