During a session at BOMA International’s annual conference and expo on Sunday morning, Greg Walterscheid cited an eyebrow-raising statistic: About 30 percent of energy used in commercial buildings is wasted.
That translates to the equivalent of 293,000 buildings, of 200,000 square feet, each sitting empty, noted Walterscheid, the national director of facilities services at Terracon Consultants. It also underscored his broader theme of sustainability as a value-add proposition.
A well-known factor in this vast landscape of energy inefficiency is that so much of today’s building inventory dates from before the emphasis on sustainability that’s emerged in the last couple of decades.
Citing estimates from the U.S. Energy Administration, Walterscheid noted that half of all commercial buildings were constructed between 1960 and 1999. Only 25 percent of commercial properties have been built since 2000.
In a telling snap poll, several hundred audience members at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center were asked to name the category of buildings they consider the greenest. Fifty-nine percent chose buildings designed to net-zero standards. Another 37 percent named existing buildings, and that was the category that Walterscheid finds is the strongest candidate.
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“The greenest building from a carbon impact perspective is one that’s already built,” he said. The reason existing buildings are the greenest is because it’s preferable to continue to use the embodied carbon in an existing building rather than consume carbon in new construction.
Change agents
Walterscheid emphasized the importance of taking action now to get ahead of the big changes that are just ahead. “Be aware, if you’re not already, that the regulators are coming,” he warned. “They’re going to be coming after those with bigger buildings, because that’s where the opportunities are” for reducing energy consumption. As an example, he cited Boston’s Building Emissions Reduction and Disclosure Ordinance (BERDO). Starting this year, the ordinance requires owners of large buildings to reduce greenhouse gases and air pollution.
Step one in making progress toward efficiency and cost savings, he said, is understanding the building and the portfolio and having access to all necessary data. Artificial intelligence promises to help aggregate the relevant information, he predicted. The challenge today is “bringing all these data streams together to help you make decisions in how you move forward.”
Walterscheid urged his audience to view building performance as a changing phenomenon that demands continuous monitoring. A new building doesn’t operate the same way it did a year after it opens, he noted. “These are things that you can’t just do once,” he said. “You need to be thinking about doing these things on a regular basis.” That calls for regular commissioning of building systems. The bottom line, he said, is extending the service life of building systems. “At the end of the day, that really achieves the sustainability goals.”
Property managers and asset managers sometimes face a big challenge in making the case for investing in sustainable upgrades. “You have to put on your sales hat, find the hot buttons that are going to get attention,” Walterscheid advised. The process amounts to a marketing campaign within the organization. It’s vital to document the value of upgrades and measure progress. “Don’t be an end-of-useful-life planner. Tie it into your game plan immediately.”
And as an audience member observed: “It’s important for building owners to understand the cost of doing nothing on your building.”
Broad adoption of these principles would have a massive effect. As Waltersheid noted, studies have suggested that retrofitting existing buildings could be a $279 billion investment that would save $1 trillion in energy costs in 10 years and reduce emissions by nearly 10 percent nationwide.
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