Benchmark Your Building Using ENERGY STAR® Portfolio Manager®

What is Benchmarking?

The first step to saving energy at your building is to benchmark — that is, to measure and compare your building’s energy to similar buildings, past consumption, or a reference performance level.

Benchmarking turns the information on your utility bill into knowledge you can act on.

ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager — the Industry Standard for Benchmarking Commercial Buildings

Portfolio Manager is an interactive resource management tool that enables you to benchmark the energy use of any type of building, all in a secure online environment. Nearly 25% of U.S. commercial building space is already actively benchmarking in Portfolio Manager, making it the industry-leading benchmarking tool. It also serves as the national benchmarking tool in Canada.

Many buildings can also receive a 1-100 ENERGY STAR score

The ENERGY STAR score compares your building’s energy performance to similar buildings nationwide, normalized for weather and operating characteristics. A score of 50 represents median performance. A higher score is better than average; lower is worse.

All you need are your bills and some basic information about your building to get started.

Benchmark Today to Start Saving for Tomorrow  

How does Portfolio Manager help you save? Once you’ve benchmarked your building in the tool, you’ll have the information you need to:

• Identify underperforming buildings to target for efficiency improvements. As long as your building systems are running, it might seem wasteful to repair or replace working systems. But benchmarking can reveal if your building is using a lot more energy than similar buildings — and wasting energy and money in the process.
   
• Identify best practices from efficient buildings. Benchmark to find out which buildings in your portfolio are the most efficient, and then work with the teams at those buildings to replicate energy-saving practices at underperforming buildings.
   
• Set investment priorities. The built-in financial tool within Portfolio Manager allows you to compare cost savings across buildings in your portfolio. Use it to help decide how to allocate capital and maximize financial returns in energy efficiency.
   
• Verify savings and prevent snapback. As you continue to track energy use over time, you can verify that your efforts are actually resulting in reduced energy use and monitor usage to prevent snapback in savings.
   
• Share and report performance. You can use Portfolio Manager to generate ENERGY STAR performance documents for each building, share your performance data with others, and run custom reports to get insights on your performance.
   
• Earn recognition. If your building receives an ENERGY STAR score of 75 or higher, it may be eligible for ENERGY STAR certification. 
   
• Benchmark more than energy. You can also measure and track water use, waste and materials, and greenhouse gas emissions.
   
• Implement a comprehensive management program. You’ve heard it before: What gets measured gets managed. Saving energy isn’t a one-and-done checklist. Most importantly, you can use Portfolio Manager to implement every step of your energy management program, which is the proven path to sustained, deep energy savings.

And when you improve the energy efficiency of your building, you reduce the greenhouse gas emissions produced in powering your building, which helps in the fight against climate change.

Your actions today can help protect the environment for tomorrow. Ready to take the first step?