Energy Star — best known for its bright blue-and-white logo — saves homeowners billions of dollars every year in energy costs. But it includes another key feature widely used by commercial real estate to gauge energy use from buildings, a main source of greenhouse gas emissions in cities.
Property owners and advocates are fretting over its possible demise under the Trump administration.
Over 330,000 buildings nationwide, representing nearly 25% of commercial building space, use Portfolio Manager — a software tool within the federal government’s Energy Star program. It allows owners to tally energy consumption across properties and spot inefficient buildings in need of upgrades. In the last year, Portfolio Manager helped businesses and organizations avoid $14 billion in energy costs.
“This is a business case for us,” says Duane Desiderio, counsel at The Real Estate Roundtable, a Washington-based nonprofit advocacy group for the real estate industry. “It allows us to monetize how much energy we are saving. It translates to dollars.”
The software is currently free, and Energy Star is a joint program of the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy, administered by the EPA. But now Republicans are considering axing its funding and potentially privatizing it as they seek to decrease government spending.
Heating, cooling and lighting buildings is responsible for 26% of global emissions, according to the International Energy Agency.
Portfolio Manager, which has been around since 2000, allows businesses to track, measure and compare energy efficiency across hundreds of thousands of buildings. In addition to helping them make decisions on where to invest in energy-saving upgrades, owners can use it to generate reports and ensure they’re complying with local mandates for energy use disclosure.
A preliminary version of the 2026 federal budget proposal released in May doesn’t call out Energy Star and its portfolio manager software program by name, but it suggests eliminating funding for the EPA’s Office of Atmospheric Protection, which Energy Star falls under.
Lee Zeldin, head of the EPA, in congressional testimony in May suggested his agency or the administration could privatize the program, which costs the government tens of millions of dollars a year.
“I have actually had multiple entities reach out to EPA over the course of the last few weeks because they want to take over Energy Star, which is a program that requires a big staff, a big taxpayer-funded staff, and a whole lot of tax dollars,” he said.
But some lawmakers and stakeholders, including The Real Estate Roundtable, say the administration would need to go through Congress to kill the program. The EPA declined to comment. The Energy Department and Office of Management and Budget did not respond to requests for comment.
Advocates working to save the software say stakeholders value it because it’s free, public and used across the whole industry.
“It’s really important to have a single source of truth that is trusted, third-party, government-backed,” says Alex Dews, CEO of the Institute for Market Transformation, a nonprofit that promotes energy-efficient buildings.
Because it’s objective and “science-based,” “no one has ever perceived it as biased,” says Dana Robbins Schneider, director of energy and sustainability at Empire State Realty Trust.
Building owners also use the tool to help them comply with state and local requirements to report and reduce building energy use. For example, Building Performance Colorado, a state energy efficiency and greenhouse gas reduction program, requires most buildings that are 50,000 square feet or larger to benchmark energy use and comply with building performance standards. Portfolio Manager allows those businesses “to easily track energy use and identify opportunities to improve efficiency and reduce costs,” says Ari Rosenblum, associate director of communications and engagement for the Colorado Energy Office.
Stakeholders say Energy Star could end up in the hands of either a for-profit company or an NGO. Building owners are strongly opposed to privatization because they say it will increase costs on what is now a free tool.
The industry is also concerned about the integrity of the data. It’s possible that multiple businesses would create their own versions of the software, fragmenting the data, experts say. State and local governments would struggle to enforce energy efficiency policies if buildings reported data from different sources, they add.
“You are able to compare yourself to so many other buildings because everybody uses Energy Star,” Robbins Schneider of Empire State Realty Trust says. “If the tool disappeared, it would be catastrophic for the industry.”
