Building Benchmark Policy Compliance and Impact Report 2018-2019

This document serves as the first official update and compliance report for the City of Orlando’s Building Energy & Water Efficiency Strategy (BEWES). The scope includes the initial recommendation of the policy by the Green Works Task Force in the city’s Community Sustainability Action Plan in 2013 - from the city’s selection to participate and receive funding from the City Energy Project in early 2014, to stakeholder engagement throughout policy development and passage in December 2016 - and into the first three years of policy implementation from 2017 – 2019.

In addition to providing a comprehensive background on the policy, the report provides an update on the status of the policy, and the current compliance and performance trends in order to inform internal and external stakeholder decision-making regarding current progress, and the policy’s role in achieving the city’s climate and sustainability goals.

Highlights:

  • The Help Desk experienced a nearly 150% increase in inquiries in 2019, providing support through 1,440 total calls and emails, as compared to 600 inquiries the year prior.

  • The compliance rate increased from 39.8% to 46.2% between the first two years of the policy, despite a larger covered building stock.

  • Benchmarking data indicated that building age was not correlated with building performance; the majority of buildings that reported perform better than their peers according to national energy use intensity averages and ENERGY STAR scores; and that building performance trends varied across building use type.

  • Greenhouse gas emissions decreased between the first and second year of reporting, despite an increase in the number of buildings and gross floor area reported.

  • There were substantial improvements to data quality between these years, with the vast majority of building submissions achieving the status of ‘fully complied’ in the second year of the policy.

What next?
Based on the analysis of the 2018 and 2019 benchmarked building sets, the city offers the following recommendations:

  1. Continue supporting and potentially expand a policy help desk that meets the evolving support needs demonstrated by the building owner community, as well as improving data quality, analyzing benchmarking data to understand trends in city wide consumption over time, and tracking progress toward carbon reduction targets and other policy goals.

  2. Continue providing free training and technical assistance to building owners and managers to learn about ways to enhance building performance and support them in achieving compliance for the BEWES policy.

  3. Continue exploring strategies to improve building performance across the city. Use building benchmarking data to better understand the efficacy and impacts of codes and standards and evaluate new performance or outcome-based building codes.

Download the Building Benchmarking Policy Compliance and Impact Report (2018-2019)(PDF, 2MB)

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