New Orleans will now measure its energy-hogging buildings todayheadline

This coverage is made possible through a partnership between Grist and Verite News, a nonprofit news organization with a mission to produce in-depth journalism in underserved communities in the New Orleans area.

As thousands of architects and planners flocked to New Orleans in 2014 for the world’s largest sustainable design conference, the city saw a chance to prove it belonged in the green building big leagues.

City leaders announced at the Greenbuild International Conference and Expo that New Orleans would join Minneapolis, Seattle and a vanguard of other cities in developing a program requiring large building owners to track and disclose their energy use.

New Orleans’ embrace of “energy benchmarking” drew praise at the conference, with one green building expert declaring that the city was “paving the way” for the rest of the country to follow. 

But New Orleans lost momentum, waiting more than a decade before finally approving its benchmarking ordinance on Thursday. In the meantime, New Orleans fell behind about 50 other cities that have approved energy tracking and disclosure requirements for most large buildings.

“The benchmarking ordinance — finally!” New Orleans City Council member Helena Moreno said. “After many, many years, we’re finally getting there.” 

Benchmarking can both shame the power hogs and extol the virtues of the frugal. The data spurs investment in older, inefficient buildings and encourages more climate-conscious design in new ones, advocates say. 

“It’s well understood that one cannot change what one does not measure,” said Christopher Johnson, a board member with the New Orleans chapter of the American Institute of Architects. By passing the ordinance, the city is “empowering owners to take matters into their own hands to improve their buildings.”  

Buildings are responsible for 40 percent of total energy use in the U.S., and about 35 percent of the country’s carbon emissions, according to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Compared to much of the country, buildings in New Orleans tend to be older and less energy-efficient, with high air conditioning use and little insulation. 

Under the city’s plan, owners of buildings 50,000 square feet and larger would need to report annual energy use starting in 2026. In 2027, the requirement would expand to buildings more than 20,000 square feet. Noncompliance could result in fines between $1,000 and $3,000. 

The fines aren’t for inefficiency, Council President JP Morrell said. “They’re for failing to report the data.”

Energy use will be tracked on an interactive map and published in an annual report. 

The ordinance covers about 1,500 properties. While buildings over 20,000 square feet make up just 1 percent of all structures, they account for nearly 40 percent of the city’s total building area, said Greg Nichols, the city’s deputy chief resilience officer. 

Nearly 80 percent of the buildings covered under the ordinance are categorized as commercial, and about 20 percent are residential. Of the commercial buildings, a quarter are warehouses, 16 percent are hotels and 12 percent are offices.  

Funding for implementing the ordinance is covered with $1.5 million from a $50 million greenhouse gas reduction grant awarded to the city by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency last year. Much of the money for the program would support a full-time employee tasked with promoting it and helping property owners with compliance. 

While President Donald Trump has been canceling or reclaiming many climate-related grants awarded by former President Joe Biden’s administration, the EPA grant appears secure, Nichols said. 

“Climate action is under threat right now from the Trump administration,” he said. “But this is an action that the City Council can take right now to show leadership at a time when other efforts are being imperiled.” 

Benchmarking is a key component of the city’s climate action plan. Updated in 2022, the plan aims to cut the city’s greenhouse gas emissions in half before 2035 and achieve net-zero emissions by 2050. The benchmarking ordinance was supposed to be passed by the end of last year, according to the plan. 

“We are a city that’s committed to significant climate goals,” Morrell said. “It is nigh impossible to do that without benchmarking.” 

Cities with similar ordinances have seen building energy use drop by an average of 2.4 percent annually, according to the EPA. At that rate, the agency calculates that a 500,000-square-foot office building can save about $120,000 per year. 

Utility bill envy can be a potent motivator for property owners, Morrell said.

“It encourages a person to say, ‘Wait a second, we have similarly situated buildings, and I’m paying triple the cost in utility fees,’” he said. “‘It might be worth seeing how we can reduce those costs.’”  

New Orleans can look to its city-owned buildings for further proof of benchmarking’s effectiveness. The city began tracking each building’s energy use more than a decade ago. Between 2018 and 2021, energy use fell by about 23 percent, Nichols said. 

Most cities that require energy consumption tracking are concentrated in the Northeast, Midwest and West Coast. Austin, Atlanta, Orlando and Miami are the only other Southern cities with benchmarking ordinances, according to the Institute for Market Transformation. 

“I’d love (New Orleans) to be one of the leading cities in the South in this area,” Nichols said. 

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Concerns about privacy and fines hindered the ordinance’s progress, city leaders said. To ease those worries, the city will now require property owners to disclose a building’s total energy use, not that of its tenants or other occupants. The ordinance would also waive penalties during the first year and cap fines at $3,000. 

Councilmember Oliver Thomas expressed doubts about the ordinance, saying it may do little more than burnish New Orleans’ image. He cited the city’s recycling program, which diverts only about 2 percent of household waste from landfills — a rate that’s less than a tenth of the national average. 

“We have to be more cautious because we keep producing investments and more money that comes from the public to create a lot of trendy things,” he said. “I don’t want to make the same mistakes we made with recycling and some other initiatives.” 

Morrell called the comparison to recycling “inappropriate.” While recycling may be a costly solution for conserving some materials, benchmarking is a low-cost means of conserving both money and energy, he said. 

 “We’re showing that if you’re more energy efficient, you’ll see a direct reduction in costs,” said. 

Tracking the energy consumption of buildings can also spur economic growth, Nichols said. As property owners recognize the savings from energy upgrades, demand for the skilled workers who implement them will grow, he said.

Energy efficiency is projected to be Louisiana’s top clean energy job creator, with about 9,300 new roles for architects and heating, air conditioning and related tradespeople expected by 2030, according to a recent NREL report. The solar industry was expected to create up to 8,300 jobs, and wind energy would add nearly 600 positions during the same period. 

“While solar and wind have huge potential, it’s actually energy efficiency that has the most job potential,” Nichols said. “And that’s because it includes a wide range of jobs, such as HVAC (technicians), electricians and insulation contractors.” 

Benchmarking could also ease demand on the city’s outage-prone power grid, said Jesse George, the New Orleans policy director for the Alliance for Affordable Energy. A spike in power use during the sweltering Memorial Day weekend overwhelmed transmission lines and triggered rolling blackouts that cut the lights and AC for more than 100,000 households. 

“That showed we need every possible tool in our toolbox to reduce our energy load and demand,” George said. “This ordinance, in terms of the cost to implement versus the potential benefit, is a no-brainer.”