September 18, 2018
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced on Thursday, September 13 that they are instituting a review period of the new methodology that is used to calculate ENERGY STAR® scores for certain commercial buildings in the United States, including hotels. During the review period, EPA will not award ENERGY STAR certifications to any property-types that use the new score model.
On August 26, 2018, EPA implemented substantial updates to the underlying metrics used to calculate ENERGY STAR scores in Portfolio Manager®. The updates are intended to more accurately assess the performance of certain building types using the most recently available market data.
Once the changes were implemented, SOL VISTA's Skywalk® team quickly noticed unusual trends in their hotel-focused datasets and raised the issue to EPA's attention. Among the trends are significant increases in ENERGY STAR scores for many hotels located on the west coast, compared to larger decreases for hotels on the east coast—including score changes exceeding 20 points.
SOL VISTA SVP of Customer Solutions and Co-Founder Zack Moore contacted EPA to share his team's findings. Soon after, EPA announced a review period beginning Monday, September 17 to "ensure that the models are working as intended…"
EPA noted that they intend to finalize the review process ahead of spring 2019 so that building benchmarking compliance timelines are unimpacted. The earliest deadline is April 1 in several cities, with others staggered throughout the year.
As a member of the American Hotel and Lodging Association's Sustainability Committee, SOL VISTA has been an active participant in the efforts to refine the scoring methodology and continues to play a hands-on role in ensuring equitable ENERGY STAR scores for our customers, and other commercial buildings across the United States.
More information on the updates to ENERGY STAR scores, including the review period, can be found on the ENERGY STAR website.
Skywalk®, SOL VISTA's proprietary SaaS platform, empowers commercial building owners and managers to improve the performance and profitability of their buildings.
