ESG Strategies Deliver Value

Commercial buildings are the nation’s single biggest consumer of energy, with most allocated toward heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC). That makes buildings both a contributor and a potential solution to the unsustainable buildup of atmospheric carbon. It also makes them ideal opportunities for improving ESG scores.

Commercial buildings are the nation’s single biggest consumer of energy, with most allocated toward heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC). That makes buildings both a contributor and a potential solution to the unsustainable buildup of atmospheric carbon. It also makes them ideal opportunities for improving ESG scores.
Up to 80 percent of commercial buildings form part of a more extensive portfolio managed centrally. Most building portfolio managers have historically approached energy efficiency upgrades on a building-by-building basis. Now, smart building technologies enable building managers to scale dramatic improvements across an entire portfolio. When analyzing and vetting energy-efficiency improvements to a collection of buildings, you can’t apply a cookie-cutter approach. For one, the sheer number of potential projects makes it hard to evaluate them consistently and accurately. Two, you’re not constantly comparing apples to apples in different locations. The economics can change based on other utility rate structures, incentives, and labor and material costs.
That said, some solutions work well in nearly all situations. Real-time HVAC and lighting controls, for example, make sense almost universally. The Rocky Mountain Institute has shown that energy analytics provide accurate and consistent results at an acceptable price and timeline for an entire portfolio of buildings. These tools use data to do energy simulations, evaluating each structure for the most cost-effective projects given its unique set of local market factors.