NYC, Others Join White House Building Efficiency Partnership

The White House unveiled a partnership on Friday with 33 state and local governments to make the nation’s buildings more efficient.

The new Building Performance Standards Coalition seeks to nudge states and cities to more quickly adopt building codes to reduce emissions. The agreement includes more technical assistance from the EPA and Energy Department to help coalition members design and manage their policies.

• The states and cities in the coalition represent more than 15 billion square feet of floor space and more than 22% of the U.S. population, according to the White House.
• The Environmental Protection Agency said it would provide coalition members information about their building energy use data, as well as a web-based tool in February that will let building owners calculate their emissions.
• Later in the year, the EPA will launch another tool that will provide access to aggregated, anonymous energy data from hundreds of thousands of buildings.
• Coalition members include New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Boston, Denver, Seattle, and Washington, D.C. Two states—Colorado and Washington—are also members.
• Only a small handful of jurisdictions—including New York City, Boston, and Denver—have passed ordinances requiring buildings to cut their energy consumption.
• The bipartisan infrastructure package that was signed into law in November includes more than $1.8 billion to support building sector policies.