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Portland may start collecting energy usage data from its largest office buildings.
(The Oregonian/file photo)
Portland may begin collecting and publicizing energy use data from about 1,000 of its largest commercial buildings in an effort to curb carbon emissions.
The policy, which would need approval from the Portland City Council, would require owners of commercial buildings — office, retail, healthcare and hotel buildings — 20,000 square feet or larger to track figures from monthly utility bills and report year-end results.
Each year the landlords would would report to the city their building's energy use per square foot, total annual carbon emissions and an Energy Star rating that ranks buildings against other comparable ones.
At the 20,000-square-foot threshold, the city would capture date from one in five commercial buildings in Portland, but 80 percent of its commercial square footage. (For scale, Pioneer Courthouse Square is a 40,000-square-foot block.)
The city would make those figures public online. They could be used, for example, by potential tenants, who are increasingly shouldering the costs of their energy consumption, or potential buyers.
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The city will hold two information sessions on the energy reporting proposal in January:
• 9 to 10:30 a.m. on Wednesday, Jan. 14
• 3 to 4:30 p.m. on Tuesday, Jan. 20
Both meetings will be held at
, Room 2500A, in Portland.
That, planning officials say, could convince property owners to make investments in energy efficiency.
The data would "provide market recognition to those who perform really well," said Alisa Kane, a manager at the Portland Bureau of Planning and Sustainability. "It also provides market motivation for those on the lower end."
Ten other major cities have implemented similar programs. Seattle has required buildings of a similar size to report energy usage since 2010, though it doesn't post the findings publicly. San Francisco requires reporting for buildings as small as 10,000 square feet and posts the figures on a website.
Building owners wouldn't be required to make any energy-efficiency improvements, but Kane said buildings who participate in the Energy Star program typically see a 2.4 percent decline in energy costs simply by virtue of paying attention to their bills.
If approved by the City Council in April, the policy would be phased in over two years. Buildings larger than 50,000 square feet would start reporting in 2016, and those larger than 20,000 square feet would start in 2017.
Wade Lange, president of the Oregon Building Owners and Managers Association, said the group hopes to endorse the policy by the time it's before the Council. But he said the group does have concerns about how the figures would be collected and displayed.
"We've tried very hard as an organization to try to get people to use the Energy Star program as a means to measure their energy consumption and improvements year over year. It's a good tool for that," he said. "When you start putting it out there as a comparison with you and your competitor, it's not always apples to apples."
In some cases, he added, landlords may not have access to their tenants' utility bills.
The proposal has its origins in the city's Climate Action Plan, passed in 2009. The city says commercial buildings are responsible for 25 percent of the city's carbon emissions, second only to the share attributed to transportation.
The cost to the city would be equivalent to the salary of one full-time employee to oversee the program.
-- Elliot Njus