On Sept. 11, the Chicago City Council voted 32-17 to adopt the Chicago Energy Use Benchmarking Ordinance. The ordinance requires approximately 3,500 commercial, residential, and municipal buildings over 50,000 square feet to track their energy consumption using the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's free Portfolio Manager web tool.
Covered buildings will report energy use data annually to the city, with the largest buildings (>250,000 square feet) being required to comply first, by June 2014, and buildings between 50,000 and 250,000 square feet reporting one year later. Residential buildings within each of those groups will have an extra year to comply. The ordinance allows the city to publicly disclose individual building energy performance starting in June 2015.
IMT congratulates Mayor Emanuel and the Chicago City Council on the passage of the bill, which makes Chicago the ninth U.S. city to require energy use benchmarking for large buildings.