Compliance for Office Buildings.

The building owner. The obligation attaches to the building, not to its occupants, and it is the owner who files and whose building is assessed. Tenants have a supporting role the standard does contemplate: providing access to usage data and physical space, and being responsive to compliance needs.

Two different questions, with two different answers. Non-compliance penalties cannot be passed through to tenants — that is prohibited by statute. Ordinary compliance costs are not addressed by the standard at all, which makes recovery a question about your lease rather than about Clean Buildings. Worth having your counsel look at the operating-expense clause before assuming either way.

You don’t collect tenant bills. Under RCW 19.27A.170, an electric or gas utility must provide energy consumption data or aggregated monthly data on the owner’s request for any covered building with tenants, without requiring prior tenant consent. On written authorization, a qualifying utility must upload it directly to Portfolio Manager; a voluntarily participating utility may upload it, but must at minimum give you the monthly data you need to benchmark.

Possibly a great deal. A building is considered unoccupied when 50 percent or more of its conditioned floor area is not leased or is otherwise vacant. If that held throughout the twelve consecutive months before your compliance date, you may be able to apply for an exemption — which needs Commerce’s approval no later than 180 days before that date, so it is worth assessing early rather than discovering it late.

Administrative and professional offices carry a site energy target of 63 kBtu/ft²/yr in western Washington and 66 in the east, before adjustment for operating hours. Government offices sit slightly higher at 66 and 69, banks and financial offices at 69 and 71, and medical offices lower at 60 and 65. If your building or an addition was permitted on or after July 1, 2016, the target drops 15 percent for the qualifying floor area. You report against the number — you are not required to reach it.

Exactly on the boundary, which is why this is worth checking rather than assuming. Weekly hours count the hours the majority of workers are present — 8am to 6pm Monday to Friday is precisely 50, the top of the lowest band, where the multiplier is 0.8. One hour more moves you to 1.0 and raises your target by a quarter. Two points catch people out: if you run two shifts the hours are added together, not overlapped — a 9-to-5 plus a 5pm-to-1am shift is 80 hours — and seasonal variation is a weighted average, so six months at 50 and six at 40 comes to 45.

It can, and the standard asks you to consider a process for it rather than discover it afterwards. The rule directs the energy manager to consider a formal process ensuring tenant improvements that change space use or relocate partitions don’t change the building’s annual net energy use, except where that change is consistent with a change in the building’s energy target. Commerce’s suggestion is lease language prohibiting improvements that increase energy use unless justified by a change of building activity type.

As a mixed-use calculation: each space takes its own activity type’s target, weighted by floor area and operating hours. The spread matters — retail sits at 68 in western Washington against an office’s 63, but a restaurant is 361, so a ground-floor dining tenant can move your weighted target substantially. Several shortcuts exist — the three most useful being that where more than 75 percent of floor area is one activity type you may treat the building as single-use, uses under 10 percent of floor area can be folded into a similar type, and separately metered space without its own target and under 10 percent can be excluded. None of them changes your total floor area or which tier you fall under.

No. Hours when the property is occupied only by maintenance, security, cleaning crews or other support personnel are excluded, and so are weekends unless your organization treats them like weekdays — regular shifts of main employees, meetings scheduled, reception running as normal.

Setting your building up in ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager and feeding it twelve consecutive months of whole-building energy data. Portfolio Manager calculates your weather-normalized energy use intensity — total energy divided by gross floor area, in kBtu per square foot per year. You then share the property with Commerce read-only, and the Clean Buildings Portal pulls the numbers through as Form C. Commerce recommends registering under a generic organizational account so the login survives a change of property manager.

It’s a living document the owner reviews and signs every year. It names an energy manager, and records your energy use in Portfolio Manager, your target, and an annual comparison against it. It also documents changes in occupancy, operating hours and equipment; how you inform occupants about efficient energy use; a training plan for building staff; a capital plan for replacing failed equipment with ENERGY STAR rated models; and a contact list. The O&M program sits inside it, as does your tenant-improvement process.

A Qualified Energy Manager, through the Clean Buildings Portal, using a Secure Access Washington account. A QEM is an individual, not a firm — someone who has completed Commerce’s Tier 2 training and then meets any one of three routes: two years of commercial building operations or energy management experience, a supervised full-time fellowship or internship of at least six months that produced a successful compliance application, or Building Operator Certification Level I. Anyone meeting the broader Qualified Person definition also qualifies. Because an owner can fill any role in the standard, a property manager who meets the definition can serve.