President’s Message October 2015

Policy Changes Coming to a City Near You

This past month the City of Seattle Office of Sustainability and Environment hosted a lunch conference to present upcoming energy policies. The meeting was very well attended with representation from all portions of our industry.  For those unable to make it or unaware of the event I thought I’d pass along a few of the key points.

• Make building energy performance data publicly available to encourage market competition and consumer choice. The intent is to start this utilizing data collected in 2015 and publish in 2016.

• Require building tune-ups to identify/correct no or low cost measures to improve building performance. The requirement will be phased in starting in 2018 with larger commercial buildings and by 2021 include all buildings over 50K square feet.  Buildings will need to go through the tune up process every 5 years but there will be exceptions made if you can show alternate form of compliance of being a high performance building.

There is more information on these and other programs available at:

http://www.seattle.gov/environment/buildings-and-energy/energy-policy

Cheers!

PS – In addition to our regular monthly lunch meeting we will be hosting an evening membership promotion event at the Smart Building Center.