Hulking, aging buildings pose a huge climate problem for the United States’ biggest cities — and innovative laws meant to address that challenge are coming into full force this year.
In the U.S., buildings can account for up to three-quarters or more of a city’s carbon output, mostly from fossil fuels burned for space and water heating.
Those emissions largely come from existing apartments, hotels, and office complexes. That’s why more than a dozen cities and states across the country have adopted building performance standards, a policy first introduced around five years ago that requires large buildings to gradually reduce their climate pollution.
This year, New York City and St. Louis will be the first metropolises with building performance standards to reach initial compliance deadlines. By May, large property owners will be required to submit data on energy performance and see if their buildings are up to snuff. Based on how well these programs are working, city staff will determine what challenges, including costs, administrative burdens, and public awareness, still need to be overcome — and whether they have to penalize any owners for noncompliance.
“St. Louis City was the first jurisdiction in the Midwest and one of the first four in the U.S.” to adopt a building performance standard, said Katarina Michalova, who oversees implementation of the policy in the Missouri city. “So this is all brand new.”
Building performance standards work by setting limits on emissions or energy-use intensity per square foot in a city’s largest buildings, typically 25,000 or 50,000 square feet or more. Those limits become stricter over time, helping regions decarbonize on pace with their climate targets.
Key to the policy is flexibility: Performance standards set energy efficiency benchmarks, but leave it up to building owners to figure out how to reach those mandates. Those who fail to comply with the laws usually face financial penalties, the revenue from which typically goes toward other building decarbonization efforts. Many local governments, including New York City and St. Louis, provide free technical assistance to building owners and offer a menu of compliance options, from swapping fossil-fueled HVAC systems with heat pumps to embarking on energy efficiency retrofits.
The policy has been adopted by four states — Colorado, Maryland, Oregon, and Washington — and nine local governments, including Boston and Seattle. Around 30 more governments have committed to follow suit through a national coalition led by the Biden administration, which has backed the policy with a federal push: Last year, the Department of Energy granted hundreds of millions of dollars to cities and states across the country to fund the development and implementation of building performance standards.
Though no silver bullet, the policy fills a critical gap in regulating older structures that make up the bulk of a city’s building stock and climate pollution, said Marshall Duer-Balkind, director of policy programs at the Institute for Market Transformation, a nonprofit focused on energy efficiency in buildings. Currently only around 1 to 2 percent of commercial buildings are retrofitted each year, meaning it would take over 50 years for all buildings to undergo even modest updates. Building performance standards help accelerate much-needed upgrades “in a flexible, cost-effective manner,” Balkind said.
Building performance standards: A novel approach that’s already working
The first performance standard in the U.S. was introduced in 2018 in Washington, D.C., followed shortly by New York City’s Local Law 97 in 2019. This year’s compliance reporting in New York City and St. Louis will provide the first concrete data on effectiveness so far, giving policymakers a chance to reevaluate benchmarks and understand barriers in implementation.
