ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager is a free online tool developed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (US EPA) that allows you to track and assess energy and water use across your entire portfolio of buildings in a secure online environment. With Portfolio Manager, you can calculate the building’s energy performance, compare it with similar buildings and monitor it over time. When you benchmark a building in Portfolio Manager, one of the key metrics you’ll see is energy use intensity, or EUI.

The EUI expresses a building’s energy use as a function of its size or other characteristics. For most property types in Portfolio Manager, the EUI is expressed as energy per square foot per year. It’s calculated by dividing the total energy consumed by the building in one year by square footage. For many building types, Portfolio Manager calculates the ENERGY STAR rating, which indicates how efficiently buildings use energy on a 1-100 scale, where a score of 50 indicates average energy performance. Buildings with a score of 75 or better are top performers and may be eligible for the ENERGY STAR certification. Some building types are currently not eligible to receive an ENERGY STAR score, but can still benefit from benchmarking, as Portfolio Manager calculates other energy performance metrics such as EUI.

Consistent with the approach to the 1 – 100 ENERGY STAR score, you can now generate an EPA 1 – 100 water score to see how your property’s water consumption measures up against similar properties nationwide. More information about the ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager Water Score can be found here. 

The Building Energy and Water Scoring program also uses Water Use Intensity (WUI) consistent with ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager. More information about WUI can be found here.

ENERGY STAR is a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) program that focuses on improving energy performance in buildings as a method of reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) is a green building certification offered by the nonprofit U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC). 

ENERGY STAR is a technical assistance and recognition program that offers owners and managers of all buildings access to free tools and resources to help them evaluate their energy performance and reduce energy use and GHG emissions.

LEED is a building certification process that looks at various aspects of “green building” and awards recognition to buildings that meet certain standards. Users of the LEED process earn credits in several categories associated with green buildings. These differ by the type of LEED certification, but generally include: sustainable sites, water efficiency, energy & atmosphere, materials & resources, indoor environmental quality, and innovation.

Neither LEED certification nor ENERGY STAR certifications are required as a part of Building Energy and Water Scoring.

By providing information about a building’s energy use and comparing its performance to similar buildings, benchmarking empowers building owners, managers, and other stakeholders to make more informed decisions, identify opportunities to improve energy and water use in their buildings, and save money. Evidence of these benefits is already available: by analyzing data from over 35,000 buildings that used Portfolio Manager and received an ENERGY STAR score from 2008 to 2011, US EPA found that average energy use declined by 7%. For more benchmarking trends, visit US EPA’s DataTrends Series, found at www.EnergyStar.gov/DataTrends.

No, per Chapter 12, Building Energy and Water Scoring, building owners must use ENERGY STAR’s Portfolio Manager to benchmark and report their covered buildings to the City of Fort Collins. Like many other jurisdictions across the nation, Fort Collins is using the reporting functionality of Portfolio Manager to ensure compliance with the Building Energy and Water Scoring program.

Yes, all covered buildings that meet the definition of “covered building” as defined by the ordinance must benchmark and report their buildings, regardless of whether the buildings are eligible earn the ENERGY STAR score. Properties that are not eligible for ENERGY STAR scores will still report EUI (Kbtu/square feet) and WUI (gal/square feet). Optional: Building owners can use the property details notes field to elaborate on the reasons for low scores or any other information they would like to communicate to City of Fort Collins. These property details will be published with the data (unless noted otherwise).

Covered buildings do not include attached single-family building types, including rowhouses and townhouses. “Townhouse” or “Rowhouse” means a single-family dwelling unit having common walls between individual units, constructed in a group of two or more attached units in which each unit extends from foundation to roof.

If the building that encompasses the condominiums adds up to 5,000 square feet or more, then yes, that building, and its condominiums, are covered and must benchmark to comply with the ordinance. The “Executive Board” or “Association” as outlined by the Condominium by-laws is the entity responsible for submitting an annual report to the City of Fort Collins.

If the property includes multiple buildings that have separate energy-consuming systems and are metered separately or sub-metered for all energy types (such as university, corporate, medical, or residential campuses where multiple buildings of various sizes share the same Larimer County parcel), you should set up a “parent property” profile and create a separate profile for each building in your Portfolio Manager account. The Fort Collins Building Energy and Water Scoring rules and regulations (available at fcgov.com/bews), does not require building owners to benchmark and report individual buildings within your covered property that are smaller than 5,000 square feet.

Learn How to benchmark a campus guidance, online at:
energystar.gov/buildings/tools-and-resources/how-benchmark-campus

Occasionally, buildings aren't individually metered; one energy or water meter may measure the usage of several buildings. In this case, these buildings should be benchmarked together as a campus, following instructions outlined in ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager’s Campus Benchmarking Guide. In some cases, buildings not covered by the ordinance may be benchmarked with the buildings that are covered by the ordinance. For example, if one building covered by the ordinance (such as a building 5,000 square feet or larger) shares energy-consuming systems with a building not covered by the ordinance (such as a building less than 5,000 square feet), both buildings should be benchmarked together as a campus.

If separate buildings are sub-metered, or if it’s possible to make reasonable calculations/assumptions to allocate energy use to each individual building, the buildings may benchmark and report separately.

Properties that generate renewable energy onsite with solar PV or wind turbines should refer to How to Benchmark Green Power Generated Onsite (PDF)

The owner of the building needs to benchmark and report for the whole building. For buildings with multiple Xcel Energy account holders, Xcel Energy will provide aggregated whole-building monthly energy data to the building owner as long as there are four or more Xcel accounts in the building, and no one account uses more than 50 percent of the energy. Refer to Xcel Energy's Energy Benchmarking User Guide for more information. If your building has fewer than four accounts, or one account that uses more than 50 percent of the energy, then you must request customer consent to obtain the data. You can have monthly energy data automatically uploaded to your account from Xcel Energy (this is recommended). Alternately, you can manually enter monthly energy meter data into your account. 

The owner or owner's representative of the property required to report may request whole building data from Fort Collins Utilities. Data requests are submitted via fcgov.com/MyData.