Welcome to BPS 101: What Is a Building Performance Standard?

By Jeff Nichols

"Clean buildings? Are you here to clean the building?"

That is a real response from a real Washington building owner this year, when we reached out about the Clean Buildings Performance Standard, and I've thought about it a lot since.

It would be easy to hear that as a joke, but it's not one. It's a fair question from someone who has never been told that a state law applies to their building, and it is a pretty accurate summary of where a large part of this market sits right now.

There is a straightforward reason why. When the Department of Commerce sends notifications about Clean Buildings, they go to the property taxpayer of record. The person who pays the property tax is very often not the person who would ever handle compliance for that building. So the notice lands on the wrong desk, nobody forwards it, and the building goes on not knowing. That single disconnect explains a great deal of what looks, from the outside, like people ignoring the law.

So we are going to start at the beginning. Everyone else is heading back to school this month, so building owners might as well too. Over the next seven weeks we are publishing a series. It starts with the fundamentals, moves into the rules and the dates, and ends with exactly what to do next and who can help you do it. No prior knowledge assumed. For the first five weeks there will be two posts a week, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, because this material goes faster when it isn't spread out. After that it settles into one a week through early November.

Today is the first lesson, and it is the broadest one.

What a building performance standard actually is

In plain English: a building performance standard is a law that requires buildings that already exist to measure how much energy they use, and then over time, to use less of it. That last part is worth sitting with, because it's what makes this category of law different from anything most owners have dealt with before.

Building codes govern construction. When you put up a new building or do a major renovation, a code tells you how it has to be built, and once you pass inspection you are done and the code never speaks to you again. A building performance standard is the opposite. It has nothing to say about how your building was built and cares only about how your building performs right now, and it keeps asking. Which means a building constructed in 1974 that has never had a compliance obligation in its life now has one.

Why this kind of law exists

The International Energy Agency estimates that in advanced economies, roughly 80 percent of the building stock that will exist in 2050 has already been built. We are talking about the middle of this century, and most of those buildings are already standing. Many of them are on your street. Which means we cannot build our way to a more efficient future, and have to improve what we already have instead. I have said versions of that sentence for years, and it is the entire logic behind these laws. New construction is getting dramatically better and that matters, but new construction is a small slice of the total, and if the existing buildings do not improve then nothing improves.

The encouraging part is how much room there is. EPA estimates that most commercial buildings can cost effectively cut their energy use by about 30 percent, which is roughly a third without any exotic technology. That is lights burning in empty rooms, equipment running against itself, and systems that drifted out of tune years ago because nobody was looking. It's the opportunity hiding inside a compliance deadline.

This is not a Washington oddity

It can feel like Washington went out on a limb here, and it didn't. Building performance standards are now law in cities, counties, and states across the country, and more than 35 U.S. jurisdictions require some form of energy benchmarking. Washington was the first state to adopt one, which means Washington owners are early rather than singled out, and owners in New York, Colorado, Maryland, Missouri and a growing list of others are working through the same questions on their own timelines.

Being first had a real cost, which is that there was no playbook. It also has a real benefit, which is that there is now a great deal of help available here that did not exist five years ago. We will spend a whole post on that later in the series.

The question worth asking

When owners first learn this applies to them, the question is almost always some version of: how much is this going to cost me? I understand the instinct and I would ask the same thing, but I think it is the wrong first question, and asking it first is what causes people to put the whole thing in a drawer.

The better question is simpler. How much energy does your building use, how much should a building like yours use, and what are you doing about the difference? You cannot fix what you cannot measure, and almost every owner I have talked to who finally sat down and looked at the numbers came away with a different picture than the one they were dreading. Sometimes the building turns out to be closer to its target than anyone assumed. Sometimes the fix is operational rather than capital. Occasionally it is genuinely expensive, and knowing that early is far better than finding out under a deadline. Either way the number comes first, and everything else is a response to it.

What's next

Thursday we get specific: what Washington's Clean Buildings Performance Standard actually requires of your building, in plain terms.

One thing worth doing between now and then. The Department of Commerce holds free public office hours on the fourth Tuesday of every month, from 10 to 11am. That is today. If you are reading this after eleven, the next one is October 27. It costs nothing, and the people answering wrote the rules.

And as always, if I can be helpful to any of you, reach out. Compliance paperwork has no inherent value. Better buildings do, and there are a lot of people in this state, including at Commerce and the utilities, whose actual job is to help you get there.