EPA Seeks Feedback on Utility Building-Level Data by June 7
In late May, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) announced the opportunity for members to provide input related to access to whole-building energy use data to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The EPA just announced its Whole-Building Energy Data Campaign to assist building owners in communicating the need for whole-building energy use data to utility companies. The campaign seeks input from building owners and managers, companies that provide support for benchmarking, and others to learn more about whole-building energy data needs. The survey, due no later than June 7, takes approximately 10 minutes to complete and can be found here.
The form will ask you to identify priority utilities where this data is needed most, and to share the importance of obtaining this information for your organization. This could include, but is not limited to, identifying any priority utilities or geographic regions from which you’d like to receive whole-building energy data; the number, location, and/or description of buildings for which you need data; whether you or your organization would be interested in meeting with utilities if EPA were able to facilitate a discussion, etc. Further, it could include, but is not limited to, statement(s) about how the lack of streamlined access to whole-building energy consumption data has affected your benchmarking, energy management, and/or greenhouse gas emission reduction efforts, or statements about how your efforts have been bolstered where you do have access to this data.
Agencies can access currently available utility data through the EPA’s access map here. The interactive map shows the service territories of utilities that provide energy benchmarking data to their customers. While more and more utilities are making whole-building energy use data available to owners, over 90 percent of U.S. utilities do not provide this service. The lack of whole-building energy data frequently prevents owners of building types where tenants are responsible for at least some energy bills from gaining a full understanding of their buildings and taking steps to make them more energy efficient. The whole-building energy data campaign aims to address this problem by supporting building owners in making the case to utility companies for the importance of data access.
HUD’s efforts related to these programs, like benchmarking to prepare for the Green and Resilient Retrofit Program (GRRP) in multifamily housing, for example, are currently not extended to public housing. PHADA continues to advocate to HUD to extend these resources to the public housing program, as well, including technical assistance funding.
A comprehensive understanding of your organization’s energy usage is essential to document and improve a building’s performance, as well as accessing new incentives and other programs from HUD and EPA, for example. Further, the Department states that this data will be crucial for the success of many of the programs associated with the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL), which among other purposes, aim to invest in domestic energy production while promoting clean energy through financing green power, lowering costs through tax credits, reducing emissions, and advancing environmental justice.
It should be noted that HUD’s efforts related to these programs, like benchmarking to prepare for the Green and Resilient Retrofit Program (GRRP) in multifamily housing, for example, are currently not extended to public housing. PHADA continues to advocate to HUD to extend these resources to the public housing program, as well, including technical assistance funding. The Department has stated that they continue to work toward this. PHADA will provide updates to members as new information becomes available.