Natural Gas Use

Alexa - this is sort of an unusual situation, so I don't know of any precedent. However, my suspicion is that you would not be allowed to split the gas use in half for the benchmarking purposes. Usually a kitchen that is part of an office building that just serves the occupants would be classified as the main space type (office). In this case, maybe you would be allowed to classify that space as Other: Food Service. The benchmarking allocates different EUIs to different space types based on the size and other variables, so presumably if this kitchen is serving another building in addition to this one, it is larger than if it just served the project building. I would suggest asking this question directly to Energy Star, since it's a bit unusual and you'll want to be certain that you are handling it correctly.

Alexa - I actually think this might be fairly simple. The building sounds like a Case 2, Option 1 candidate which will allow you to create a weighted national average source EUI based on the square footage of the various space uses in the building. The fact that the commercial kitchen portion of the building serves other buildings on campus doesn't actually matter - the CBECS data provides a national average of a wide variety of kitchens operating with widely varying hours, capacity, and product. It's part of the beauty (and clumsiness) of that tool. But from an EBOM perspective, you probably wont be able to control for production. I guess if you wanted to make the case that your kitchen is radically more productive than most (on a per SF basis) then an alternative compliance path might be justified, but I think that the standard path is probably where you'll end up. I'll be interested to hear if USGBC agrees!